Continuity and Change 24 (1), 2009, 55–78.

f Cambridge University Press 2009

doi:10.1017/S0268416009007012 Printed in the United Kingdom

Labour, land, and capital markets in

early modern Southeast Asia from the
fifteenth to the nineteenth century

PETER BOOMGAARD*

ABSTRACT. Factor markets of sorts did exist in the more highly developed areas of
early modern Southeast Asia, and they became more efficient in the course of time
(although not in a linear process). However, in other more remote areas land was
hardly ever sold, labour could not be hired and money was rare. Neither was the
institutional framework conducive to economic growth, mainly because the rule of
law did not apply where the ruler was concerned. This state of affairs goes a long way
to explain why levels of economic growth were lower in Southeast Asia than they
were in Western Europe at the same time.

THE SETTING

Many economists and economic historians assume that there is a

positive relationship between economic growth on the one hand and well-
functioning markets for labour, land and capital on the other. They also
assume that these factor markets need the backing of an institutional
framework promoted by the state.1 Evidently, Western Europe is an area
for which these links have been and are being demonstrated, going back as
far as the pre-modern period, but there is mounting evidence that these
relationships can also be demonstrated for Japan, for (parts of) China
prior to 1800 and possibly for (parts of) India before 1750.2
The ‘discovery’ of such links for Asian countries appears to coincide
with their high rates of economic growth during recent (China) or fairly
recent (Japan) decades. This might lead one to expect that Southeast Asia,
with very satisfactory growth rates during the decade or so preceding the

* Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden.

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 PETER BOOMGAARD

T ABLE 1
Rice production (in the husk) per hectare, for various regions and periods

Region Year Kgs per hectare

Java 1815 1,650

Java 1900 2,000
Burma 1930 1,430
Indo-Chinaa 1910 1,560
Thailand 1930 1,630
Japan 1910 3,000

a
Indo-China consisted of what is nowadays Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Sources: Peter Boomgaard and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Food crops and arable lands, Java
1815–1942, Changing economy in Indonesia, 10 (Amsterdam, 1990), 41 (for Java), and
Cheng Siok-Hwa, The rice industry of Burma 1852–1940 (Kuala Lumpur/Singapore, 1968),
28 (for all other areas).

1997 financial crisis, is now on the brink of being discovered as another

example of the above-mentioned links in more remote periods.3 Those
who started reading this chapter with that expectation in mind will have to
be disappointed. However, there are recent studies that suggest that
economic developments in Southeast Asia came much closer to the
Western European pattern than is usually believed.4 This is quite a de-
parture from the traditional point of view that Southeast Asia, prior to
the colonial experience, was mired in some kind of eternal Middle Ages.5
In much of the literature published before the 1980s, the countries of
Southeast Asia were regarded as ‘hermit states’, as they were supposed to
have done their utmost to keep outside influences at bay. New research
shows convincingly that population growth and international trade led to
many changes in the region between, say, 1400 and 1870.
One of the reasons scholars can have such divergent opinions about the
levels of development of Southeast Asia in the past is that statistics for
many of its areas are absent or dubious for everything prior to 1900 or, for
some remote areas, even 1950. Thus, it is very difficult to present statistics
that reflect the pre-colonial or proto-colonial situation for most Southeast
Asian areas, and it is likely that the more quantitative aspects of our
knowledge of the early modern economic history of the region (between
1400 and 1870) will always remain unsatisfactorily documented. Much of
the evidence that is presented in this chapter is, therefore, of a qualitative
nature and contains speculative elements.
However, some data have been collected that may be assumed to reflect
the area’s ‘ best practice ’ level of development and that can be used in a
comparison with other Eurasian countries.6 The data presented in Table 1

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 LABOUR, LAND, AND CAPITAL MARKETS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

T ABLE 2
Productivity of labour expressed in millions of (net direct) calories per
adult male agricultural labourer per year around 1800, in Java and
selected European countriesa

Area Calories (millions)

Java 3.2
Portugal 3.2
Finland 4.1
United Kingdom 13.2

a
In the calculations the procedure set out by Paul Bairoch (see source note below)
has been followed. The figure for Java means that a male agricultural labourer produced
on average 3.2 million net direct calories per year (female labour could not be taken into
consideration, as the relevant data is missing, both for Europe and for Java). ‘Direct’ means
that ‘indirect’ animal calories have been converted into direct ‘vegetative’ calories, and ‘net ’
means that seed and fodder have been deducted from the gross figures. All production
data was converted to calories, including that regarding non-consumables, which was first
converted into rice equivalents.
Sources: P. Bairoch, L’Agriculture des pays de´veloppés, 1800 à nos jours: production,
productivite´, rendements (Paris, 1999), 136; Peter Boomgaard, ‘Long hours for high yields:
agricultural productivity in pre-industrial Java (Indonesia)’, paper presented at the 13th
Economic History Conference, Buenos Aires, 2002, where the details of the calculations for
Java are given.

clearly suggest that in one of the most developed Southeast Asian areas,
the Indonesian island of Java, the level of productivity per unit of land – a
measure often used as an indicator of the level of economic devel-
opment – lagged behind that of the leading Asian country, Japan.
Around 1900, Java was far ahead of most Southeast Asian countries,
but Japan was doing much better than Java in terms of yields per unit of
land.7 There are no comparable figures for the early nineteenth century for
the Southeast Asian areas except Java, but it may be assumed that all the
figures were higher around 1900 than they were around 1800, as was the
case with Java. This was due to the fact that declining acreage per capita,
caused by population growth, had to be compensated for by higher
labour input per hectare. In Java, part of the increase may reflect ‘mature’
colonial rule.8
Another comparison has been made between labour productivity in
Javanese agriculture around 1815 and that in Europe around 1800. The
results are presented in Table 2. Java was on the same level as Portugal in
terms of labour productivity, and came fairly close to Finland. These were
the most economically backward European countries for which such
data can be produced. In comparison to the United Kingdom, the most

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 PETER BOOMGAARD

T ABLE 3
Occupational structure of the population in Java in 1815 and 1875, and
in Burma in 1891 (%)

Sector Java 1815 Java 1875 Burma 1891

Primary 85 75 71
Secondary 7 10 7
Tertiary 8 15 22

Sources: Peter Boomgaard, Children of the colonial state: population growth and economic
development in Java, 1795–1880 (Amsterdam, 1989), 109–35, and ‘The non-agricultural side
of an agricultural economy: Java, 1500–1900’, in Paul Alexander, Peter Boomgaard and Ben
White eds., In the shadow of agriculture: non-farm activities in the Javanese economy, past and
present (Amsterdam, 1991), 34; Teruko Saito and Lee King Kiong, Statistics on the Burmese
economy: the 19th and 20th centuries (Singapore, 1999), 23.

