1

INTRODUCTION
Four Key Exports and the Trade Cycle
of Southeast Asia
Anthony Reid

Exports as an Economic Indicator

If research on Southeast Asian economic history is still in its infancy, our knowledge
of the period before 1800 is hardly more than embryonic. The tendency is still wide-
spread to assume that little changed in the region until the advent of colonial
capitalism in the nineteenth century, and that most Southeast Asians before this
lived by growing their own food crops on a subsistence basis. Such assumptions are
based on little more than absence of information. The reality, as this volume aims to
demonstrate, was of constant changes frequently brought about by interaction with
the international economy.
The colonial states generated abundant statistics from the late nineteenth century
onwards, and their indices tended to rise dramatically from a very low base, partly
because colonial control of the economy itself expanded. By contrast, all data avail-
able for earlier periods has appeared fragmentary and unhelpful. Not even the
strongest of Southeast Asian pre-colonial states maintained substantial statistical
records. Where indigenous economic data have survived they are in the form of
contracts and tax assessments at the local level (notably in Vietnam and Burma),
extremely difficult to aggregate meaningfully. On the other hand, the much more
abundant European statistics available after 1500 have been studied systematically
for what they tell us about Europe and its progress towards capitalism (e.g. Chaunu
1960; Chaudhuri 1965; Glamann 1981; Wake 1979) more frequently than as windows
on Southeast Asia. Despite the abundance of studies of the spice trade, in particular,
it is extremely rare to find clove, nutmeg, pepper, benzoin, sandalwood and so forth
referred to as Southeast Asian "exports" at all in the literature of the early modem period.
Yet Southeast Asia, more particularly its two vast Archipelagoes and accompany-
ing (Malayan) Peninsula, is a region uniquely suitable to maritime activity, in which
exports of forest and tropical produce and imports of manufactures and metals have

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 N

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 INTRODUCTION 3

played a major role for at least two thousand years. The shallow seas of the Sunda
shelf were favoured by regular monsoonal winds and abundant fi sheries as training-
grounds for mariners. Navigable rivers gave access to ti1nber highly appropriate for
boat-building. Above all, Southeast Asia lay athwart the major maritime route of
Asia, so that most of the exchanges between China, Japan, India and West Asia took
place there. The most ancient towns we know in the region are maritime trading
centres, where Chinese and Indian coins, Chinese and Vietnan1ese bronze artefacts,
Indi an statuary and Chinese, Vietnamese and Tha i cera1nics all provide the
archaeologist with evidence of a vigorous pattern of international trade. The relative
ease of communication gave rise to an economic pattern of local as well as long-
distance interdependence, where people "are constrained to keep up a constant
intercourse with one another, the one supplying what the other needs," as one of the
earliest French visitors noted (Pyrard 1612, cited Reid 1988: 6). Up landers exchanged
exportable forest products for the fish, salt and imports of the coast; inhabitants of
small islands imported most of their staple grains by sea.
The scale of exports or imports, if it can be established, will therefore provide as
helpful an indication of economic changes in this region as in any part of the world.
Although most of the local trade in foodstuffs and other essentials is of course lost
to history, we are fortunate that some of Southeast Asia's exports were of sufficient
interest to Europeans that they have generated some useable data as far back as the
fourteenth century. The arrival of spice-bearing galleys in such Mediterranean ports
as Venice and Genoa was s ufficiently exciting to be noticed by medieval diarists
and commercial agents at that early stage. Later the monopoly licences to trade in
the east, which the Portuguese estado da India and the Dutch and English East
India Companies obtained from their respective goven1ments, ensured that there was
a degree of centralised reporting of shipments from Asia to Europe. Dutch records
are particularly admirable for every aspect ofAsian n1aritime trade in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, and scholars are beginning to mine the1n systematically
for the light they can shed on the scale of Asian as well as European trade. The
picture becomes more difficult to draw at the end of the eighteenth century as the
Dutch East India Company (VOC) loses its dominance in Southeast Asian co1n-
merce, and before the rise of Singapore after 1819 again provides useful tin1e series
of trade through that port.
It is the aim of this monog raph to bring together what is knowable at this stage
about the scale of exports of four important Southeast Asian export crops, in the
belief that this is the best means available to trace in quantitative tem1s the changes
in the Southeast Asian econo1nies before more sophi sticated measures becon1e
possible in the middle or late nineteenth century. A secondary aim is to show the
importance of external trade in the life of Southeast Asia before colonialisn1, and
enable some comparisons to be made with other parts of the world in this regard.
Finally, we have continued to trace the exports of these four crops down to the

