Ulbe Bosma

European colonial soldiers in the nineteenth century: their role in white global migration and patterns of colonial settlement.

More than six million European soldiers were involved in nineteenth-century empire-building and a substantial number of them stayed behind in the colonies. Throughout history, soldiers have been priming the pump for settler colonies, being a reliable force in difficult pioneering circumstances with high mortality rates. In the age of European mass migration, however, these colonial soldiers were consistently excluded from migration statistics. This article argues that there is a nexus between the beginning of the age of mass migration and the exclusion of colonial soldiers from migration history. Their status as un-free labourers developed into an anomaly at a time when free labour and free European migration increasingly became the norm. An important implication of including these colonial soldiers in the purview of migration history would be a revisiting of nineteenth-century European emigration history. It would require a broader comparative perspective on coercive labour conditions among nineteenth-century European migrants (military and non-military). This effort could be part of an ongoing revision of the perception of the age of European mass migration as overwhelmingly free.

Sailing through Suez from the South: The emergence of an Indies-Dutch migration circuit, 1815-1940

This paper shows the importance of colonial garrisons and colonial migratory circuits in the history of European migration. During the nineteenth century the overwhelming majority of European-born migrants to the Dutch East Indies were military personnel. Rapidly decreasing mortality rates and a large influx of European military personnel in the decades of colonial wars were responsible for the remarkable growth of the European colonial population throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. As a consequence an extensive colonial-metropole migration circuit emerged. Contrary to expectations, neither the opening of the Suez Canal nor imperialist expansion resulted in a significant increase of white civilian emigration to colonial Indonesia in the late nineteenth century. Instead, sailings through Suez went north as frequently as south. It was only at a much later stage, following the end of World War I, that the tobacco and rubber plantations as well as the oil industry of the Outer Regions of the Indies archipelago generated an unprecedented demand for expatriate labor.

The Cultivation System (1830–1870) and its private entrepreneurs on colonial Java

Ever since the interregnum from 1811 to 1816 of Lieutenant Governor General Stamford Raffles, British trading interests had been firmly established in colonial Indonesia. The implementation of the Cultivation System in 1830 on Java by the Dutch colonial government was an attempt to bring this potentially rich colony under Dutch economic control, but it is usually considered a departure from the principles of economic liberalism and a phase during which private entrepreneurs were barred from the emerging plantation economy. However, on the basis of census data and immigration records, and with reference to recent literature on the development of the nineteenth-century sugar industry, this article argues that British trading houses present on Java in the early nineteenth century continued to play an important role in the development of the production there of tropical goods, and that the emerging plantation economy attracted a modest influx of technicians and employees from various European nations. This article proposes to consider the Cultivation System and private enterprise not as mutually exclusive, but as complementary in making the cane sugar industry of Java the second largest in the world after that of Cuba.

Mediating Labour: An Introduction

The essays in this volume aim to explain the evolution and persistence of various practices of indirect labour recruitment. Labour intermediation is understood as a global phenomenon, present for many centuries in most countries of the world, and taking on a wide range of forms: varying from outright trafficking to job placement in the context of national employment policies. By focusing on the actual practices of different types of labour mediators in various regions of the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and by highlighting both the national as well as the international and translocal contexts of these practices, this volume intends to further a historically informed global perspective on the subject.

Beyond the Atlantic: Connecting Migration and World History in the Age of Imperialism, 1840–1940

The age of mass migration that commenced in the 1840s has traditionally been conceived within the orbit of Atlantic history, and rendered as a narrative of modernity and industrialization. At an individual level the departure for the New World was propelled by rising expectations, which nicely fitted the macro-pattern of converging labour markets between North-America – as well as Australia for that matter – and Europe. Many of the assumptions that brought global migration under the aegis of modernization have been refuted, or at least seriously questioned. But that still leaves us with the important question whether there are alternative paradigms available that fit the realities both within and outside the North Atlantic world. Some have already answered the question negatively. According to Hatton and Williamson, it is impossible to find a unifying paradigm that would enable us to develop a global migration history. Their argument is too important not to be cited:

Global factory and local field: Convergence and divergence in the international cane-sugar industry, 1850-1940

Technological convergence in the international sugar economy began in the 1830s and was substantially complete by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. By the end of the nineteenth century, the industrialized sugar factory was a global phenomenon like the steamship and the railway engine (to which key aspects of its innards were closely related). We will argue that the single most important fact about nineteenth-century sugar industries was the degree of technological convergence that came to characterize their manufacturing sectors, regardless of the type of labour involved. A revisiting of the literature of the past twenty-five years, both in the New and Old Worlds, suggests that historians have yet fully to come to terms with the global character of this convergence and with the question of why convergence in the factory had no parallel in the field, where there continued to be a striking global divergence between the means and modes by which the industry was supplied with raw material. This problem in the recent historiography of the subject also highlights issues relating to the ‘‘proletarianization’’ of labour and the assumption that industrial capitalist modernity was inextricably associated with the development of ‘‘free labour’’. More specifically, it draws attention to major flaws in the terms of reference of the now classic debate about the nexus between technological change and the predominant forms of labour in the Caribbean production area. In so doing, it underlines the need for a global rather than simply regional approach to the dynamics of change in the international sugar industry of the late colonial era. The latter part of our article outlines the broad historical parameters of this divergence in the sugar-cane field, and suggests the need for exploring the political economies surrounding the sugar producing areas and their mechanisms of ethnic segmentation of the labour force in particular.

Late Colonial Estrangement And Miscegenation: Identity and Authenticity in the Colonial Imagination in the Dutch and Lusophone (post) Colonial Worlds

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to reassess the work of two contemporary writers in the 1930s: Gilberto Freyre in Brazil and E. du Perron in the Netherlands Indies (Indonesia). Their famous narratives (respectively, Casa-Grande e Senzala and Het Land van Herkomst) present a (post) colonial world where inequality, violence and racism are almost as conspicuous as mixing and contact across the colour lines. In fact, although one work is a sociological and historical interpretation of colonial and imperial Brazil and the other a literary reworking of personal reminiscences related to Indies society in the early twentieth century, both construct worlds that present several important similarities.

Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective

Migration and Membership Regimes brings together ten essays on the history of settlement and migration in an analytical framework which reconceptualises the migrant-state relationship and explores the variety of membership regimes on five continents and over two millennia.

Working on Labor

Using comparative and long-term perspectives the seventeen essays in this collection discuss the development of labor relations and labor migrations in Europe, Asia and the US from the thirteenth century to the present.

Citizens of Empire: Some Comparative Observations on the Evolution of Creole Nationalism in Colonial Indonesia

An imaginary Berlin Wall stands between nationalist trajectories of the Western hemisphere and those of the East. While the nationalism of the West is generally associated with Enlightenment, the Eastern version is usually referred to as dormant cultural or linguistic nationalism stirred up by Western education. It is an old academic canon that gained new respectability through Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities. But even if political realities in the postcolonial world apparently vindicated this academic canon, the same realities might trap us into writing history retrospectively. A pertinent case in point is the narrative of the emergence of the Indonesian nation in which the notion of a slumbering national identity has been central. A concomitant of that is the almost complete isolation of Indonesian historiography from important discussions in other postcolonial societies. This article proposes a heterodox perspective on the emergence of Indonesian nationalism, which is informed by literature on Senegal and Bengal. This choice is not coincidental, as these locations were the heartlands of the former French and English colonial empires.