advanced European country at the time, Java’s labour productivity

was evidently very low. As Java’s labour productivity was probably
higher than that of most other Southeast Asian regions, Southeast Asian
productivity of labour cannot have been at par with the more developed
European areas.
Looking at both indicators – productivity of land and labour – the
conclusion appears to be inescapable that during the nineteenth and early-
twentieth centuries Southeast Asia was not at the same level of economic
development as were the most advanced areas in Eurasia. This is in
keeping with a number of other indicators, one of which is the small size
of the non-agrarian sectors of the Southeast Asian economy. Data for two
areas at various points in time have been summarized in Table 3. The data
there may be compared with those of a number of Western European
countries, where the primary sector was already much smaller around
1850, as was the case in Great Britain (20 %), the Netherlands (45 %) and
Belgium (50 %).9 Generally speaking, areas with a large agrarian sector
(say, over 60% of the economically active population) are economically
less developed than regions where the industrial and service sectors ac-
count together for 50 per cent or more of the active population.
Another, related indicator is the degree of urbanization. Around 1890,
3 per cent of Java’s population was living in towns of 20,000 inhabitants
or more, while that figure for the Netherlands in the same year was
29 per cent and for the British Isles as much as 48 per cent.10 As a rule,
before 1950 high rates of urbanization and high rates of economic growth,
mainly generated by the secondary and tertiary sectors, went hand in hand.
Moreover, compared to Western Europe, Northern India, (South-)
Eastern China and Japan, Southeast Asia was relatively sparsely

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populated, and it seems to be an almost universal rule that in early

modern societies the highest rates of economic growth were to be found in
densely populated regions.
A factor of a more qualitative nature to be mentioned here is the low
level of (‘ industrial ’) technological development in most of Southeast
Asia. The use of steam was restricted to the (small) Western industrial
sector and was hardly significant prior to 1900, and in many areas prior
to 1950. But even older technologies, such as water- and windmills,
were badly represented in the region, and were intimately linked to the
European and occasionally Chinese presence. Perhaps even more re-
markable is the absence of saws prior to European influence, for instance
in Java, perhaps because steel-making was poorly developed.11
A look at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Southeast Asian exports
versus Indian or Chinese exports confirms the lack of technological de-
velopment in the former region. Southeast Asian countries exported
agricultural, forest, maritime, and mining products, but very little that
could be termed ‘industrial, ’ small quantities of cotton textiles apart. This
is in contrast to China, which exported huge quantities of silk and
ceramics, and India, with its voluminous cotton textile exports.12
All this implies that rates of economic growth in early modern
Southeast Asia were relatively low. If the assumption is to be confirmed
that there is a link between levels of economic development and the
functioning of factor markets, we should find labour, land and capital
markets in Southeast Asia that were not functioning as well as they did in
the more highly developed parts of Eurasia. This assumption will now be
tested.

LABOUR

Little has been written about Southeast Asian labour prior to, say, 1850,
but what we know can be summarized as follows.13 Free (wage) labour
had probably always been available in small (sometimes no doubt very
small) numbers, but during the early modern period various forms of
dependent or bonded labour were predominant. From around 1400, the
supply of various kinds of free and unfree labour was increasing due to the
influence of the international market. In order to respond to growing
foreign demand, labour was recruited in increasing quantities. In the ur-
ban areas and the densely settled rice bowls, this could be free labour, but
at the same time various forms of unfree labour had to be employed.
However, locally from the late eighteenth century, and across the
region during much of the nineteenth, corvée obligations and fully fledged
slavery were being increasingly abolished, while free wage labour took

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their place. This development was linked to three factors – population

growth (which led to falling man–land ratios and therefore to cheaper
labour), the continuing growth of international trade and measures taken
by the colonial rulers. I will now deal with these topics in more detail.
Bonded labour, was, at one time, quite important in parts of Asia.14 It
was an indigenous institution, not introduced there by Europeans. My
impression is that it was much more important, say, around 1500 in
Southeast Asia than it was in either South or East Asia.
Bonded labour – which includes serfdom, debt peonage (debt slavery)
and people with heavy corvée labour obligations – was widespread in
Southeast Asia during the pre-modern period (and therefore prior to
European influence), probably particularly in the core areas of the early
states. Nieboer’s thesis that there is a negative link between population
density and slavery, with bonded labour to be found particularly in so-
cieties where people were scarce and land abundant, is often assumed to
apply.15 That rule applies to Southeast Asia as well.
However, within such societies, at least in Southeast Asia, bonded la-
bour appears to have been connected to those core areas where a monarch
ruled over a sedentary peasant population, with a moderate population
density. Here, bonded labour was ‘created ’ through debt bondage, pun-
ishment meted out by the ruler or a magistrate, the commutation of fines
that could not be paid, the slave trade and raiding outside the core areas.
Bonded labourers were put to work on religious properties and the secular
building projects of the ruler. Bonded labour was also used for the pro-
duction of export commodities.16
A few remarks are in order about the many gradations of servility in
these societies. The question should be asked whether every person with
labour obligations towards the ruler should be regarded as bonded. If, as
was often the case, these obligations amounted to six months per year, the
answer clearly should be positive. But what about those with a corvée
obligation of only one month per year ? If that is bonded labour, there
were many Southeast Asian regions where not much labour was not
bonded, that is, free. If, for instance, we were to regard everyone with
corvée obligations in eighteenth-century Thailand as bonded, there would
be hardly any free people left.17 Be that as it may, there were sufficient
people with a genuinely bonded status to enable us to say that bonded
labour was quite important in early modern Southeast Asia.
Looking into the causes of bonded labour, I am inclined to agree with
Nieboer, that we are dealing here with land-rich and labour-poor societies
where labour was at a premium, and often could not be acquired without
some degree of compulsion. Or, as Domar has reformulated the Nieboer
thesis, there was no wage rate where demand and supply met, and in that

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sense there was no labour market in many Southeast Asian regions prior
to 1850 or so. That explains the demand for bonded labour. Looking at
the supply side, it can be observed that these were risk-prone societies
where during the many lean periods that occurred people sometimes had
to sell themselves or their families into slavery, or just offered themselves
as slaves to rich people.18
In addition to this, mention should be made of a basic ordering of
society in countries such as Burma and Thailand during the early modern
period. Here we encounter a basic division of commoners (usually pea-
sants) into those groups (often entire villages) who owed corvée labour to
the monarch and those who did not. The latter were either paying taxes or
owed labour obligations to the nobility or the clergy. Labour obligations
to the crown were often quite heavy, but they could also be regarded as an
honour, such as having a high rank in the military or serving in some
other non-menial capacity at court.19
Of course we would like to know what proportion of the population
was actually entirely ‘free ’, here defined as tax-paying but not subject
to servile obligations. I have the impression that in some societies this
number might have been very small. One group of people, though, ap-
pears to have been free everywhere in Southeast Asia. I am referring to
foreigners, and in particular to Chinese migrants. It is well known that
Chinese migrants played an important role as merchants, petty traders
and moneylenders, but it should not be forgotten that most Chinese
migrants arrived in Southeast Asia as coolies, owning nothing but their
labour power (and they were also often in debt).20
It is also likely that those groups – often tribal – who lived too far away
from the core areas or that could not be easily reached for other reasons
(for example because they lived in forests or swamps) paid only token
homage to a ruler, and it is unlikely that they were called upon for corvée
labour. In principle, therefore, they were free to do with their labour as
they saw fit. However, for the same reasons that the state left them alone,
one can hardly expect them to have been available on a routine basis
for the labour market. Therefore, in the nineteenth century, when under
colonial rule Western enterprise was opening up ‘waste ’ lands in tribal
areas, local wage labour was often hard to get, and entrepreneurs had to
import (indentured) labour from elsewhere.
Finally, data for Java suggest that at least from 1650 onward there
were always some unskilled wage labourers – usually called ‘coolies’ –
available in and around the areas where the Vereenigde Oostindische
Compagnie (Dutch East India Company, VOC for short) had established
itself.21 These were small numbers of people who, for various reasons, had
left their village societies. They were an unruly lot who appear to have

61
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spent most of their income on gambling, whoring, drinking and opium.