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 MAP2 ~

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 INTRODUCTION 5

present, even though modern data is relatively readily available, because the com-
plete histories of these four trade commodities in Southeast Asia are in themselves
fascinating, and have not previously been set out.

Why These Four Commodities?

In today's Southeast Asia the four export commodities traced in this volume have
become minor or even insignificant. Manufactures, particularly textiles and elec-
tronics, have recently become dominant. Even among the raw materials which
dominated Southeast Asia 's export performance until the past decade, oil, rubber,
palm-oil and timber have been the dominant factors for the past half-century.
This volume, however, is concerned with the long term - the longest term for
which useable statistics are available. Because statistics of imports to European
markets are the most reliable ones before about the mid-nineteenth century, it must
also focus on long-distance exports which served the global centres of trade in
Amsterdam and London, rather than items such as rice, salted f ish, salt and cook-
ing-oil which were primarily traded w ithin the Southeast Asian area and for which
no reliable statistics are available. We are confident, nevertheless, that expansion in
the long-distance trade brought about multiplier effects in the local economies.
Southeast Asian exports to Europe (as well as China and America) were domin-
ated by these four commodities until World War I, each in turn taking the major
role. Cloves (with nutmeg in smaller quantities) were the first commodity to be
recorded in specific qu antities on arrival in Europe, for which a Southeast Asian
provenance is certain. These Malukan spices dominated Europe 's transactions with
Southeast Asia from medieval times until about the mid-fifteenth century and
remained a vital ingredient in Southeast Asian economic expansion until the Dutch
monopoly was established in the 1650s. Thereafter they were itnportant only to the
VOC. Pepper was an important Southeast Asian export to China in the fifteenth
century, but became unquestionably the most valuable export to Europe and the
world from the mid-sixteenth century until the I 820s, when it was surpassed by
coffee. The reign of coffee was short-lived, since sugar in turn expanded meteorically
after 1830 and dominated Southeast Asian exports in both volume and value until
the rubber boom after World War I. Coffee remained comfortably in second place
for most of the nineteenth century, and sugar continued to vie with rubber and oil
for primacy unti l the 1920s.
In the twentieth century export figures for the colonies and successor states in
the region are of course available. Before 1900 it is necessary to estimate how much
of Southeast Asia's exports of these commodities was going to China, India, and
other destinations for which import data are even scantier than for Europe. For the
period from about 1650 to 1900, when first Batavia and later Singapore played a
dominant role in trade, we have been able to do this with sufficient confidence to

