Tania Murray Li is Professor of Anthropology and Senior Canada Research Chair in Political Economy and Culture in Asia-Pacific at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Malays in Singapore: Culture, Economy, and Ideology and the editor of Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power, and Production.

THE WILL TO IMPROVE

Duke University Press

Contents

Chapter One

This chapter explores two of the contradictions I outlined in the introduction, contradictions deeply embedded in the will to improve. The first is the contradiction between the promotion of capitalist processes and concern to improve the condition of the dispossessed. I examine how this contradiction played out through a series of governmental assemblages, each with its characteristic diagnoses and prescriptions, its preferred way of balancing profits, native welfare, and other "specific finalities." The second is the way that programs of improvement designed to reduce the distance between trustees and deficient subjects actually reinscribe the boundary that positions them on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide. This boundary is the contradictory foundation that makes colonial and contemporary improvement programs thinkable, anxious and doggedly persistent. Yet it is not self-evident. It is produced through situated practices that can be critically explored.

My examination in this chapter takes the form of a history of government, teasing out the problems that various authorities sought to address, the techniques they deployed, their contradictions, and their effects. It is an overview, covering in schematic form a period of two centuries (1800-2000), with particular emphasis on the island of Java, the focus of colonial attention before the Netherlands East Indies Empire was "rounded out" in the period 1900-1910. Subsequent chapters, focused on the highlands of Sulawesi, examine governmental programs of the colonial and contemporary periods at much closer range.

Although I have arranged the parts of the chapter in chronological order, this is not a narrative of governmentality rising. It is not the case that late colonial rule overcame the racism and despotism of earlier regimes, nor did independence bring all citizens into the nation on an equal basis. The governmental assemblage that took shape on Java early in the nineteenth century was far more optimistic about the capacity of Indonesians to develop their own capacities through a "normal" process of self-improvement than the assemblage that emerged under Suharto in the New Order, in which the boundary separating trustees from those they would know and improve was sharp indeed. Arguments about the racial superiority of Europeans, relatively inchoate for more than two centuries while the Netherlands East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) competed with other parties for a share and eventual monopoly of trade in the archipelago, became much more pronounced after 1800 when the Dutch crown assumed sovereignty. They were entrenched in separate legal systems and reached their peak under the ethical policy (1905-30), precisely the moment when the white man's burden of improving Native lives was most clearly enunciated. As I will show, this was also the period when the "otherness" of the Natives, their ineffable difference, was conceptually elaborated, empirically investigated, and made the basis for policies aimed to restore "tradition" and harmonious, Asiatic village life.

THE RIGHT TO RULE

As far as possible, the voc ruled indirectly. It reinforced the powers of local rulers so that they could extract more profits for themselves, and for the company, by intensifying existing systems of appanages, tax farms, forced labor, usury, and trading monopolies. In Java, it used Chinese as agents in its collection system. Its objectives were not governmental-it did not intervene in native lives in order to improve them or make them more secure. It reserved discipline for the population of the territory it ruled directly-a minute proportion of the territory that later became the Netherlands East Indies. Even then, it asserted detailed control only when this was necessary to maximize profits. The predominance of the VOC's extractive orientation is evident from its accounts. It paid stockholders an average of 18 percent per year for two hundred years (1602-1800), a return so high the company was eventually bankrupt.

The bankruptcy of the voc obliged the Dutch crown to assume direct responsibility for the Indies in 1800. Thereafter, Dutch authorities became more deeply involved in the lives of subject populations in some parts of the archipelago-namely Java, parts of Sumatra, and the northern tip of Sulawesi. Over much of the rest of the archipelago, Dutch rule remained nominal, taking the form of treaties and contracts with local rulers to protect Dutch commercial interests. Only in 1900-1910 did the Dutch establish territorial control over the entire archipelago by the extension of existing contracts in some areas, and direct military action in others.