They figure prominently in reports about criminal activities. Here, ap-
parently, we find a genuine proletariat in the making – free people who
had to sell their labour. Data on wages between 1650 and 1800, although
not abundantly available, suggest that there was a downward tendency,
which implies that the supply of coolies was increasing.
However, around 1750 there are signs that in Java this development
towards a fully fledged proletariat was rivalled by another tendency. This
was the appearance of what in Java was called a bujang, a young, un-
married male (occasionally a female), who was temporarily looking for
work outside his village. Of course such people had always existed, but
their presence in larger numbers in the ‘Western’ sector of the economy
appears to have been a rather novel phenomenon. They were temporary
migrants, who came looking for work during one or two seasons, perhaps
more, but who intended eventually to go back to their village and get
married, for which they should have been saving part of their income, in
order to be able to pay the brideprice.
By 1400, those living in most Southeast Asian core areas were familiar
with coinage of one kind or another. Nevertheless, this was far from being
a fully monetized society when the Europeans arrived on the scene. After
1500, the region received large amounts of (American) silver from Europe,
while Japanese silver and copper may have played a much larger role than
many of us have been aware of.22
It has been suggested that increased monetization may initially have led
to more rather than less debt slavery,23 which comes perhaps as a surprise
to those who would have expected ‘more market ’ to have led to more free
labour. And yet there are various indications that an increased demand
for export products could only be met by employing more bonded labour,
particularly if and when remuneration for labour, because of increased
competition and therefore falling prices, had to be low, and was therefore
unattractive to peasant-cultivators and others with a reasonable income.
The incidence of obligatory labour, therefore, appears to have increased,
at least initially in many instances, due to stronger market influence.
Nevertheless, market influence in the end has been the undoing of cor-
vée labour. Between 1700 and 1900, service obligations in many Southeast
Asian countries (Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Java) were being gradually
commuted to monetary payments, or they were reduced and finally
abolished, while work for the state was increasingly being paid for. This
happened more or less at the same time as the substitution of monetary
taxation for taxes in kind, and no doubt for the same reasons – more
money had become available, more people were willing to work for wages,
probably largely because population growth led to lower amounts of

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arable land per capita, and therefore more dependence on wage labour,
while at the same time increasing imports from outside the region made
more desirable goods available.24
The development of slavery and serfdom is a somewhat more compli-
cated story. Fully fledged slavery – as a proportion of the total labouring
population – may never have been very important during the period we
are discussing, as so much corvée labour was available to the state and to
the nobility. However, many elements of the population could not access
corvée labour and, as wage labour was difficult to get, slavery was often
the only solution for non-noble entrepreneurs, and in the less populous
areas even for the nobility. There is also evidence that rulers and nobility
of ports-of-trade availed themselves of slaves, while slavery was often also
the only solution for resident foreigners looking for workers.25
Slavery then, far from being (only) a ‘backward ’ mode of production,
was almost certainly stimulated by the growth of international trade and
the increasing importance of production for export, a defining feature of
the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. However, in the
densely settled core areas of Java and Northern Vietnam for instance,
slavery was rare in the indigenous countryside and was largely restricted
to the ports-of-trade.
When the influence of European powers increased during the nine-
teenth century and solidified into formal colonialism, slavery was slowly
but surely phased out. Slavery in Southeast Asia was not abolished for
economic reasons by the colonial powers, but for humanitarian ones.
However, it coincided conveniently with the increasing availability of free
wage labour in the region. Nevertheless, slavery persisted in many
Southeast Asian fringe areas into the twentieth century, and in the late
1940s Condominas encountered a few slaves when he was doing fieldwork
in a tribal upland area in Vietnam.26

LAND

Generally speaking, unidirectional development from communal land

tenure to individual rights to land under the influence of the colonial
state – a notion dear to many present-day writers – does not seem to re-
flect very well what happened, while it is, furthermore, not sufficiently
specific to tell us much about the social and economic effects of changing
land-tenure arrangements. Individual, hereditary private tenure has ex-
isted for ages in many areas of Southeast Asia. The occurrence of this
form of tenure appears to be related to population density and the
working of the international market. However, ‘communal rights to land ’
could also be found in village communities in the populous core areas.

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Such land tenure arrangements were different from what has been called
customary or communal tenure among marginal (tribal) groups. Not all
rights to land in such areas were ‘communal’, but neither was there a land
market, as land was abundantly available.
It can also be established that many European regulations between
1570 and 1870 were not aimed at the creation of private property in land,
and in various cases they led to distortions of private property rights
already in existence, for instance by stimulating the transformation of
peasant freehold into communal tenure, as happened in nineteenth-
century Java. Even after 1870, there are many instances of colonial states
preferring long leases for Western enterprise instead of private holdings.
In the case of forests the option of private property was never contem-
plated, the forests being declared sovereign domain instead.
Various colonial regulations have, indeed, facilitated the creation of
private landed property since the late nineteenth century. In many in-
stances, however, this was not conversion from communal land into pri-
vately owned land, but from open access and state land. The following
paragraphs deal with the land market problems in more detail.
There are not many reliable historical studies concerning rights to land
in Southeast Asia that are based on empirical data. It is still possible, as
Glenn May recently did for the Philippines, to write an article based on
actual research of the primary sources in which the received wisdom about
the historical development of land rights is stood on its head.27 Therefore,
much of what is said here is preliminary and awaits further research.
Nowadays, many students of land-tenure arrangements distinguish
four types of land rights – open access land, state land, common property
and individually owned private property.28 However, historiographically
the terminology was subject to changes. During the nineteenth century
most colonial regimes assumed that the indigenous rulers of Southeast
Asia were the owners of all the lands, a notion they copied from the ruling
elites. The colonial states regarded themselves as the successors to such
rights.29 However, since the early twentieth century, the view has been
gaining ground that it was not the ruler or the state but the village or the
clan in which land rights were ultimately vested.30 In this view, land was
the common property of the villagers, for which terms such as ‘communal
rights’ or ‘customary rights ’ are often used. Such rights were often no
longer in evidence around 1900, so the argument went, because the in-
digenous or the colonial state had usurped them. However, in stateless
societies, village rights to land could still be encountered.
Both opinions – the king as the original owner of all the land or all
rights to land originally vested in the local community – can still be en-
countered in the recent literature. Usually, those who cite the former