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6 SOUTHEAST ASIAN EXPORTS SINCE THE 14TH CENTURY

estimate Southeast Asia's exports to the world, not simply to Europe, and make
clear that our four commodities do indeed dominate the entire scene. The further
one goes back before that, the less significant Europe becomes as a factor in South-
east Asian trade, and the more hazardous it is to extrapolate from these commodities
imported to Europe to the trend of Southeast Asian exports as a whole. B efore 1500
the European record of clove imports can be no more than suggestive. Exports of
pepper, sappanwood, sandalwood and camphor, notably to China but also to India
and beyond, were cumulatively much more important, and we can do no more than
guess the trend.
The privileging of exports for which there is a reliable European record also
skews the record slightly in favour of the Indonesian Archipelago, ~here the products
of interest to Europeans were concentrated. The exports of mainland Southeast Asia,
though of more modest scale, were directe d chiefly to China and Japan until as late
as the early nineteenth century. For example, in the 1630s Siam was exporting about
2,000 tons of sappanwood a year to China, while Siam and Cambodia together ex-
ported about 300,000 deerskins a year to Japan (Reid 1993: 24). While these factors
should be born in mind when we attempt to draw conclusions from the data pre-
sented here, it appears that the trend of exports to China was similar to the trend of
exports to Europe, especially in relation to the booms in the periods 1600- 30 and
1760-1800.
What proportion of the total exports of Southeast Asia might be represented by
the four commodities examined here? Since a large proportion of Southeast Asia's
exports have always been re-exports, in the form of Chinese goods purchased at
Southeast Asian ports by Indian, Japanese or European traders, and vice versa, it
may be relatively small. Some indication may appear from two points - around the
peak of the "age of commerce" boom in the 1630s, and in the 1890s. In the former
period I have calculated elsewhere that the total value of Southeast Asian exports
and re-exports may have been about 220 tons of silver in value, or 8.6 million Spanish
reals (Reid 1993: 24- 25). Compared with this the 0.95 million reals in the export
value of commodities surveyed here (pepper 0.5, cloves 0.4, sugar 0.04) represents
only about 11 per cent of total Southeast Asian exports. However, it must represent
at least three times that proportion of exports originating in Southeast Asia, since
the majority of Southeast Asian exports in the earlier period represented China's
trade with the rest of the world, including in that period even Japan. Over the decade
of the 1890s average exports of Southeast Asia as a whole (minus Burma which in
any case does not feature much in our commodities) amounted to US $231 million,
according to figures presented by Lewis ( 1981: 55- 57). In that decade our four
export commod ities acco unted for $59.6 mil lion (sugar 37.3, coffee 19.5 ,
pepper 2.8) or about 26 per cent of the total. Given the substantial volume of re-
exports, these sizeable proportions of total trade provide a solid basis on which to
esti1nate trends.

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 fNTRODUCTJON 7

The Method of This Volume

The further we go back in time, the less adequate and systematic are the statistics
with which we have to deal. Only in the last three decades, and much less in the
cases ofVietnam and Burma, has export data been systen1atically assembled by the
Unjted Nations and World Bank from all countries in terms of common metric meas-
ures and US dollar values. Colonial regimes and their successors were collecting
data with varying degrees of exactitude from the nineteenth century, each in their
own units of quantity and value. For earlier periods data is available in fragments,
usually in the farm of purchases, shipn1ents, or imports of particular agencies or
importing countries. Our aim has been to n1ake sense of all this by converting quan-
tities to metric units and values to a common dollar value and using a process of
estimates to fill the largest gaps. Only during the twentieth century has Southeast
Asia been demarcated into the ten units which make up its contemporary nation
states - though even this must be qualified in the cases of Malaysia (only since
l 965) and Vietnam (regarded as three constituent parts of French Indo-Ch ina in
most of the statistics of the colonial era and divided into two very different sover-
eign entities in 1954-75). Nation states had little meaning in Southeast Asia for the
majority of the f ive century period we are surveying. Before leaving the region
exports were transshipped in a variety of entrepots - independent port states like
Aceh, Banten and Makasar, colonial enclaves like Batavia, Manila and Singapore,
or ports such as Hoi An (southern Vietnam), Ayutthaya or Bangkok which were
subordinate to Southeast Asian kingdoms. The changes in political units make geo-
graphical ones more appropriate for long-term analysis. Where exports are generated
from different areas we have identified these by reading back the contemporary
nation states as geographical entities in the case of the Philippines, Vietnam, Siam/
Thailand and Burma, but have divided the Malay-speaking world of the Indonesian
Archipelago by major islands. Where possible we have aggregated the data for
Southeast Asia as a single geographic unit, though aware that this refers in reality to
a particular maritime trading system, carrying the major export products of the
region by sea westward to India and Europe and northward to China. Neither the
cross-border trade to China by land, nor the intra-regional local trade, is accessible
to the same type of methodology.
We hope by these means to overcome to some extent a bias \vhich is built into
previous statistical reconstructions of the export perforn1ance of Southeast Asian
countries. Because Southeast Asia's nation states are the heirs of colonial governments
which were relatively efficient at gathering statistics, virtually all such time series
begin with the nineteenth century rise of the colonial states. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, however, the area covered by such states was much less exten-
sive than at its end, while the competence of colonial statistical agencies expanded
even more rapidly. Not surprisingly, such time series present a picture of constant