The reasons for the territorial extension and intensification of Dutch rule around 1900 are the subject of debate. Although some historians have argued that the Dutch were obliged to consolidate their hold over territory to ward o competing colonial powers, others argue that the spheres of influence of Britain, France and the United States were stable by 1900, and Dutch interests were sufficiently protected by the British as arbiter mundi. The argument that commercial motives prompted intensification is persuasive for some parts of the archipelago but not others. Many expansionary ventures "made little sense in terms of economic profitability" and some were "financially disastrous." Costs could easily outrun returns. State-owned mines and plantations plus port duties added important sources of revenue, but European corporations paid little tax. Military ventures could be ruinously expensive, the prolonged Aceh War (1873-1903) a case in point.

Decisions about territorial expansion, argues Benedict Anderson, "were made in Batavia rather than The Hague, and for local raison d'etat." What were these reasons? By the end of the nineteenth century, Robert Elson observes, the "right to rule was no longer a function of divine anointing, or possession of the palace or regalia, but rather of secular efficiency, formalized order, and getting things done." Local rulers had always been awkward partners for the Dutch, routinely despised, critiqued, and sometimes unseated for their despotic ways and personal failings. What changed around 1900 was not the conduct of local rulers, but the practices and assumptions of the Dutch. As Dutch emphasis on regulation, enumeration, and bureaucratic compliance increased, so did the range of fronts upon which local rulers were found deficient. Concerns for the well-being of the colonized population, popular fare in the Netherlands, and "bureaucratic concerns about Dutch prestige and law and order" were conjoined in critique of the misdeeds and defiance of local rulers. Colonial archives reveal "the fear of diminishing the prestige of the colonial government, and need to maintain vigorous Dutch authority." Maintaining that prestige and authority came to require a set of practices different from those that had previously prevailed.

Security, improvement, and systematic administration were key, by the late nineteenth century, to how the legitimacy of government and the right to rule were defined. Officials justified military action against the population in these terms. Violence was the prerequisite to welfare. Sovereignty over territory and a concern with the condition of the population emerged together in the colonial situation, and remained entwined there as the focus shifted to the question of how to achieve not one dogmatic goal but a "plurality of specific aims," a "whole series of specific finalities," the problematic of governmentality exposed by Foucault.

GOVERNING WITH ECONOMY

In the areas where secure control over territory was achieved early in the nineteenth century, the question of how to govern, and to what ends, soon followed. The approach of Sir Stamford Raffles, appointed to rule Java during a brief interregnum when control of the colony passed to the British (1812-16), was informed by liberal ideas about individual rights and freedoms, the self-regulating character of markets, and the capacity of the native population to bring about its own improvement once the necessary conditions had been set. Raffles's associate William Colebrooke wrote that the people of Java

possess in aggregate as large a share of natural intelligence and acuteness, of patriotism and enthusiasm, as will be found among the lower orders of any country; & it goes for to confirm the universal doctrine that Mankind in the same circumstances is always the same.... Java might in 30 years or less be elevated into a respectable & eminent free state ... [if Java was established] under the protection of England 'till by introduction of Arts and Education the people might be fitted to govern themselves.

In addition to freeing the peasantry from what he saw as excessive control and exploitation by Native elites, Raffles sought to improve the peasants' capacity to consume the products of British industry, routinize administration, and stabilize revenue. He thought these diverse ends could be achieved through a single strategy: creating the conditions for free trade and free agrarian production. Farmers would prosper simply by following their natural interest. The state would obtain its revenue directly from independent cultivators and ensure it was collected systematically according to law, thus eliminating extortion by local elites. All these changes could be achieved, moreover, merely by adjusting the social forces that were already present. A study of land tenure commissioned by Raffles found, conveniently enough, that all the land on Java was previously the property of the indigenous rulers, from whom it had passed into the hands of the successor sovereign power, namely the British crown. Thus the crown, as landlord, could derive its revenue as rent. Rent would not be alien to Java's peasants, already familiar with concepts of individual land tenure. The intermediaries known as bekel, currently operating as agents of a personalized and hierarchical appanage system, could serve as village Headmen, tasked with collecting rents and taxes on behalf of the landlord state.