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version are interested in the densely settled core areas of the Southeast
Asian states, while supporters of the latter hypothesis are interested in the
sparsely populated tribal margins. Therefore, these views are not necess-
arily mutually exclusive.
It is also assumed that these rights have changed drastically since the
colonial state took matters in hand and introduced individual private
rights to land. The general trend, therefore, suggested implicitly or ex-
plicitly by many scholars writing about Southeast Asia, is that land rights
were transformed from state or common property to private property as a
result of colonial intervention.31
A few comments on these views are in order. Individual ownership of
land predates the colonial experience in Southeast Asia. Perhaps the best-
documented area in this respect is tenth-century Java, where epigraphic
evidence strongly suggests that land, particularly irrigated rice land, could
be bought and sold on a freehold basis, pawned and leased. Individual
hereditary private property in land prior to 1500 or 1600 is also to be
found in Burma, Vietnam and the Philippines. Thailand appears to have
been the country where the claim that the king was the sole owner of the
land was taken more seriously than elsewhere. Here, private individual
rights to land were weakest prior to the late eighteenth century, and those
who cultivated the land could not claim more than usufruct rights. Even
around 1800, when land could be sold and bequeathed by the cultivator, it
was not generally used as collateral.32
The areas where hereditary private tenure of land predominated were
mostly to be found in the densely populated core areas of the indigenous
states, in and around capital cities and ports-of-trade. Here, land had
become scarce and therefore valuable at an early stage, and ‘commodi-
fied ’ even if its legal status may have been that of regal domain land. In
areas where land was abundant, land rights were often less clear, but a
hereditary right to the land of the first person who reclaimed and con-
tinued cultivating it was usually recognized. In these areas there was no
real land market, as land was considered a free good which could be
acquired by anyone willing to cultivate it and pay the taxes on it. Land
sales, therefore, were exceptional here.33
Not much discussed in the literature is the size of privately owned lands,
with the exception of the situation in the Philippines, where large eccle-
siastical and private estates came into being after the arrival of the
Spaniards.34 Large estates of the nobility are mentioned in pre-modern
Vietnam, but around 1500 rulers actively sought to discourage such lati-
fundia, which were seen as competition for the monarch. Relatively large
landholdings – but nothing compared to what could be found in the
Philippines – came into existence after the clearing of large new areas for

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agriculture, as happened in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam in the eight-

eenth century and the Irrawaddy and Chao Phraya Deltas in Burma and
Thailand respectively during the nineteenth century. There does not ap-
pear to have been much difference in this respect between indigenous and
colonial rule. The new lands had in common the fact that it was difficult
for individual smallholders to clear these swampy deltas and to dig the
canals needed for transportation. People with access to capital were in a
much better position to carry out such activities as a large-scale enterprise.
It seems therefore that environmental circumstances dictated the land-
tenure arrangements in these cases.35
Common property or communal tenure, sometimes also termed ‘cus-
tomary tenure ’ in the literature, is now often regarded as the form of
tenure historically to be found in stateless societies.36 Many anthro-
pologists writing about tenure and the environment seem to feel that it is
private property, introduced by alien forces (the colonial state,
Capitalism), that is to blame for many of the environmental problems of
today. In their view, customary rights to land would be better suited to
sustainable exploitation of the natural environment.37
There are a number of problems with these terms. In the first place, they
suggest that all ‘primitive ’ or ‘tribal ’ communities owned land in com-
mon. This appears not to be the case. This, at least, is what could be
concluded from research done around 1950 among the Iban and the Land
Dayak by, respectively, Derek Freeman and Bill Geddes.38 The claims
created here by the individual through clearing the land are admittedly
not identical with our ‘individual tenure ’ in the usual sense of the word,
but neither is it communal tenure – the village or the longhouse do not
appear to have had residual claims.39 However, there are many instances
in Borneo of stronger communal claims on the land.
The second point is that there is another phenomenon called ‘commu-
nal tenure ’, which has nothing to do with the ‘pristine ’ arrangements
mentioned here. It refers to the fact that in villages of sedentary peasant-
agriculturalists, often located in long-settled, densely populated wet-rice-
growing areas, part or all of the arable lands did not have permanent
individual owners. These lands were distributed by the village head among
all families (in Java), or among a section of the villagers, often, but not
always, the landless and/or the ‘dwarfholders’ (in Vietnam). Redistri-
bution could take place annually or after more years. This phenomenon
was to be found in Java and northern Vietnam around 1800 and later. As
a rule, such communal holdings could not be alienated.40
Were the colonial masters as interested in introducing private property
as many scholars seem to think ? In the first place some colonial powers
preferred concessions to outright property, at least for large-scale Western

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enterprise. Ever since the Agrarian Law of 1870, plantations in the

Indonesian Archipelago had to depend entirely on the acquisition of
leases, usually for a period of 75 years. Such a period was sufficiently long
for banks to accept leasehold land as collateral. In Java, the situation had
been more complicated between 1820 and 1870, when no non-Javanese
had been permitted to buy land. The planting of crops for the world
market by Western enterprise could only be undertaken on arable lands
hired from villages. These arrangements were part of the so-called ‘culti-
vation system ’.41
In the Philippines, Spanish legislation during the nineteenth century
worked in favour of the creation and expansion of haciendas, but this was
done at the expense of small private holdings. Even as late as 1914, under
US rule, the legislation stimulated the acquisition of large landholdings
by the high and mighty, to the detriment of smallholders, who became
tenants on the properties they once owned. The state, therefore, en-
couraged the growth of the numbers of large private holdings, but it also
encouraged the disappearance of smallholdings.
There are also indications that colonial powers during certain stages of
their presence in Southeast Asia were in favour of communal holdings.
The Spanish crown, for instance, gave land grants to Philippine villages in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, thus creating communal
holdings out of the royal domain. But even during part of the nineteenth
century the Dutch colonial state actively encouraged the growth of
communal holdings in Java, as it was convenient for the sugar industry
and for other aspects of the ‘cultivation system ’.42
It is also clear that between about 1800 and 1940 almost all the forests
in Southeast Asia were declared to be the property of the state. Before
1800, most forests in the more remote areas had been open access re-
sources, while in the more densely settled areas they had been regarded as
part of the village commons. Forests as private property, well known from
Europe, must have been rare or even non-existent in Southeast Asia, both
before and after 1800.43
Whatever the formal arrangements of landed property, it is arguably
of equal importance whether such lands were owner-operated or worked
by tenants. It is generally accepted that tenancy – probably mainly share
tenancy – has increased considerably during the last 100 or 150 years. It
has been estimated that by the 1950s around 50 per cent of all farms were
tenant-operated. This means that a large proportion of all cultivators were
not able to put up the land they were cultivating as collateral. This made
them dependent on ‘improving landlords ’ (while most landlords were
better known for their rentier mentality) or moneylenders who charged
usurious rents in order to compensate for the risk they were running.44