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8 SOUTHEAST ASIAN EXPORTS SINCE THE 14TH C ENTURY

expansion from a very low base at the beginning of the nineteenth century and
notably fail to deal with the independent states not yet absorbed into the colonial
embrace. Therefore, as a basis for comparing colonial and pre-colonial performance
such series are seriously inadequate. Scholars are greatly in the debt of the dedicated
team which has produced sixteen volumes of The Changing Economy of Indonesia
series by excavating Netherlands Indian statistics of the period 1815- 1940 with
great care and sophistication. But because the colonial figures only gradually ex-
tend their scope outside Java, they cannot do justice, fo r example , to pepper, which
our figures show to be still Southeast Asia's most profitab le export as late as 1820,
though chiefly grown in Indonesian areas outside Dutch control. A sin1ilar problem
besets French statistics on Vietnam and British on Burma.
The tables here begin by presenting recorded data, though in most cases already
converted to metric measures of weight. Prior to the seventeenth century such con-
versions are problematic because of the variability of units of measure, so we have
also presented the original units in some early cases. The measures and conversion
factors used in these conversions are listed in the appendices. On the basis of all the
available data we then proceed, in the final tables in each section, to construct
estimates of the trend of exports in terms of ten-year averages. Such estimates are
expressed in italics in the tables to distinguish them from the recorded data.
The values of exports of course present much more serious problems of long-
term analysis than the quantities - so serious that we initially thought we should
avoid this task altogether. Originally expressed in an enormous diversity of Asian
and European currencies, the data on prices and values is spasmodic and extremely
difficult to aggregate. The values of different currencies fluctuate greatly in relation
to one another at different times and places, especially as between gold-based
coinages and silver-based ones. Should we use the (more accessible) prices of the
European markets for these commodities, or the far lower and more variable pri ces
paid in the region at the point of export? Eventually we were persuaded that the data
will be vastly more useful to any comparative work if values can be estimated, even
though this involves us making some heroic assumptions. The reader should be
aware of just how these calculations have been made. We are a little more fortunate
in Southeast Asia than in other parts of the world, in that a silver dollar of sorts was
a relatively consistent international coinage over a very long period. The great expan-
sion of silver in global circulation during the sixteenth century and early seventeenth
century, when both American and Japanese mines were producing unprecedented
quantities, had a profound impact in the region. "One way or another silver had
become irresistible as the effective international currency of Southeast Asia by about
1630, whether in [Spanish] reals, as in most of the island world, or in weight" (Reid
1993: 107). The Spanish real or peso de ocho of Charles V was particularly popular
because of its highly consistent weight in silver (25.5 grams) and the abundant
supplies brought in by the "Manila galleon" fro m Acapulco as well as by Dutch,

