オランダ植民地支配と農作業暦 : 一八二〇年代のプリアンガン地方の場合

Abstract

This essay examines the change in the traditional agricultural calendar effected by Dutch rule over Priangan colonial society. At the time that Priangan society came under the Dutch East India Company (VOC)'s rule in 1677, it subsisted on the slash-and-burn method of cultivation. The VOC introduced the cultivation of coffee in the early eighteenth century, and Priangan soon became a profitable coffee-producing colony for the VOC. However, in the initial period the VOC government in Batavia could exercise no control over the production process, in which coffee was cultivated in the same way as traditional pepper cultivation. In the course of the eighteenth century, the VOC was gradually able to gain control over the coffee-production process by making use of irrigated wet-rice fields established by native chiefs using VOC funds. Coffee cultivations was promoted among the people in exchange for the use of fields or irrigation facilities such as canals, which allowed far greater production stability and higher crop yields than was possible using the traditional slash-and-burn method. The mobilization of cultivators on irrigated fields provided the government with a steady labour supply without seasonal shortages. In the Priangan area, well-irrigated fields allowed wet-rice cultivation to start anytime during the year, freeing such cultivation from dependence on the vagaries of the monsoon. However, the most crucial and labour-intensive period in slash-and-burn cultivation coincided with that of coffee cultivation at the end of the dry and beginning of the rainy season. Through the establishment and promotion of the irrigated-fields method of cultivation, the VOC government and its colonial dependants came to a accord in matters of cultivation. As a result of this accord, Priangan local society abandoned its traditional agricultural calendar and began to depend on the Dutch colonial imposition.