A Great Book But Only Including European Perspectives
4 stars
This is an absolutely devastating takedown of Dutch rule in Indonesia, focusing in on first the Dutch East India Company's and then the Dutch government's management of coffee production on Java. Breman details how a regime that cared only about output with no connection to the laborers that produced it led to horrific working and living conditions that created only hardship for the local population. He also shows how the economic figures often used to put a positive spin on this colonial enterprise are due to the substitution of unaccounted for local production for cheap, likely inferior imports. The book can be a bit repetitive (likely to facilitate academics zeroing in on a particular phenomenon), and the complete absence of any local source material or even more current oral histories is a glaring hole in this volume. While that is almost certainly hard to procure, its absence makes this book …
This is an absolutely devastating takedown of Dutch rule in Indonesia, focusing in on first the Dutch East India Company's and then the Dutch government's management of coffee production on Java. Breman details how a regime that cared only about output with no connection to the laborers that produced it led to horrific working and living conditions that created only hardship for the local population. He also shows how the economic figures often used to put a positive spin on this colonial enterprise are due to the substitution of unaccounted for local production for cheap, likely inferior imports. The book can be a bit repetitive (likely to facilitate academics zeroing in on a particular phenomenon), and the complete absence of any local source material or even more current oral histories is a glaring hole in this volume. While that is almost certainly hard to procure, its absence makes this book great but still in need of more work to provide a truly holistic perspective. Highly recommend