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 INTRODUCTION 9

English and Portuguese traders. In the nineteenth century it was largely replaced by
the Mexican " Republican" dollar, more than a billion of which were issued between
1822 and 1888 (Drake 1991: 92). As the other European powers sought to establish
their own standard currencies in the region they were gradually forced to issue silver
dollars based on the Spanish and M exican coins and of similar value. The Dutch
rijksdaalder filled this function for the VOC, and the British minted a trade dollar
for Southeast Asian purposes from the moment they established a factory in Pinang
( 1786). Spanish and M exican dollars continued to be legal tender in the British
Settlements alongside the Straits dollar throughout the nineteenth century. As Frank
King put it for the late nineteenth century, "Sin ce East Asia outside Netherlands
East Indies used the dollar Mex, or a coin based on it, there was one currency for
one great trading area" ( cited Drake l 991: 96).
The United States produced its own silver dollar also based initially on the
Mexican, so that the transition from Spanish/Mexican to US dollars as our unit for
the twentieth century provides a relative continuity in values over the long term.
Although the Southeast Asian countries did generally adopt their own gold-based
paper currencies in the early twentieth century, we have converted these to US dollars.
Where we attempt to show long-term trends in the final tables and graphs of each
section, we have adjusted for post-war inflation by using a CPI index as a deflator.

Conclusions
The data assembled here make it possible to begin to quantify some trends already
known or suspected and to question assumptions which may have been made too
easily. To begin with the pattern of prices, the data assembled on the gap between
European and Southeast Asian prices is a fascinating reflection of the faltering
progress towards the integration of South east Asia and its products into a global
economic system. Even in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the clove
trade was becoming relatively reliable in a series of stages between Maluku (in
eastern Indonesia) through Melaka, South India and the Middle East to Venice, the
price was still about 100 times higher in Venice than at the production centre and
about 30 times higher than in the main Southeast Asian entrepot of Melaka. A cent-
ury earlier these ratios must have been two or three times higher. The exploitation
of the sea route between Europe and Asia by the Portuguese narrowed the gap, after
an initial period of disruption when the prices in Venice increased. Once the Portu-
guese monopoly (among Europeans) was broken in 1596 prices were driven up in
Southeast Asia and down in Europe as Dutch, English, Portuguese, French and Danes
competed in shipping the precious spice directly to Europe. By the 1640s cloves
were selling in Amsterdam for the equivalent of 2,330 Spanish dollars (reals) per
ton, only two or three times the price being asked in the free entrepots of Southeast
Asia (Table 2.3). But this trend was subsequently reversed by the effect of monopolies

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10 SOUTHEAST ASIAN EXPORTS SINCE THE 14TH CENTURY

to which cloves and nutmeg were especially vulnerable. By maintaining an effect-

ive monopoly of all the cloves produced in Maluku, the only world source, between
the 1650s and the 1770s, the Dutch East India Company kept European prices arti-
ficially high in that period, at prices nearly fourteen times as high as those paid _for
the cloves in Maluku. Only with the collapse of that monopoly did the European
and Southeast Asian prices rapidly converge.
The difference was never so great for pepper prices, because quantities were
larger, sources more nu1nerous and accessible, and a monopoly impossible. The gulf
between European and Southeast Asian prices was about 8: 1 during the buying
frenzy around 1600, wh ich helped to drive the Dutch and English on their quest to
break the Portuguese 1nonopoly. Here again a convergence recommenced in the
first half of the seventeenth century, suggesting that a world market had begun at
least by then - though a case could certainly be made that a Eurasian market for
pepper vvas already functioning efficiently in the fifteenth century in the hands of
the Muslim traders. The convergence of prices was reversed by Dutch and English
local monopolies and forced contracts from the 1670s. These collapsed as the
Napoleonic wars were driving European prices up to unprecedented highs, so that
again it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that prices markedly converged
(Table 3.6). By contrast, sugar and coffee were never subject to monopolies, and in
these cases there was an effective world n1arket in both commodities fron1 the
eighteenth century, and the converging trend for prices was relatively continuous
(Tables 4. 10, 5.8).
The values of exports show interesting fluctuations over the long term. Data
before 1500 is too sketchy to be more than suggestive, but the figures for cloves are
included to make c lear that the upward swing in Southeast Asian exports was not a
direct consequence of the arrival of European (Portuguese) buyers by sea in 1509.
The sale of Indonesian cloves even in Europe, their most distant market, rose gradu-
ally th.rough the fifteenth century, dropped when the Portuguese caused havoc with
the Indian Ocean trade routes after 1498, and regained its upward momentum after
1520 (Table 2.14).
From about 1540 to 1630 the trend for both cloves and pepper was sharply up-
ward. The influx of American and Japanese silver into the world economy brought
about a phase of rapidly escalating prices in Europe, while Southeast Asian spices
took a prominent part in the competition for priinary produce which ensued. In the
1530s the value we have estimated fo r the exports of clove and pepper together, in
the prices being paid at Southeast Asian entrepots, was just under 100,000 cruzados,
or roughly an equivalent amount in Spanish dollars. By the 1590s this had risen to
490,000 and in the following decade when European competition was at its fiercest
to 810,000 Spanish dollars. In the space of 70 years the value of these Southeast
Asian exports had risen eightfold, almost entirely carried in this period by products
of the Indonesian Archipelago. This high level of export values was n1aintained

