Colonialism and Its Racial Imprint

To meet the huge demand for a workforce in the plantation belt that arose on Sumatra’s East Coast, coolies were initially recruited from Malaya and later from China and Java. They were held captive by a labour contract subjecting them to penal sanctions. An official but undisclosed report documented a wide range of atrocities to discipline workers found ‘slothful’ or resisting. My monograph, Taming the Coolie Beast (1989), featured this report, but was challenged by some reviewers as biased and moralistic. In a riposte, I argued that ‘the coolie scandal’ should be contextualized in the wider setting of colonial rule and its objectives. Resistance to the forced production of agrarian commodities led colonial wisdom to blame the peasantry of indolence. A more polished veneer of this myth suggested that the indigenous population was driven by social rather than economic needs. Institutionalized in legislation, the racist imprint of colonialism insisted on fixing a colour bar. The so-called Dutch ‘ethical policy’ of the early twentieth century promised welfare for the people, referred to as ‘natives’ in discriminatory colonial jargon, but was not implemented.