Commercialization and Divergent Labor Control in Colonial Java and the Tagalog Region, 1830-1901

• In Event: 50460 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Economics of Empire

Abstract

There is much that is similar between the Dutch East Indies and Colonial Philippines in the nineteenth up to the turn of the twentieth century. Both countries were under European colonial rule with extractive economies oriented towards Madrid and Holland and both occupied a similar position in the world market owing to economic priorities set by the dictates of Western interest. They occupied the same functional space within the overarching global structure with similarly semi-peripheral powers as their colonial metropoles. More importantly, both experienced fundamental transformations into agricultural export economies at around the same time. These structural similarities make it less clear why adaptations of labor to commercialization in their core regions – Java and the Tagalog Region - were so different. Whereas the Tagalog peasant would flee their villages and the estates to seek new frontiers abroad presaging the Filipino labor export regime, the Javanese village turned inward, resorting to the modification of existing tenureship, tenancy, and cooperative arrangements. I argue that this divergence is due to the fact that despite both colonies undergoing processes of agricultural commercialization and full-blown market integration during this time, the mechanisms of these processes were markedly different in each case. The differing contours of labor control are premised on the colonies’ disparities regarding the degree of their supplementarity to their metropole, the national makeup of their native elite, and the available forms of credit to their peasant-cultivators. Therefore, the ways by which its various actors reacted to the heterogenous components of commercialization were far from uniform, circumscribed by the diverse constraints specific to each society. In turn, this molded the social bases which were the ‘critical antecedents’ allowing for the divergence of labor control in the junctures that is the coming of the American Empire and the Dutch Ethical Policy in the 1900s.

Author

• Richard Christopher Tamayo Kahulugan, University of Wisconsin-Madison