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It is undoubtedly true that most colonial states attempted from the late
nineteenth century onwards to improve the registration and therefore the
creation and recognition of private property in land. Most countries – but
not the Netherlands (East) Indies – introduced the so-called ‘ Torrens
system ’, where the registration of title deeds was coupled to cadastral
surveys and an exact positioning of the relevant plots of land. However,
this attempt was fraught with many difficulties, of which the main ones
were the lack of trained personnel and the endless disputes over conflict-
ing claims. The pace of registration was therefore excruciatingly slow, and
the process was far from finished at the end of colonial rule.45
Finally, the point should be made that up until today the existence of
so many property regimes (‘ legal pluralism ’) that have succeeded but
not replaced each other – indigenous, colonial, post-colonial – is a source
of incredible confusion and uncertainty as regards titles to land.46

CAPITAL

Interest rates were generally speaking high in this period, and the highest
rates were paid by the poorest, who, as we have seen when dealing with
the labour market, could easily become debt bondsmen. During the sev-
enteenth century, the interest rates for large sums of money dropped
considerably in various places, but certainly not everywhere. They re-
mained higher than in the most developed regions of Western Europe.
Capital, therefore, was expensive, and the performance of the capital
market left much to be desired. The following paragraphs will highlight a
number of relevant details.
Asia always had the reputation of a money-poor, cash-hungry and
debt-ridden part of the world with very high interest rates, a sink of im-
ported specie and bullion.47 This is easily illustrated – at least for South
and Southeast Asia – for the period between 1600 and 1900, when we have
quantitative data on interest-rate levels. The lowest interest rates in the
indigenous sphere in Southeast Asia during this period, both in legal texts
and in actual practice, appear to have fluctuated at between 25 and 35 per
cent per year, rates that were probably only applicable if some sort of
collateral was present. In Java, Europeans who lent money to the Chinese
sometimes charged somewhat lower rates during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries – 16 to 18 per cent. However, much higher rates were
found in many cases.
Occasionally, the laws set limits to the amount of interest to be charged,
but we do not know whether people actually paid any heed to such in-
junctions. Given the structure of authority – which will be discussed in the
next section – it is unlikely that the state actually upheld such rules on a

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 LABOUR, LAND, AND CAPITAL MARKETS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

routine basis. Indigenous legal texts mention maximum rates of between

80 and 150 per cent. Occasionally, the principle is formulated that the
repayment of a debt cannot be more than double the original sum that
was borrowed, which, therefore, after one year would have been an in-
terest rate of 100 per cent. So even if such maximum legal rates had been
adhered to, repayment must have been an enormous burden on Southeast
Asia’s commoners, often people living on the edge of survival.
The highest rates appear to have been paid on the smaller sums, both
according to the law and in actual practice, which was still the case in
colonial times. Pierre Gourou, writing about northern Vietnam in the
1930s, presents the example of people borrowing 1 piaster, for which they
had to pay an interest of 1 sou a day, or a rate of 100 per cent for a
hundred-day period (and therefore 365 per cent after one year).48 Such
amounts of money, though very small in our eyes, were to be taken
seriously from a Southeast Asian peasant’s perspective.
Interest rates were lower in the major ports-of-trade in seventeenth-
century India, at least for loans made available by local merchants to the
VOC. The rates were also decreasing over the century, no doubt as a result
of large silver imports from Europe. The lowest rates were found in Surat,
where they dropped from 12 to 712 per cent, those in Bengal were some-
what higher, dropping from 15 to 10, while the highest rates occurred in
Coromandel, decreasing from 24 to 12 per cent. All these rates were
charged for very large amounts, so rates for smaller amounts would have
been higher.
Finally there are data for the European-dominated centres in the
seventeenth-century Indonesian Archipelago, Batavia and Ambon. Here,
interest rates paid by the VOC to private persons, probably mainly
Europeans and European institutions (such as the orphan chamber)
varied between 6 and 9 per cent per year. This was getting close to rates
charged in the Netherlands during the same period, at that moment the
most advanced financial centre in the world, where interest rates varied
from 312 and 5 per cent for large loans to the state or the VOC.
The most plausible explanation for these differences in interest rates
appears to be a combination of the different degrees of penetration of
European capital and the different levels of economic development. The
economies of areas such as Gujarat, Coromandel and Bengal were of a
more complex nature than the indigenous economies of Southeast Asia,
and larger amounts of European capital were imported in India than in
Southeast Asia. Only places such as Batavia and Ambon, where the
European element was numerically and economically dominant, were
doing marginally better in terms of interest rates than Surat, the Indian
city with the lowest rates.

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 PETER BOOMGAARD

Why were interest rates higher in Southeast Asia than they were in
Western Europe around the same time ? A number of factors will be
mentioned, or rather complexes of factors.49
Early modern Southeast Asian societies were characterized by status
based on ostentation (conspicuous consumption) and reciprocity. Status
could be acquired by organizing large ceremonies, which had to be recipro-
cated by competing status-seekers (in competitive feasting). For Southeast
Asians of a certain standing – particularly kings and aristocrats – wealth
had no meaning unless it could be displayed. Being indebted owing to
conspicuous consumption was not regarded as morally wrong.
A second factor is the scarcity of money. Although, as was mentioned
earlier, many Southeast Asian countries did have various types of coinage
from the pre-modern period, the minting of coins came much later than it
did in Europe. This phenomenon might be related to the fact that the
proportion of the economy that was market-oriented was small in com-
parison with more advanced countries, which, in turn, appears to be re-
lated to the less complex nature of Southeast Asia’s pre-modern economy
and society. Low levels of population density appear to have played a role
here, which might ultimately be linked to environmental factors. Within
Southeast Asia there were huge differences, and one could find barter
economies not too far from the monetized core areas. The scarcity of
money may have been stimulated by the often-reported proclivity of
Southeast Asians to ‘ hoarding ’. Besides the well-known fact that gold and
silver coins were taken out of circulation and turned into jewellery, there
are many instances found in the sources of buried treasures.50
A third factor is that of natural and human-made hazards. Natural
risks are present in every society, and most early modern societies had few
buffers against such disasters. It seems likely that Southeast Asian so-
cieties were even more at risk than others because of the hazards con-
nected to the ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation) phenomenon, which
hits the region harder than other areas, causing droughts and floods with
sad regularity in addition to the weather anomalies that are found in other
regions as well. It has also been argued that tropical areas are more sub-
ject to all kinds of diseases, which would make Southeast Asia – a region
entirely located in the intertropical zone – more risky in this respect too.
Finally, Reid has argued that Southeast Asia was characterized by a
higher than average level of conflicts.51 Even if all these factors only made
a marginal difference in comparison with other parts of the world, taken
together they are likely to have made a big difference, which would imply
more risk and therefore higher interest rates, all other things being equal.52
Finally, high rates may also have been caused by high transaction
costs. Gourou argued that in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) moneylenders

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 LABOUR, LAND, AND CAPITAL MARKETS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

only got their money back if they were supported by a local Mandarin, and
Mandarins did not come cheap. In many areas of Southeast Asia money-
lenders were aliens (Arabs, Indians, Chinese), and it is well known that,
particularly in times of economic crisis, recouping their loans would be
very difficult. They needed bodyguards-cum-enforcers to stay in business
or, occasionally, to stay alive. Particularly regarding Indonesia various
authors have convincingly argued that the lack of trust would contribute to
an adverse business climate, and thus to high levels of interest. Finally the
lack of contract enforcement should be mentioned, a factor pertaining to
the institutional features to be dealt with next.53

