Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1979

Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1985 Book. Good. Hardcover. 1st Edition. English text; Hardcover (with dust jacket); 16.4 x 24.1 cm; 0.634 kg; 244 pages, including some black and white images.; Used with signs of wear on the dust jacket and on the interior. The dust jacket is now protected with a clearcover. Very good copy overall.; Over the last century, North Sumatra has been the site of one of the more intensive and successful pursuits of foreign agricultural enterprise in the Third World and of overt, sometimes violent, confrontation between capital and labor. This fascinating ethnographic history by Ann Laura Stoler analyses how popular resistance actively molded both the form of this colonial expansion and the social, economic, and political experience of the Javanese labouring communities on Sumatra's plantation borders. Stoler considers the nature and intensity of labor protest at critical moments of the estate industry's development: from the early pioneering years to the Great Depression, through the wartime Japanese occupation, the post-independence years, and the period since the 1965 coup d'etat. She shows how labor policies impinged on domestic organization, sexual alliances, and community ties, and how the structuring of gender and ethnic conflicts has been embedded in company efforts to enforce, and workers efforts to resist, the industry's hold on the laborers lives. Combining fieldwork and archival research, Stoler places the women and men of global perspective. She argues that the persistence of the part-proletarian, part-peasant status of these Javanese laborers is both a product of the industry's domination and a mode of resistance to it, evident in plantations systems throughout the world..