Chinese Indentured Labour in the Dutch East Indies, 1880–1942: Tin, Tobacco, Timber, and the Penal Sanction

628 Pages·2022·6.267 MB·English

by  Gregor Benton

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY SERIES
Chinese Indentured Labour
in the Dutch East Indies,
1880–1942
Tin, Tobacco, Timber, and the
Penal Sanction
Gregor Benton
Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series
Series Editors
Akira Iriye
Harvard University
Cambridge, USA
Rana Mitter
Department of History
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK
This distinguished series seeks to develop scholarship on the transnational
connections of societies and peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies; provide a forum in which work on transnational history from dif-
ferent periods, subjects, and regions of the world can be brought together
in fruitful connection; and explore the theoretical and methodological
links between transnational and other related approaches such as compara-
tive history and world history.
Editorial board:
Thomas Bender, University Professor of the Humanities, Professor of
History, and Director of the International Center for Advanced Studies,
New York University
Jane Carruthers, Professor of History, University of South Africa
Mariano Plotkin, Professor, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero,
Buenos Aires, and member of the National Council of Scientific and
Technological Research, Argentina
Pierre-Yves Saunier, Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, France
Ian Tyrrell, Professor of History, University of New South Wales
Gregor Benton
Chinese Indentured
Labour in the Dutch
East Indies,
1880–1942
Tin, Tobacco, Timber, and the Penal Sanction
Gregor Benton
Cardiff, UK
ISSN 2634-6273 ISSN 2634-6281 (electronic)
Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series
ISBN 978-3-031-05023-7 ISBN 978-3-031-05024-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05024-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Praise for Chinese Indentured Labour in the Dutch
East Indies, 1880–1942
“Gregor Benton is a veteran researcher and a prolific author on Chinese revolu-
tionary history, Chinese migration, and overseas settlement. In this rich and widely
ranging study, he explores Chinese labour migration to Sumatra under Dutch rule,
the iniquities of the Dutch recruitment system, and the penal sanction with which
Dutch indenture became synonymous. He also offers profound reflections on the
contrasts between Chinese labour indenture and its Indian and Javanese equiva-
lents. Benton proposes a novel and highly innovative explanation of the special
features of Chinese labour migration and identifies its social, cultural, and eco-
nomic causes in China’s modern crisis and international weakness. The study ben-
efits from its author’s virtuoso linguistic skills and the breadth of his knowledge of
Chinese society and politics.”
—Hong Liu, Tan Lark Sye Chair Professor of Public
Policy and Global Affairs, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
“Gregor Benton has written a most impressive work, a highly original contribution
to the study of the Chinese labour diaspora. His pioneering study of Chinese ‘coo-
lies’ (Huagong) and their descendants in the late- colonial Dutch East Indies builds
on Chinese, Dutch, and other sources, and offers a convincing blend of fine
description and careful analysis.”
—Marcel van der Linden, International Institute
of Social History, The Netherlands
“This book is much more than a beautifully written social history of Chinese
indentured labour in the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. It is a thoughtful, rigorous, and comparative analysis of how and why
Chinese differed from Indian and Javanese indenture. Based on sources in several
languages, this fascinating study has much contemporary relevance and makes an
invaluable contribution to Chinese diaspora studies, indenture studies, and the
interdisciplinary field of migration studies.”
—Min Zhou, Distinguished Professor, University
of California, Los Angeles, USA
“Finally, a pioneering study of Chinese labour migration and a cohesive narrative
of colonial indenture in comparative perspective. Painstakingly researched and
using an impressive array of Chinese, English, and Dutch sources, this study pro-
vides a fresh look at the complex multi-layered phenomenon of unfree labour. This
is a book that captures the horrors of this dehumanising form of labour diaspora
so well that we see it for what it really was—indenture slavery.”
—Edmund Terence Gomez, Professor Emeritus
of Political Economy, University of Malaya
A
cknowledgements
I wrote this book as my contribution to a collective research project on
indentured Chinese labour in Asia and the Pacific in the early twentieth
century. The project was run from the School of Humanities and Social
Inquiry in the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the
University of Wollongong, Australia, by Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie,
and was funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC DP180100695).
Julia and Claire were ideal and energetic partners in our collaborative
effort, which they initiated and led. I was aided in organising my part of
the study by them and by colleagues in the School of History, Archaeology
and Religion at Cardiff University, where I am an Emeritus Professor. I am
grateful to Leila Hughes, Emma Fisher, Ann-Marie Morgan, David
Watkinson, and Shaun Tougher for helping to administer my travel and
funding. I would like to thank all these people, in New and old South
Wales, for their help, support, tolerance, and kindness. In the course of my
research, I visited libraries, museums, and archives in Leiden, Hong Kong,
Nanjing, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Miri, Jakarta, Belitung, and Bangka
and historic sites in Bangka-Belitung. I would especially like to mention
Bangka’s Tin Museum in Pangkal Pinang and Belitung’s Tanjung Pandan
Museum. In all these places, I owe a great debt of gratitude to staff and
local people, who received me with patience and goodwill. At Palgrave
Macmillan, Tikoji Rao Mega Rao coordinated the book’s publication and
Sam Stocker looked after its editing, following the departure of Meagan
Simpson, my initial contact at Palgrave Macmillan. Akira Iriye and Rana
Mitter, by agreeing to host the book in their Transnational History series,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
gave me an additional stimulus to persevere with the project and organised
a very helpful review of the manuscript, as well as helping me to solve vari-
ous practical problems. Again, I am deeply grateful to all these people. At
Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, my friends Liu Hong
and Zhang Huimei were in many ways an inspiration for the book, which
followed on naturally from the research that the three of us did in the
mid- 2010s on qiaopi (migrants’ remittances), leading to conferences,
workshops, and several books, including Dear China, and articles. Hong
and Huimei not only procured much of the archival material on which
parts of this book (in particular in Ch. 5) depend but helped by producing
the map that graces its front matter.
Others helped with scholarly advice and guidance, technical assistance,
and other forms of material or spiritual support. They include, in alpha-
betical order, Sunlie Thomas Alexander (Bangka-Belitung), Rebecca Urai
Ayan (Sarawak), Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Daniel Fanxi Benton, Jan Breman,
Sebastian Budgen, Feng Chongyi, Margo Groenewoud (Curaçao), Danny
Hayward, Gregory Jany, Daniel Wan Jonathan, Kaan Kangal, Paul Key,
Arun Kumar, Toby Lincoln, Marcel van der Linden, Fiona Middlebrook,
Budiman Minasny, Josie Pollentine, Christopher Reinhart (Jakarta),
Lomarsh Roopnarine, Shen Yuanfang, Willie Xue (Bangka-Belitung),
Kevin Yang, and Taomo Zhou. To all of them, my heartfelt thanks.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
This detail of Liu Yi in close-up
shows that he is wearing
spectacles, suggesting that he was
not necessarily an ordinary miner
but might have been an educated
man, perhaps one of the Chinese
teachers who turned up on
Bangka at around this time
The arrest of the rebel miners’ leader Liu Yi on Bangka, 1900