.J
 INTRODUCTION II

throughout the peak years of the "age of commerce", roughly 1590-1650 (Table 1.1).
Over the whole period from the 1530s to the 1640s the average growth in export
values at Southeast Asian prices can be calculated as 2.7 per cent a year.
Since population appears to have been growing very little in this period, probably
no more overall than 0.2 per cent per year, the transformation of Southeast Asian
society in a commercial direction must have been very significant, especially around
the Straits of Malacca and the Java Sea where the spice export centres were clustered.
In relation to a population of about eleven mill ion in the Indonesian islands and the
Malayan Peninsula in the early seventeenth century (Reid 198 8: 14), the exports
covered in our survey (principally pepper and clove, almost entirely exported from
this area) would have constituted about one tenth of a Spanish dollar per capita
during this boom period. My previous global figure of 8.6 million Spanish reals
(above) for the total of Southeast Asian long-distance exports by sea (i .e. to destina-
tions outside Southeast Asia) in this period, including re-exports, would give an
export value per capita of0.37 Span ish dollars for the whole Southeast Asian region.
One must remember, however, that the great majority oftrade by sea was in foodstuffs,
tools, ceramics and other essentials over shorter distances within Southeast Asia.
There followed a prolonged slump in export values as the Dutch monopolies
took hold in the 1650s, with the combined value of our four key products not again
reaching the levels of 1600-50 until the 1720s, when Javanese sugar and coffee
f irst compensate for the sh arp drop in the Southeast Asian return on cloves. It should
be noted that the slump would look less acute if we had used European prices during
the period of the effective VOC monopoly on cloves (1565- 1770), rather than cal-
culating clove values in this period by the prices paid by the VOC to producers in
Ambon. The prices received in Amsterdam were relevant to the VOC itself, and
enabled it to maintain a strong military establishn1ent in the east. In relation to the
economies of Southeast Asia, however, the important variable is the prices received
within Southeast Asia. While we make no apology fo r using the low clove prices of
Maluku during this period, if it had been possible to calculate some kind of price for
Batavia (which the Company itself had no re~son to do), it would have reflected the
wealth which now flowed to the Dutch enclave of Batavia, "the Queen of the East",
rather than to Southeast Asian entrepots as before.
I have written extensively elsewhere about the crisis which gripped the Southeast
Asian economies in th e middle of the seventeenth century (Reid 1993: 270-31 1;
Reid 1990b). The data in this volume suggest that it was (at least in export terms) as
severe as that anywhere in the world. While for most European economies the m id-
seventeenth century decline was short-lived in absolute terms, though putting Spain
and Portugal at a long-term relative disadvantage, in Southeast Asia per capita exports
appear to have been depressed for a century. The effect of the imposition of mono-
polies by force was to turn Southe_a st Asian farn1e rs and power-holders away from
cash-cropping for the world market and reduce the role of export-derived income in

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12 SOUTHEAST ASIAN EXPORTS SINCE THE 14TH CENTURY

TABLE 1.1
10-year Average Values of Exports
($,000 in 1940 US dollars)