THE INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK

The low interest rates in Batavia were not only the result of the presence of
more cash, but also, one assumes, of the will and the means to enforce
contracts. Thus, we arrive finally at the institutional factors, which will be
dealt with briefly.
Although it is no longer fashionable to speak of ‘Oriental despotism ’,
one is hard put to find another equally evocative term to describe
the behaviour of Southeast Asian power-holders. They were certainly
absolute rulers by the fifteenth century, and income and firearms acquired
through trade with Europeans strengthened their position. Evidently,
Southeast Asian society prior to 1850 was not a civil society. The king
could, up to a point, do as he pleased, and he was certainly above the law
(as the laws themselves show us convincingly). The states we have been
dealing with in this chapter had subjects, not citizens.
There was a generally high level of insecurity among commoners and
nobility alike. One of the reasons people – mainly commoners – were
hoarding is that they would not dare show too much of their wealth, lest
they made the monarch jealous. Rulers were known to make unexpected
and unreasonable financial demands. These factors have generally been
held responsible for the lack of an indigenous stratum of well-to-do (non-
royal and non-noble) large-scale merchants. Rulers preferred to deal with
Chinese, Arab, Indian or European merchants, as these, in their eyes,
could never pose a threat to their position.54
The fact that many of Southeast Asia’s commercial transactions were
thus in the hands of strangers might be an additional explanation for the
eternal shortage of cash in the region, as these merchants repatriated a
(large ?) proportion of their earnings.
Next to the role of the monarch, the quality of the legal framework
within which a society operates is of great importance for the issues we are
dealing with. Written laws were present in most Southeast Asian countries

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from an early age. These laws contain clauses about property (but not
much on landed property), financial transactions, written contracts,
bondage and punishment for crimes.55
A typical feature of various Southeast Asian laws was that public law
and private law were not strictly separated, so that someone who had been
found guilty paid not only compensation to the party that had been
wronged, but also a fine to the ruler, who, as will be shown presently, was
often the judge. Most penalties consisted of fines, but corporal and capital
punishment were often applied as well. The latter types of punishment
could be commuted to – rather stiff – fines. Those who could not pay
their fine became slaves, in principle, again, of the ruler who had sat in
judgement. The ruler-judge was, therefore, far from impartial – the more
people he found guilty, the more income and slaves he obtained.56
Moreover, the means to decide innocence or guilt was often the or-
deal – mainly total immersion in water (whoever came up for air first was
guilty) and the plunging of hands in boiling water or molten tin. People
might understandably have been reluctant to avail themselves of this type
of legal process.
We do not know how much of the written law was ever put into practice
(some of it surely was – we know of instances where debts were registered,
for example), but we do know that the existing law books were not much
used for sentencing. We also know that justice was usually administered
by the ruler or by one of his representatives. Legal specialists were usually
only involved in the process in an advisory role, and independent judges
hardly existed in the indigenous sphere. The general impression is that
might was stronger than right, and that it was fairly easy for someone with
money to pervert the course of justice. There were doubtless many just
kings and good magistrates, but there were also many examples to the
contrary, and there were no institutional constraints to keep a bad king
from doing things he should not. The rule of law did not apply where the
monarch was concerned.57
Finally, it should be pointed out that there are no traces of self-
governing bodies, such as the cities in Europe, or of representative bodies
in which commoners held seats, such as the parliaments in many
European countries.

CONCLUSION

It is probably fair to say that in the more highly developed areas of early
modern Southeast Asia, such as Java and the Red River Delta, factor
markets of sorts did exist, and that they became more efficient in the
course of time. Some free labour was available in the ports-of-trade, and if

72
 LABOUR, LAND, AND CAPITAL MARKETS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

it was not, people could usually hire or buy slaves. As time went by, the
supply of free labour appears to have increased in the most densely settled
urban areas. However, in many areas labour was not available at any
price an employer was willing to pay, and labour recruitment took place
outside the labour market, through adoption, marriage and procreation,
an option usually not available to outsiders.58
Arable lands could be bought and sold in the wet-rice-producing areas
where population density was high, but it is not clear to what extent such
sales were entirely unfettered. We do know that the village or the extended
family often had residual rights to land. In many areas, however, there
was no land market at all, mainly because land was a free good for anyone
willing to clear it, pay tax and do the corvée-labour duties. As it was often
impossible to hire labour in such areas, outsiders could not avail them-
selves of this free good.
Capital was expensive in most areas of early modern Southeast Asia,
and interest rates were prohibitively high. Only where imported cash was
available in large amounts do interest rates appear to have dropped
somewhat during the seventeenth century, and in European-dominated
places such as Batavia and Ambon they came relatively close to rates
obtaining in Europe. However, even in cities not so far away from
European establishments interest rates could remain quite high, let alone
in the remote rural areas where money was rare.
The Southeast Asian monarch was an absolute ruler, and the rule of
law did not apply where the king was concerned. Merchants and in-
dustrialists, in Western Europe the motors of development, often had to
live in constant fear of arbitrary confiscation, and even noblemen, who
were obliged to consume conspicuously, were never certain that they
would be left in peace by the ruler. Therefore, with free labour not
abundantly available, landownership often burdened with residual rights,
capital scarce and expensive, and an institutional framework that was not
conducive to economic growth, one is hardly surprised to find lower levels
of economic development in Southeast Asia than one does in Japan and
Western Europe during the early modern period.
However, we have observed gradual changes between the sixteenth
and the nineteenth centuries, towards greater convergence with Western
patterns. These changes appear to have been driven largely by two
factors – population growth and an increasing demand for commodities,
at least partly generated by the European trading companies and ac-
companied by increased monetization. In places where the European
presence was particularly strong, access to European-style law courts
may have contributed as well, particularly regarding contract enforce-
ment.

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 PETER BOOMGAARD

For further research, it would be interesting to concentrate on the more

advanced areas, where free labour, individual rights to land, and relatively
large amounts of money were available (and, one assumes, lower interest
rates). These were the ports-of-trade, sometimes also the capitals of the
various core areas. It is in these areas that slavery and debt peonage were
also reportedly of great importance, an anomaly worthy of further in-
vestigation.

