1997 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 586-615
This article portrays peasant societies situated at the international border in Western Borneo during rubber booms in the 1930s and the 1950s. The focus of the discussion is a historical process of exclusion of peasants from the state-led commodity production system; through their manipulative strategies and resilience, locals engaged in cross-border rubber smuggling and stuck to non-capitalist swidden rice cultivation. The nature of political and economic interaction among Malay peasants, Chinese merchants, and the state power in the region, both colonial and post-colonial, is also examined. By focusing on the border region which had been geo-politically divided by conflicting powers, i.e., Sarawak (subsequently the British Crown Colony) and Western Dutch Borneo (subsequently West Kalimantan, the Republic of Indonesia), the unit of analysis inevitably goes well beyond a single community, ethnic group or state. Trans-national interaction and the regional political economy are thus given due attention. The author examines the conventional anthropological analyses on Bornean societies which tend to have overvalued the social units and therefore undervalued the interconnectedness of the historical contingency of the units. The analysis starts with the assessment of the economic condition of Sarawak at the turn of the century under the second Rajah of Sarawak, Charles Brooke, who did not support the introduction of plantation-based rubber production. For that reason, Sarawak's participation in rubber production was much delayed compared with other rubber producing colonies in Southeast Asia. Then the agrarian condition of Lundu District in Southwestern Sarawak in the wake of world-wide expansion of rubber production in the 1920s is discussed. The historical process of local economy being transformed from gambier, pepper, and coconut to rubber production is reconstructed based on archival materials. The participation of Sarawak and Dutch Borneo in the International Rubber Agreement of 1934 greatly changed the agricultural landscape of Lundu District. The objective of the Agreement was to limit the amount of both rubber production and exports to stabilize rubber prices in the international market. Both governments prohibited new rubber planting and introduced strict control of marketed rubber by the coupon system. In response, rubber smueggline flourished between Sambas in Western Dutch Borneo and Lundu in Sarawak. Rubber smuggling to Sarawak territory was further given a boost in the 1950s by the economic chaos of newly independent Indonesia. The next section is on the state formation and the establishment of the national boundary in the studied region. The introduction of taxation systems and the restriction of the movement of locals as well as commodities across the border are of particular relevance. In Sarawak, cultivated rubber sheets became the most important dutiable commodity following the decline in jungle produce and therefore the crucial source of state income. The final section of the article presents an ethnographic case study of peasant villages situated on the Sarawak side of the border. The coastal communities which previously supplied a labor force to local coconut plantations functioned as smuggling points receiving rubber sheets from Western Borneo. With the decline of the coconut plantation industry, the Malays there began to turn on swidden rice cultivation and persistently stayed away from production of commercial crops such as rubber even during the boom periods. Their oscillating turn to self-sufficiency does not fit the theoretical premise in the study of macro-economic history which tends to presuppose linear capitalist penetration and to describe local peasants as a passive periphery in the modern world system.