Percentage
Growth p.a.
Four Between
Year Cloves Pepper Sugar Coffee Products Decades

1500- 09 6 47 53
1510-19 6 50 56 0.6
1520-29 5 55 -60 0.7
1530-39 20 78 98 5.0
1540-49 66 102 168 5.5
1550- 59 66 114 180 0.7
1560-69 115 189 304 5.4
1570-79 120 240 360 1.7
1580-89 130 288 418 1.5
1590-99 150 340 490 1.6
1600-09 210 600 810 5.2
1610- 19 180 319 499 -5.0
1620-29 360 551 911 6.2
1630-39 400 462 36 898 -0.1
1640-49 308 602 171 1,081 1.9
1650-59 90 417 168 675 -4.8
1660- 69 33 357 96 486 -3.3
1670-79 28 417 132 577 1.7
1680-89 28 392 102 522 -1.0
1690-99 36 442 71 549 0.5
1700-09 44 400 150 594 0.8
1710-19 58 383 204 1 646 0.8
1720-29 49 500 266 242 1,057 5.0
1730-39 49 475 282 207 1,013 -0.4
1740-49 36 500 194 263 993 -1.2
1750-59 31 408 319 294 1,052 0.6
1760-69 58 467 602 344 1,471 3.4
1770- 79 42 508 312 345 1,207 -2.0
1780-89 40 508 336 362 1,246 0.3
1790- 99 30 600 550 395 1,575 2.4
1800-09 30 1,150 810 350 2,340 4.0
1810- 19 40 1,008 532 780 2,360 0.1
1820- 29 45 1,386 910 4,374 6,715 11.0

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 INTRODUCTION 13

TABLE 1. 1 (Cont'd)

Percentage
Growth p.a.
Four Between
Year Cloves Pepper Sugar Coffee Products Decades

1830-39 67 1,760 2,646 5,782 10,255 4.3

1840-49 123 2,088 13,070 7,009 22,290 8.1
1850- 59 38 2,616 17,3 61 12,63 5 32,650 3.9
1860- 69 39 1,825 25,989 18,539 46,392 3.6
1870- 79 72 3,527 35,991 26,020 65,610 3.5
1880- 89 49 4,294 53,016 21 ,929 79,288 1.9
1890-99 22 2,777 37,294 19,516 59,609 - 2.9
1900-09 23 5,362 56,055 9,647 71,087 1.8
1910-19 0 7,438 132,477 13,457 153,807 8.0
1920- 29 97 7,505 195,69 1 18,341 221,653 3.7
1930-39 62 9,491 89,613 12,104 111,282 - 7.1
1940-49 0 4,560 63,990 8,58 1 74,955 - 4.0
1950-59 0 9, 521 51 ,673 7,638 68,918 - 0.8
1960-69 25 9,788 67,672 31,806 109, 185 4.7
1970-79 17 21,552 158,522 76,436 256,368 8.9
1980- 89 74 16,537 89,919 116,344 222,866 - 1.4

SOURCE: Tables 2.15, 3.7, 3.1 3, 4.12, 5.9.

the local and household economies. Even when the overall economy picked up again
in the following century, it did so partly on the basis of forced deliveries of coffee
and pepper to the VOC (and to a lesser extent the English company), and the profits
of the trade were less widely spread around the Southeast Asian trading system than
had been the case in the "age of commerce".
Table 1.1 shows a century of fluctuation in export performance after 1650 with
no sustained tendency to grow again unti l the latter part of the eighteenth century.
The record from the 1780s onwards, however, is again an impressive one, which has
not been much noticed hitherto. A lthough the period of the Napoleonic Wars was
unstable and exceptional because of the disruption of shipping routes to Europe, it
had the merit of destroying the colonial monopolies and making it possible
for Southeast Asians again to respond directly to the market for tropical crops -
particularly the American hunger for pepper and coffee, but also the demand of
Chinese and British shippers. Both in Sumatra and Java there was a rapid expansion

