State and capital in late colonial Indonesia. The sugar industry, Braakhuur, and the colonial bureaucracy in north central Java

Abstract

[...]braakhuur is important for the light it throws on the nature of sugar capital - a category which, like the colonial state itself, needs a more nuanced treatment than that frequently accorded it. [...]at the beginning of the 1920s, a regime was beginning to consolidate in Batavia that was increasingly out of sympathy with the Ethical Trend and inclined towards a corporate view of the colonial state, one in which the interests of government and capital were essentially convergent. [...]the inducement would have to be a higher rent rate, which would compensate them adequately for any erop loss incurred. Since the price of rice, which determined the height of the cultivators' opportunity cost, was increasing, Obertop expected that braakhuur would soon become too expensive for be profitable to the factories. [...]although the braakhuur commission recommended that this form of rental should indeed be prohibited, it did so on grounds of social conservatism rather than of sympathy for the damage to peasant economie interests. lts recommendations were modified in the industry's interests: the phasing out of braakhuur was to take place over a period of nearly twenty years, and the implementation of these recommendations was placed in the hands of a new generation of colonial officials notably more sympathetic to the industry's interests than their predecessors.