Credit and debt are practical concerns of all times and places. They are also increasingly important topics in economic history and the social sciences, from Marcel Mauss and the anthropology of the gift to the urgent quest for understanding of today's global credit crunch. This volume brings together eight essays on credit and debt in the history of Indonesia, where for centuries debt and debt bondage played central roles in the organization of society, and where efforts to combat 'usury' and free peasants from indebtedness were central to the ethical and nationalist movements of the late colonial period. Topics range from the inscriptions of ninth-century Java to the first global financial crisis in 1930, and from Islamic laws against the charging of interest to the role of Chinese temples and Dutch church charities as credit providers. The history of credit and debt in Indonesia is examined from a wide variety of perspectives - legal, institutional, and cultural as well as economic. Attention is paid to parallels and contrasts with more recent developments, including the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and Indonesia's rise to fame as a pioneer of the current global microfinance revolution.

The last twenty years have seen a transformation in the availability and use of credit among the less prosperous strata of Southeast Asian societies. Drawing on experiences from across the whole region, this book explores this important development, focusing especially on the modern or formal part of the microfinance sector.

The great majority of the population in colonial and postcolonial India lived in the countryside and were poor. Many were unable to find gainful work outside agriculture and remained dependent on a livelihood that provided only subsistence, and a precarious one. Seeking the roots of persistent poverty, Maanik Nath finds that the pervasive high cost and shortage of capital affected the peasant's ability to invest in land. The productivity of land, as a result, remained small and changed little. Bridging economic theory and historical evidence, Capital Shortage shows that climate, law, policy design, and interactions between these factors, perpetuated a stubborn cycle of low investment and widespread deprivation over several decades. These findings can be tested against credit and development in preceding and succeeding periods as well as positioned in comparative global context.

European markets almost exclusively relied on Caribbean sugar produced by slave labor until abolitionist campaigns began around 1800. Thereafter, importing Asian sugar and transferring plantation production to Asia became a serious option for the Western world. In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it over time. Although initial attempts by British planters in India failed, the Dutch colonial administration was far more successful in Java, where it introduced in 1830 a system of forced cultivation that tied local peasant production to industrial manufacturing. A century later, India adopted the Java model in combination with farmers' cooperatives rather than employing coercive measures. Cooperatives did not prevent industrial sugar production from exploiting small farmers and cane cutters, however, and Bosma finds that much of modern sugar production in Asia resembles the abuses of labor by the old plantation systems of the Caribbean.

Based on new datasets, this book presents an economic history of Indonesia. It analyses the causes of stagnation of growth during the colonial and independence period, making use of new theoretical insights from institutional economics and new growth theory. The book looks at the major themes of Indonesian history: colonial exploitation and the successes and limitations of the post 1900 welfare policies, the price of instability after 1945, and the economic miracle after 1967. The book not only discusses economic change and development – or the lack thereof – but also the institutional and socio-political structures that were behind these changes. It also presents a lot of new data on the changing welfare of the Indonesian population, on income distribution, and on the functioning of markets for rice, credit and labour. Concluding with a discussion on whether the poor profited from the economic changes, this book is a useful contribution to Southeast Asian Studies and International Economics.

Dutch Commerce and Chinese Merchants in Java describes the vanished commercial world of colonial Java. Alexander Claver shows the challenges of a demanding business environment by highlighting trade and finance mechanisms, and the relationships between the participants involved.

Answering the calls made to overcome methodological nationalism, this volume is the first examination of the links between corruption and imperial rule in the modern world. It does so through a set of original studies that examine the multi-layered nature of corruption in four different empires (Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and France) and their possessions in Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. It offers a key read for scholars interested in the fields of corruption, colonialism/empire and global history. The chapters ‘Introduction: Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era: Towards a Global Perspective’, ‘“Corrupt and rapacious”: Colonial Spanish-American past through the eyes of early nineteenth century contemporaries. A contribution from the history of emotions’, and ‘Colonial Normativity? Corruption in the Dutch-Indonesian Relationship in the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries’ are Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600–1900 presents a new perspective on the uses of justice between 1600 and 1900 and confronts prevailing Eurocentric historiography in its examination of how people of this period made use of the law. Between 1600 and 1900 the towns in Western Europe, the Kingdoms in Eastern Europe, the Empires in Asia and the Colonial States in Asia and the Americas were all characterised by a plurality of legal orders resulting from interactions and negotiations between states, institutions, and people with different backgrounds. Through exploring how justice is used within these different areas of the world, this book offers a broad global perspective, but it also adopts a fresh approach through shifting attention away from states and onto how ordinary people lived with and made use of this ‘legal pluralism’. Containing a wealth of extensively contextualised case studies and contributing to debates on socio-legal history, processes of state formation from below, access to justice, and legal pluralism, The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600–1900 questions to what degree top-down imposed formal institutions were used and how, and to what degree, bottom-up crafted legal systems were crucial in allowing transactions to happen. It is ideal for students and scholars of early modern justice, crime and legal history.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays offers a window onto the overseas Indian and Chinese communities in Asia. Contributors discuss the interactive role of the cultural and religious ‘other’, the diasporic absorption of local beliefs and customs, and the practical business networks and operational mechanisms unique to these communities. Growing out of an international workshop organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong, this volume explores material, cultural and imaginative features of the immigrant communities and brings together these two important communities within a comparative framework.