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 INTRODUCTION 15

of smallholder production of pepper and coffee which had little to do with colonial
estates, while Chinese entrepreneurs in the Philippines, Siam and Vietnam helped to
generate new supplies of sugar and pepper. Overall the export value of our four prod-
ucts together increased sixfold between the 1780s and the 1820s, at a growth rate of
4.6 per cent a year. This period, unfortunately difficult to document precisely because
of the dynamic new beginnings in so many areas, appears to have a strong claim to
mark the start of the modem period of Southeast Asian economic growth.
As the "cultivation system" in Java after 1830 gave a further impetus to coffee
and later sugar production, the locus of export growth gradually shifted towards
European-controlled areas. The rate of growth, however, reached a higher level only
briefly in the first period of the cultivation system, before falling back to about 3.5 per
cent a year in the 1850s and 1860s. lfwe divide the period 1780s to 1930s into three
stages, it is clear that the "high colonial" period after 1870 was one of slowing
growth, not the explosion of export agriculture which is usually portrayed.

Collapse of Company Control,

1780s- l 820s 4.6 per cent growth annually

Semi-colonial Production,
1820s-1870s 4.7 per cent growth annually

High Colonial Period of Estates,

1870s-l 930s 0.8 per cent growth annually
[alternatively: l 870s- l 920s 2.4 per cent growth annually]

If we regard the 1920s as the true apogee of colonial agriculture, before the depres-
sion of the 1930s began the major mid-century crisis of the whole system, then the
performance is a little better at 2.4 per cent a year, but certainly not one to match the
rapid growth before 1870 - let alone the extraordinary expansion in so many fields
after 1970. Although surprising in the light of colonial triumphalism, Southeast
Asia 's poor export performance after 1870 is less remarkable in global terms. World
trade growth as a whole slowed dramatically, from an estimated 4.4 per cent a year
in 1830-1860 to 2.7 percent in 1872-99, 4.1 per cent in 1899- 1913 and only 0.9 per
cent in 1913-39 (Lewis 1981: 11- 12).
Had the boom exports of the twentieth century - rubber and oil-been included
in our calculations the performance after 1900 would look a little better. On the
other hand, if one takes into account the rapid population growth of the h igh colonial
period, between one and two per cent a year in most countries, this would make the
per capita increase in exports after 1870 still more dismal. Although pre-colonial
population figures are an even more hazardous area than export statistics, there is
little doubt that population growth was below 0.5 per cent a year in almost all

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16 SOUTHEAST ASIAN EXPORTS SINCE THE 14TH CENTURY

countries before 1820. If we were able to calculate a growth rate in per capita ex-
ports, therefore, it would probably show a steady decline from the 1820s onward to
the mid-twentieth century, when it became negative.
Accumulating our results for the four export products (see Table 1.1) makes
clear how severe an impact the depression of the 1890s had on Southeast Asia, with
export values in the first decade of this century still below those of the 1880s. Far
more severe, however, was the crisis of 1930-65, in which Southeast Asian exports
were set back by a half-century and the region fell far behind the industrialized
world. This crisis began with the Great Depression, in which agricultural exports
were particularly hard hit, and continued with the Japanese occupation of the region
( 1941- 45) and a series of political upheavals, revolutions and _anti-trade policies
thereafter. Against this background the growth after 1965 has been the more astonish-
ing. Although something of this can be g limpsed from our four exports, none of
them were the leading exports after 1930 and they can no longer be considered to
represent the broader economies by that point.
The building of the Suez canal and the spanning ofAsia with steamship, railway
and telegraph routes has tended to dazzle the imagination and lead even careful
scholars to the mistaken assumption that basically static pre-colonial economies
were galvanized into commercial growth by colonial capitalism in the late nine-
teenth century. We hope that the figures assembled here, rough as they are in many
respects, will cause some rethinking of these assun1ptions.

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