Rubber, rice, race, and space: A socio-ecological approach to the remaking of agricultural space in East Sumatra.

摘要

Between 1863 and 1940, Dutch colonial administrators oversaw the transformation of Sumatra’s east coast from subsistence cultivation to large-scale rubber production, supplying half the world’s rubber by 1940. Through the course of this transformation, European planters experimented with a variety of cultivars in an attempt to extract greater profits and neutralize native resistance. Using the analytical tools of political and cultural ecology, this paper looks at the history of agrarian change in East Sumatra during the Dutch colonial period. Traditional agricultural histories and more modern research tend to describe, explain, and critique agrarian change from within established socio-economic narratives. Such research sees issues of land tenure, access, racism, resource exploitation, and neoliberalism as catalysts (or culprits) in agrarian change. This paper seeks to emphasize the significant role cultivar ecology plays in the transformation of socio-agricultural space. In so doing, it explores how interested parties have used cultivar selection as a form of social control, and demonstrates the need to view agrarian change as a long-term succession of commodities, rather than a single transformative moment.