Making sugar out of opium: A narco-plantation regime in early modern Southeast Asia

Abstract

In the early modern period, while slavery became firmly entrenched in the Atlantic’s sugar economies, Southeast Asia witnessed the rise of distinct plantation regimes. Unlike their Atlantic counterparts, these Asian plantation regimes relied not on enslavement but on addiction — particularly to opium smoking — as a means to control and exploit plantation labour. Existing research has highlighted how such opium-driven regimes, along with Asian ‘coolie’ labour, proliferated globally in the nineteenth century following the abolitionist movement. Yet, their early modern origins in Southeast Asia remain largely unexplored. As a result, a deep plantation labour history outside the Atlantic World is still lacking, and researchers often continue to essentialize early modern plantation capitalism as inherently tied to slavery, while overlooking other, often more insidious, forms of plantation labour control that existed beyond the Atlantic. This article seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence and development of a narco-plantation regime on the sugar frontier of rural Batavia (Jakarta) from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.