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"Sugar, Steam and Steel is about cane sugar and the transformation of an Indonesian island into the 'Oriental Cuba' during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Between the 1830s and the 1880s, sweetener manufacture in Dutch-controlled Java - the crown jewel of the erstwhile Netherlands Indies - drew decisively away in matters of technology and sugar science from other Asian centres of production which had once equaled or, more often, surpassed it in terms of both output and know-how. Along with its larger and altogether more famous Caribbean counterpart, Java's industry came to occupy a position at the apex of the trade in what had become by this date a key global commodity. Along with the beet sugar producers of (post-1870) Imperial Germany, Cuba and Java accounted for a little over one-third of the world's recorded output of the industrially manufactured kind of sugar usually referred to as 'centrifugal'. While Cuba held the position of the world's largest supplier of cane sugar to international commodity markets, 'Dutch' Java emerged from almost nowhere to take second place. The island had begun the nineteenth century as one of a number of centres - in fact, a rather minor one - of pre-industrial sugar production located in tropical and sub-tropical Asia from the Indian sub-continent through to the southernmost islands of Japan. It ended the century not only as by far the largest of Asia's producer-exporters of sugar but also - critically - as the sole example of the sustained and successful large-scale industrialisation of sugar manufacture anywhere in 'the East'. Sugar, Steam and Steel sets out to explain how and why this happened - and what its implications were for the long-term trajectory of the Java sugar industry in the international sugar economy."--Cover description.
Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world's prime resource. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were transformed by a fusion of new and old forces of production, as the international sugar economy incorporated production areas in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Sugar's global economic importance and its intimate relationship with colonialism offer an important context for probing the nature of colonial societies. This book questions some major assumptions about the nexus between sugar production and colonial societies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, especially in the second (post-1800) colonial era.
Yali's Question is the story of a remarkable physical and social creation—Ramu Sugar Limited (RSL), a sugar plantation created in a remote part of Papua New Guinea. As an embodiment of imported industrial production, RSL's smoke-belching, steam-shrieking factory and vast fields of carefully tended sugar cane contrast sharply with the surrounding grassland. RSL not only dominates the landscape, but also shapes those culturally diverse thousands who left their homes to work there. To understand the creation of such a startling place, Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz explore the perspectives of the diverse participants that had a hand in its creation. In examining these views, they also consider those of Yali, a local Papua New Guinean political leader. Significantly, Yali features not only in the story of RSL, but also in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning world history Guns, Germs, and Steel—a history probed through its contrast with RSL's. The authors' disagreement with Diamond stems, not from the generality of his focus and the specificity of theirs, but from a difference in view about how history is made—and from an insistence that those with power be held accountable for affecting history.
Sugar yesterday was what oil is today: a commodity of immense global importance whose tentacles reached deep into politics, society and economy. Indonesia's colonial-era sugar industry is largely forgotten today, except by a small number of regional specialists writing for a specialist audience. During the period 1880-1942 covered by this book, however, the then Netherlands Indies was one of the world's very greatest producer-exporters of the commodity. How it contrived to do so is the story presented in this book. Book jacket.