ENDNOTES

1 Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas, The rise of the Western world: a new econ-
omic history (Cambridge, 1973).
2 Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: global economy in the Asian age (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1998); Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the
making of the modern world economy (Princeton and Oxford, 2000).
3 Southeast Asia mainly consists of the countries that are now called Myanmar (Burma),
Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines.
4 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the age of commerce, vol. I: The lands below the winds
(New Haven, 1988); Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the age of commerce, vol. II:
Expansion and crisis (New Haven, 1993); Victor Lieberman, Strange parallels;
Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge, 2003).
5 As B. Schrieke (Indonesian sociological studies (The Hague and Bandung, 1955–1957),
vol. 2, 100) famously said: ‘[T]he Java of around 1700 A.D. was in reality the same as
the Java of around 700 A.D. ’
6 Detailed statistics have been collected (on an annual basis, and by unit of adminis-
tration) on population, arable lands and (rice) harvests for nineteenth-century Java
(see Peter Boomgaard and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Food crops and arable lands,
Java 1815–1942, Changing economy in Indonesia, 10 (Amsterdam, 1990)). The early-
nineteenth-century figures are not as good as the data for the early twentieth century, as
they are almost invariably too low. This was partly because data-gathering was linked
to taxation, which made underreporting attractive, and partly because people, land and
crops in out-of-the-way areas escaped notice. However, if one calculates yields per
hectare or consumption per capita, the underestimates in numerator and denominator
may be expected to cancel each other out. To date, figures for other Southeast Asian
areas for the early nineteenth century have not yet been published. However, it may be
assumed that production per hectare, for instance in the Red River Delta, northern
Vietnam, was of the same order of magnitude as that in Java, while lower rates obtained
in much of Southeast Asia.
7 Broadly similar conclusions can be drawn from Pierre van der Eng, ‘Production tech-
nology and comparative advantage in rice agriculture in Southeast Asia since 1870’,
paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies Conference, Honolulu, Hawai’i,
1996, 23.
8 Boomgaard and Van Zanden, Food crops, 41.
9 Richard Griffiths, Industrial retardation in the Netherlands 1830–1850 (The Hague,
1979), 5.
10 Jan de Vries, European urbanization, 1500–1800 (London, 1984), 46; Boomgaard,
Children, 111. In 1815 and 1850 almost 7 per cent of Java’s population lived in towns of
20,000 inhabitants and over. The drop in the urbanization rate between 1850 and 1890

74
 LABOUR, LAND, AND CAPITAL MARKETS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

was partly caused by the fact that the so-called ‘cultivation system’ created jobs in the
countryside more than in the cities. But even 7 per cent is very low in comparison with
the more developed regions of Eurasia.
11 Peter Boomgaard, ‘Technologies of a trading empire: Dutch introduction of water- and
windmills in early modern Asia, 1650s–1800 ’, History and Technology 24:1 (2008),
43–60.
12 Details in Peter Boomgaard, Southeast Asia: an environmental history (Santa Barbara,
2007), 145–54.
13 But see for instance Reid, Southeast Asia, vol. I, 90–136, and (for Java) Peter
Boomgaard, ‘Why work for wages? Free labour in Java, 1600–1900’, Economic and
Social History in the Netherlands 2 (1990), 37–56. On labour around and after 1850, see
Amarjit Kaur, Wage labour in Southeast Asia since 1840: Globalisation, the international
division of labour, and labour transformations (Basingstoke, 2004).
14 There are three more or less recent collections on slavery that are partly or entirely
dedicated to Southeast Asia: see Anthony Reid ed., Slavery, bondage and dependency
in Southeast Asia (St Lucia, 1983); Georges Condominas ed., Formes extrêmes de de´-
pendance: contributions à l’e´tude de l’esclavage en Asie du Sud-Est (Paris, 1998); and
Gwyn Campbell ed., The structure of slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London
and Portland, 2004).
15 This notion was famously pioneered by H. J. Nieboer, Slavery as an industrial system:
ethnological researches (The Hague, 1910); a revised version of his thesis is given by
E. D. Domar, ‘The causes of slavery or serfdom: a hypothesis’, Journal of Economic
History 30 (1970), 18–32; see also the article by Gareth Austin in this issue.
16 Lieberman, Strange parallels, 95, 113, 157, 180–3, 300, 303, 359, 410; Volker
Grabowsky, Bevölkerung und Staat in Lan Na: ein Beitrag zur bevölkerungsgeschichte
Südostasiens (Wiesbaden, 2004).
17 David Feeny, ‘The coevolution of property rights regimes for land, man, and forests in
Thailand, 1790–1990’, in John F. Richards ed., Land, property, and the environment
(Oakland, 2002), 188–93.
18 Nieboer, Slavery; Domar, ‘The causes of slavery’.
19 Reid, Slavery, 8; Lieberman, Strange parallels; Domar, ‘The causes of slavery’.
20 Leonard Blussé, Strange company: Chinese settlers, mestizo women and the Dutch in
VOC Batavia (Dordrecht/Riverton, 1986), 26–7, 52–5; Boomgaard, ‘Why work for
wages?’, 41; Robert E. Elson, The end of the peasantry in Southeast Asia: a social and
economic history of peasant livelihood, 1800–1990s (Basingstoke and New York, 1997),
41 ; and Feeny, ‘The coevolution’, particularly pp. 189–93.
21 On this and the next section see Boomgaard, ‘Why work for wages?’.
22 Robert S. Wicks, Money. markets, and trade in early Southeast Asia: the development
of indigenous monetary systems to AD 1400 (Ithaca, NY, 1992); Lieberman, Strange
parallels, 46–7; Ryuto Shimada, The intra-Asian trade in Japanese copper by the Dutch
East India Company during the eighteenth century (Leiden, 2005). More on money and
monetization will be found in the section on capital below in this article.
23 Lieberman, Strange parallels, 181–2.
24 For details see Feeny, ‘The coevolution’, 191, and Lieberman, Strange parallels, 186,
298–9, 417.
25 Reid, Slavery, 17; Boomgaard, ‘Why work for wages?’, 37–40.
26 Georges Condominas, We have eaten the forest: the story of a montagnard village in the
central highlands of Vietnam (New York, 1994); Feeny, ‘The coevolution’, 193.
27 Glenn Anthony May, ‘The making of a myth: John Leddy Phelan and the ‘‘ hispani-
zation’’ of land tenure in the Philippines’, Philippine Studies 52:3 (2004), 275–307.

