Labour Mobility and Colonial and Forced Labour Regimes in Indonesia: A Long-Term View

Abstract

Incorporated into the global economy to provide the commodities for core capitalist countries, Indonesia experienced a variety of predominantly unfree labour regimes that connected local societies to global markets. These regimes varied from slavery, coerced labour imposed by colonial authorities, to extensive patterns of leverage employers hold over workers through advance payments. This paper gives an overview of different forms of exploitation pursued both by Dutch colonialism as well as local rulers from the 1600s onwards; it explores how these varied over time and place and how a major divergence of labour regimes happened in the 19th century wherein densely populated Java followed a different trajectory from other islands that were mostly thinly populated. In Java, plantation agriculture became embedded in local rural economies whereas production for the global market in other parts of the Indonesian archipelago led to an upsurge of slave-based production. Only in the 20th century did this bifurcated pattern of labour recruitment start to converge, wherein hundreds of thousands of Javanese migrant workers were recruited under indentured conditions. In conclusion, the paper demonstrates how these patterns have left their legacies in postcolonial times.