Although Raffles presented his policies as the mere confirmation and systematization of existing tradition, they proved difficult to implement with the very limited administrative apparatus at Raffles's disposal. In the areas where his reforms were implemented, they did not produce the expected results because they "assumed a social structure that did not in fact exist." Peasants were indeed tied into personalized extractive systems that did not disappear. Yet Raffles was not simply guilty of bad research. As with other programmers, his knowledge was shaped by the interventions he envisaged, and by the need to represent the domain to be governed as "an intelligible field with specifiable limits and particular characteristics." The model was India, where the British sovereign claimed the position of superlandlord, and administration was conducted through village Headmen. Thus the historian Furnivall found it "difficult ... to resist the suggestion that in the material collected for this enquiry Raffles found what he wanted, and expected." Other critics, Furnivall observes, put the point more strongly, arguing that "Raffles discovered in Java the economic system which the British had invented for Bengal."

Rectifying the confusion, protest, and impoverishment created by Raffles's new system of land rents was one of the tasks facing the Dutch when the colony was returned to their control. Johannes van den Bosch, assigned to the Indies in the role of Governor General in 1830, found Java's peasants in rebellion, and the colonial state weak. The Netherlands' economy was stagnant, and the costs of running the Indies empire exceeded revenues. Unlike Britain, the Netherlands had no industrial manufactures to export and was interested in the Indies principally as a locus for production from which revenues could be obtained. Van den Bosch's task was to make the Indies both profitable and secure. To this end, he instituted the Cultuurstelsel (Culture System or Cultivation System) in Java and in Minahasa (the northern tip of Sulawesi), intervening to organize production as well as monopolize trade in key products: sugar in the lowlands and coffee in the hills. Working through "traditional" authorities and village units reconfigured for the purpose, the Culture System conscripted land and labor from around 70 percent of Java's households, supplying a third of the Netherlands' state revenue by the 1850s. In Minahasa, colonial authorities laid out new villages and roads and subjected the population to an "unprecedented level of colonial surveillance and control."

Successful as it was for the Netherlands in economic terms, critics at the time and subsequently have regarded the Culture System as a throwback to the coercive tactics of the VOC, a system out of step with the rising tide of liberal thinking emphasizing market principles. Based on a careful study of Van den Bosch's economic ideas, however, Albert Schrauwers argues that Van den Bosch shared many of Raffles's liberal premises. He too sought to govern through existing social forces, merely adjusting them to produce the desired results. His diagnosis, however, was different. He did not share Raffles's faith that market forces, set free, would be sufficient to reform Native conduct. He recognized that capitalism was contradictory. His analysis of rural poverty in the Netherlands led him to identify a problem-lack of a habit of industriousness-that could not be addressed through market forces alone. Rural paupers lacked industry, he argued, because any surplus they produced was quickly extracted from them by the owners of capital. Wage workers, similarly, were disciplined not by morality but by their lack of access to the means of production. They were wage slaves, not free men and women contracting to sell their labor as a matter of choice. From his analysis, a course of action followed. Rather than seek to displace capitalism, which he regarded as legitimate, or to eliminate poverty, which he regarded as an inevitable feature of a class society, he sought to use disciplinary means to create habits of industriousness, substituting for the incentives the "self-regulating" market failed to supply. His goal was to make the poor more productive, and less threatening to the state.

For the Netherlands, Van den Bosch devised a system of agricultural colonies, the first of which opened in 1818. These were parapenal institutions tasked with instilling discipline in the criminalized poor. Inmates were sorted into categories and permitted progressively more freedoms as their behavior conformed. Eventually, they were expected to graduate to become independent farmers. In Java, Van den Bosch understood the task of government in similar terms: how to discipline underproductive farmers to produce marketable surpluses, which would not only provide for their own limited needs, but also support the edifice of the state and capitalist profit. Since the system of detailed supervision in parapenal colonies he devised for the Netherlands could not be extended to the Indies population at large, discipline must be supplied by other means. Farmers should be obliged to pay rent for the use of land Raffles had conveniently declared the property of the sovereign authority, then British, now Dutch. Rent would take the form of agricultural commodities produced under a regulated system. Payment would be the collective responsibility of village communities, enforced through the "traditional" authority of Native elites. This authority would be strengthened by new administrative techniques, including the demarcation of village boundaries and the registration of populations to prevent flight. Thus emerged the blend of collective and hierarchical features that later came to be regarded as "traditional" village Java.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE WILL TO IMPROVEby TANIA MURRAY LI Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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