75
 PETER BOOMGAARD

28 Richards ed., Land, property, and the environment, 2.

29 At a much earlier date (in the sixteenth century), the king of Spain had declared himself
owner of all the lands in the Philippines by right of conquest (O. D. Corpuz, An econ-
omic history of the Philippines (Quezon City, 1997), 27). Based on the same right the
VOC regarded itself as the owner of Batavia and its environs (Java) after 1619.
30 This view was pioneered by the Dutch scholar Cornelis van Vollenhoven, founder of
what is often called the Adat Law School. The term he used for such village rights was
beschikkingsrecht (C. van Vollenhoven, De Indonesiër en zijn grond (Leiden, 1919), 8).
This has been translated variously as ‘rights of avail’ and ‘rights of disposal’, but
nowadays the term ‘residual rights ’ appears to be used by most scholars.
31 Mark Cleary and Peter Eaton, Tradition and reform: land tenure and rural development
in South-East Asia (Kuala Lumpur, 1996), 29–45; Richards, Land, property and the
environment, 14; Peter Eaton, Land tenure, conservation and development in Southeast
Asia (London and New York, 2005), 9.
32 For details see Kenneth R. Hall, ‘Economic history of early Southeast Asia ’, in
Nicholas Tarling ed., The Cambridge history of Southeast Asia, vol. 1: From early times
to circa 1500 (Cambridge, 1999), 268 ; Feeny, ‘The coevolution’, 182–5; Lieberman,
Strange parallels, 148; Jan Wisseman Christie, ‘The agricultural economies of early
Java and Bali’, in Peter Boomgaard and David Henley eds., Smallholders and stock-
breeders: histories of foodcrop and livestock farming in Southeast Asia (Leiden, 2004),
55; and May, ‘The making’. See also Peter Boomgaard, ‘Rights to land and the en-
vironment in the Indonesian Archipelago, 900–1950’, John Kleinen, ‘The tragedy of
the margins: land rights and marginality in (pre-)colonial Vietnam (c. 1800–1950)’, and
Barend Jan Terwiel, ‘Land rights and the environment in early modern Thailand’, all
papers presented at the Third International Conference of the European Society for
Environmental History, Florence, 2005.
33 Willem van Schendel, ‘Origins of the Burma rice boom, 1850–1880’, Journal of
Comtemporary Asia 17:4 (1987), 461 ; Terwiel, ‘Land rights’, 5.
34 In the Philippines, conversion of the local population to Catholicism had been one of
the most important aims of the Spanish conquest, and the large friar estates should be
seen in that light.
35 Michael Adas, The Burma delta: economic development and social change on an Asian
rice frontier, 1852–1941 (Madison, 1974); David B. Johnston, ‘Rice cultivation in
Thailand: The development of an export economy by indigenous capital and labor’,
Modern Asian Studies 15 :1 (1981); Van Schendel, ‘Origins’; Lieberman, Strange par-
allels, 410, 432, 442.
36 In the literature on landed tenure in Europe, ‘customary tenure’ usually has a different
meaning.
37 An example of this line of reasoning can be found in Toon van Meijl and Franz von
Benda-Beckmann eds., Property rights and economic development: land and natural re-
sources in Southeast Asia and Oceania (London and New York, 1999).
38 W. R. Geddes, The Land Dayak of Sarawak (London, 1954); J. D. Freeman, Iban
agriculture: a report on the shifting cultivation of hill rice by the Iban of Sarawak
(London, 1955).
39 In some areas of Borneo the longhouse was the basic community type, rather than any
village. In the regions discussed here, land was still easily available and the sale of land
was practically unknown until far into the twentieth century.
40 On this type of communal tenure in Vietnam see Pierre Gourou, Les paysans du
delta Tonkinois: e´tude de ge´ographie humaine (Paris and The Hague, 1965), and
Kleinen, ‘The tragedy’; on Java, see Peter Boomgaard, Between sovereign domain

76
 LABOUR, LAND, AND CAPITAL MARKETS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

and servile tenure: the development of rights to land in Java, 1780–1870 (Amsterdam,
1989).
41 This rule did not apply to the so-called ‘private estates’ (Particuliere Landerijen),
mainly to be found around Batavia, where land had been given out to foreigners in full
allodial property before about 1820, and to the ‘principalities ’ (Vorstenlanden) of
Central Java, where European entrepreneurs could lease land from the Javanese princes
and the nobility.
42 Marshall S. McLennan, The central Luzon plain: land and society of the inland frontier
(Quezon City, 1980), 86–102; Boomgaard, Between sovereign domain; Elson, The end of
the peasantry, 127; Willem G. Wolters, ‘The development of property rights to land in
the Philippines, 1850–1930’, in Van Meijl and Von Benda-Beckmann, Property rights,
122 ; May, ‘The making’, 299.
43 Boomgaard, Southeast Asia, 249–61.
44 On tenancy see McLennan, The central Luzon plain, 98–102; Elson, The end of the
peasantry, 140–8 ; François Molle, ‘Social and economic patterns of landlord–tenant
relationships in the Chao Phraya delta, Thailand: an historical perspective’, Journal of
Southeast Asian Studies 33:3 (2002), 517–43.
45 Elson, The end of the peasantry, 125–30; Wolters, ‘The development’, 116–27.
46 A similar point, regarding urban land rights, is made by Hernando de Soto in The
mystery of capital: why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else
(New York, 2000).
47 This section is largely based on Peter Boomgaard, ‘Buitenzorg in 1805: the role of
money and credit in a colonial frontier society’, Modern Asian Studies 20 :1 (1986),
33–58, and ‘Geld, krediet, rente en Europeanen in Zuid- en Zuidoost-Azië in de ze-
ventiende eeuw’, in C. A. Davids, W. Fritschy and L. A. van der Valk eds., Kapitaal,
ondernemerschap en beleid: studies over economie en politiek in Nederland, Europa en
Azie¨ van 1500 tot heden (Amsterdam, 1996), 483–510; Elson, The end of the peasantry,
185–212; and Peter Boomgaard, ‘‘‘ Following the debt’’ : credit and debt in Southeast
Asian legal theory and practice, 1400–1800’, in David Henley and Peter Boomgaard
eds., Credit and debt in Indonesia, 860–1930: from peonage to pawnshop, from kongsi to
cooperative (Singapore, 2008), 62–80.
48 Gourou, Les paysans, 379; see also Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Credit and the
colonial state: the reform of capital markets on Java, 1900–1930’, in Henley and
Boomgaard, Credit and debt, 163–80, on pawnshop rates in the Netherlands Indies
around 1900.
49 This analysis is partly inspired by David Henley, ‘Credit and debt in Indonesian his-
tory : An introduction,’ in Henley and Boomgaard, Credit and debt, 1–41.
50 Reid, Southeast Asia, vol. II, 109. This feature seems to be at odds with the above-
mentioned display of wealth, but while the latter was practised mainly by royalty and
nobles, the former applied to merchants and the peasantry. However, in case of war – a
situation in which Southeast Asians often found themselves – even the ruling classes
would resort to hoarding.
51 Anthony Reid, ‘Low population growth and its causes in pre-colonial Southeast Asia’,
in Norman G. Owen ed., Death and disease in Southeast Asia: explorations in social,
medical and demographic history (Singapore, 1987), 42.
52 Boomgaard, Southeast Asia, 91–108.
53 Gourou, Les paysans, 379. Regarding trust in Indonesia, see Alice G. Dewey, Peasant
marketing in Java (New York, 1962); David Henley, Jealousy and justice: the indigenous
roots of colonial rule in Northern Sulawesi (Amsterdam, 2002); Henley, ‘Credit and
debt’.

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54 See for instance Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, ‘Restraints on the development

of merchant ‘capitalism’ in Southeast Asia before c. 1800’, in Anthony Reid ed.,
Southeast Asia in the early modern era: trade, power, and belief (Ithaca and London,
1993), 123–48.
55 M. B. Hooker, A concise legal history of South-East Asia (Oxford, 1978); M. B. Hooker
ed., Laws of Southeast Asia, vol. I: The pre-modern texts (Singapore, 1986).
56 As there were no prisons, there were no jail sentences.
57 Reid, Southeast Asia, vol. I, 137–46; Boomgaard, ‘‘‘ Following the debt’’ ’, 57–8.
58 In the bridewealth areas the son-in-law had often to work for his father-in-law if his
family was not sufficiently rich to pay the going brideprice.

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