Narratives of Colonialism: Sugar, Java, and the Dutch: In Horizons in Post-Colonial Studies

The commercial production of cane sugar in Java dated from the first half of the seventeenth century. It took place there until the early nineteenth century under the patronage of the Dutch East India Company and its successors. The actual business of manufacture, largely carried on by Chinese settlers, was working in rather varied relationships with Javanese workers and 'peasant' farmers. During the mid-nineteenth century decades, however, the industry was transformed. It became the first of its kind in Asia successfully to adopt the panoply ofsteam, steel and chemistry which formed the technological basis of industrialised sugar manufacture.