Lecture | Colonialism and Decolonization seminar
Polanyi in the garden; food, farming and the economization of rural Java
- Date
- Tuesday 17 November 2026
- Time
- Series
- Colonialism en Decolonization Seminar Series 2026-2027
- Location
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- 2.60 (conference room)
Abstract
In this talk I will address the theoretical models used by colonial researchers in the 1920s and 1930s to conceptualise Indonesian farming practices. The studies mostly combined evolutionary notions of agriculture with economic theory as available in the national and international literature of the time, resulting in a what I label a techno-economic model. The model helped to mark out differences between, at one end, developed agriculture, as employed by Western plantation companies and, at the other end, less-developed, and primitive, agriculture of the Indonesian farmers. These studies also contained empirical descriptions of social phenomena that do not sit well with the techno-economic model, as colonial researchers often point out themselves. As first shown by Karl Polanyi in his major work The Great Transformation, additional concepts and theoretical models from the social sciences were available, and offered an alternative explanation to the production, consumption and exchange of goods. This raises the question why these insights did not reach the colonial department of agriculture? What follows is a bit more background on each of these points.
Colonial agricultural science primarily focused on the production of industrial crops for international markets, to advance the profits of Dutch-European plantation companies. In the 1900s the Dutch version of colonial civilizing missions, coined Ethische Politiek (Ethical Politics), created more space for agricultural research on the crops and farming techniques of Indonesian smallholder farmers. Most research on Indonesian farming practices was done by agricultural extension officers, assigned to work in allocated areas of Java and other islands. The Dutch extension officers were mostly trained in Wageningen, where they received a broad agronomic training with additional courses in colonial economics and Indonesian languages. For their fieldwork they often relied on their Indonesian colleagues. Each Dutch extension officer worked with one or more assistants who had been trained at the agricultural school in Bogor.
An interesting example of these studies is the work of a two extension officers, J.J. Ochse and G.J.A. Terra who worked on fruit and vegetable gardens in rural Indonesia. In their work they gave detailed descriptions of the planting patterns, processing, consumption and sharing and marketing of garden crops. In their writing many passages can be found that provide exceptions and openly question the techno-economic model. After the war, Ochse moved to the US where he became professor of tropical botany at the University of Miami. Terra became professor at the University of Indonesia in 1951 in a position that combined the history, ethnology and sociology of agriculture with agricultural economics and extension. Although his chair and also his earlier work acknowledged the importance of sociology, this never really resulted in a departure from the techno-economic model. An influential economist to this model was the Leiden professor in colonial economics (tropische koloniale staathuishoudkunde) J.H. Boeke.
The empirical descriptions of rural communities in Indonesia of the 1930s by Terra and his colleagues show clear traces of the three key principles of non-capitalist societies as laid out by Polanyi: reciprocity, redistribution and householding. Polanyi distilled these principles from the work of anthropologists, most prominently B.K. Malinowski. Malinowski’s work was also well known in Leiden where J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong held two chairs in anthropology. Sjoerd Hofstra worked with Malinowski in London before becoming professor in African ethnology in Leiden in 1947. It seems that social sciences and economics were not ‘on speaking terms’, not in Leiden and not in Wageningen, where anthropology and sociology were first established in 1946 when F.H. van Naerssen became a lector in colonial ethnology and linguistics, followed in 1955 by R.A.J. van Lier (niet-Westerse sociologie). The disciplinary divides of the academic structures of the time offer a somewhat formalistic explanation. Another prominent element in Polanyi’s work is an overall critique on capitalism, the dominant economic model of the colonial policies and post-colonial policies for development aid. Challenging the techno-economic model implied challenging the dominant political view that capitalism was the only option for economic development.
