Leonard Blussé

Labour takes Root; Mobilization and Immobilization of Javanese Rural Society under the Cultivation System

In the production of tropical export crops, the factor labour has always overshadowed the two other factors, land and capital. In the days prior to the mechanisation of agriculture, that is to say, far into the second half of the 19th century, the factor capital almost coincided with labour. “Des bras, des bras, toujours des bras” as the saying went among the planters of the Mascareignes. However, it would be wrong to suggest that before the industrial revolution the relative importance of labour only manifested itself in the production of tropical export crops. There is a revered tradition in economic theory which considers labour to be the only source of wealth. Thus, Karl Marx proposed that the value produced by a labourer above the maintenance level should be designated as surplus value. For him, the control of this surplus lay at the basis of each “mode of production” (his term for a stage of development). Each mode of production was characterised by a specific set of social relations between the labourer, the ruling class that appropriates the surplus value, and the means of production. Labour and the labour process therefore were in his eyes a social phenomenon. One might add they are inherent to the tissue of authorities that constituate any social order.

Peeking into the Empires: Dutch Embassies to the Courts of China and Japan

In the 1660s the renowned publishing company of Jacob van Meurs in Amsterdam published three richly illustrated monographs that fundamentally changed the European perceptions of the empires of China and Japan. It all started with the publication in 1665 of the travel notes and sketches that Joan Nieuhof had made ten years earlier, while travelling in the retinue of two Dutch envoys to the Manchu court in Peking. With no less than 150 copper prints, this book aroused so much interest in travel topics—it was published in Dutch, French, German, Latin, and English—that Van Meurs did not hesitate to launch a whole series of illustrated volumes about faraway countries. To keep the China lovers happy, he published a reprint of the richly illustrated China Monumentis by the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. In 1668, another monumental illustrated work appeared in Dutch (and later also German, English and French editions) time about Africa written by the Amsterdam physician Olfert Dapper, and shortly afterwards, when that publication also proved to be a smashing success, Van Meurs asked for the right to publish two more works, one on Japan and one on China. That privilege was obtained on March 1669. The book on Japan, Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen der Oost-Indische Maetschappij aen de Kaisaren van Japan , or “Memorable embassies of the (Dutch) East India Company to the Emperors of Japan,” was compiled by Arnoldus Montanus, a learned Dutch clergyman, who according to the preface had already published fifty-three monographs. The book on China was authored by Olfert Dapper, who this time edited the travelogues of the second and third Dutch embassies to China. What made these books so interesting is that they all were based on eyewitness accounts of the interior of the widely known but little explored empires of China and Japan by servants of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The reason why it was possible for the Dutch merchants to travel where few other westerners had gone before was that they had been sent by the directors of the company as envoys bearing tribute presents to the rulers of both realms to secure privileged trading rights.

Testament to a Towkay: Jan Con, Batavia and the Dutch China Trade

Among historians, Southeast Asias Overseas Chinese have never enjoyed much popularity. They are in many respects a “People without a History,” having left behind no substantial deposit of experience and having failed to produce a school of historians to write their own history from an insiders perspective. Apart from their ethnic and cultural background, what distinguishes the hua-chiao from the indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia is the intermediary role that these immigrants have continued to play within the different territories, colonies or states of the area over the last few centuries. Acting as middlemen and brokers – and therefore necessarily discreet in the handling of personal relations – they have traditionally hidden their own aims and motives from the “outer world”, and thus eluded the understanding of their contemporaries.