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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2009
The rise of the three great rice-producing and -exporting deltas of mainland Southeast Asia numbers among the most familiar chapters in the modern history of the region. On a macro level, it exemplifies the integration of the region into the North Atlantic-centered world economy during the age of high imperialism and the consequent shock of the depression of the 1930s. On a micro level, that rise has offered historians an opportunity to examine the responses of Southeast Asian cultivators to market signals; the variation in the allocation of factors of production across the Irrawaddy, Chao Phraya and Mekong deltas; and the implications of those responses and that allocation for reactions to the shock of the inter-war crisis. The principal features of the history of the mainland rice economies between 1850 and the 1930s have indeed grown so familiar as to make that history seem like yesterday's topic. Occasional attempts to propose significant revision to the story have had little impact. And the need for a major monograph on the economic history of the Mekong delta during the French colonial period remains unmet.
1 Brown, Ian, Economic change in Southeast Asia, c.1830–1980 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 114–27Google Scholar, treats major scholarship on the rise of the three rice deltas. See also, Ammar Siamwalla, ‘Land, labour and capital in three rice-growing deltas of Southeast Asia, 1800–1940’ (New Haven: Yale Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper No. 150, 1972); and Owen, Norman G., ‘The rice industry of mainland Southeast Asia, 1850–1914’, Journal of the Siam Society, LIX, 2 (1971): 75–143Google Scholar, which offers classic, still valuable, comparative analyses.
2 For example, Coclanis, Peter A., ‘Southeast Asia's incorporation into the world rice market: A revisionist view’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 24, 2 (1993): 251–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 The historical sections of Sansom, Robert, The economics of insurgency in the Mekong delta of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970)Google Scholar, remain useful. The stimulating Brocheux, Pierre, The Mekong delta: Ecology, economy and revolution, 1860–1960 (Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1995)Google Scholar, serves above all to make clear how much more research is needed, at least in English. Guy Gran, ‘Vietnam and the capitalist route to modernity: Village Cochinchina, 1880–1940’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1975), was never published. But the ongoing work of David Biggs merits attention; see for example, ‘Problematic progress: Reading environmental and social change in the Mekong delta’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 24, 1 (2003): 77–96. Elson, R.E., The end of the peasantry in Southeast Asia: A social and economic history of peasant livelihood, 1800–1990s (London: Macmillan Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which appeared under the auspices of the Australian National University's Modern Economic History of Southeast Asia Project, is hardly irrelevant to historical understandings of the rice deltas. But that project's planned volume on Thailand, in which a reassessment of the rice economy would surely have figured prominently, never appeared. Neither is it clear whether the project commissioned volumes on Burma or Vietnam.
4 As RoutledgeCurzon has priced this 126-page book at US$160, there is reason for concern about how many readers will have the opportunity to assess Brown's interpretation for themselves.
5 Journal of Asian Studies, 45, 5 (1986): 995–1025.
6 See, for example, ‘Some comments on industrialisation in the Philippines during the 1930s’, pp. 203–20, in The economies of Asia and Africa in the interwar depression, ed. Ian Brown (London: Routledge, 1989); and ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–19; and Ian Brown, ‘Material conditions in rural Lower Burma during the economic crisis of the early 1930s: What the cotton textile export figures reveal’, pp. 109–20, both in Weathering the storm: The economies of Southeast Asia in the 1930s depression, ed. Peter Boomgaard and Ian Brown (Leiden and Singapore: KITLV Press and ISEAS, 2000).
7 Ian Brown, ‘Rural distress in Southeast Asia during the world depression of the early 1930s’, pp. 1021–2.
8 Ibid., pp. 1009–16.
9 New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
10 Brown, ‘Rural distress’, pp. 995 and 1021.
11 Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987.
12 Brown, The elite and the economy in Siam, pp. 179–80.
13 Brown, A colonial economy in crisis, pp. 6–7.
14 Ibid., p. 7.
15 R.E. Elson, ‘The cultivation system and “agricultural involution”’(Melbourne: Center of Southeast Asian Studies Working Paper No. 14, Monash University, 1978), p. 8; see also pp. 25, 28–30.
16 Elson, R.E., ‘Javanese peasants and the colonial sugar industry: Impact and change in an east Java residency, 1830–1940’ (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 242–7Google Scholar.
17 Doeppers, Daniel F., ‘Metropolitan Manila in the Great Depression: Crisis for whom?’, Journal of Asian Studies, 50, 3 (1991): 511–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Ibid., p. 513.
19 Brown, A colonial economy in crisis, pp. 65–6.
20 Adas, Michael, The Burma delta: Economic development and social change on an Asian rice frontier, 1852–1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974)Google Scholar. Brown cites not The Burma delta in ‘Rural distress’ but rather Adas, Michael, Prophets of rebellion: Millenarian protest movements against the European colonial order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979)Google Scholar, and its treatment of the so called ‘Hsaya San rebellion’. He returns to that treatment in the last substantive chapter of A colonial economy in crisis, discussed below.
21 In addition to the vast body of colonial-era reports and studies on which Brown and especially Adas draws, Siok-Hwa, Cheng, The rice industry of Burma, 1852–1940 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1968)Google Scholar, also merits attention from the next generation of economic historians of Southeast Asia.
22 Adas, The Burma delta, p. 69; the position of each of these four classes of agriculturalists in this early period is treated on pp. 70–82.
23 Ibid., p. 141; discussion of the lot of each class of agriculturalists during the later period is found on pp. 141–53.
24 Brown, A colonial economy in crisis, pp. 22–5.
25 Ibid., p. 39.
26 Ibid., p. 66.
27 See, for example, Doeppers, ‘Metropolitan Manila in the Great Depression’.
28 Brown, A colonial economy in crisis, pp. 91–6. This reckoning matches that found in Adas, The Burma delta, pp. 186–92; the latter book's wide variety of British sources does not include the Grantham report.
29 While not seriously damaging to Brown's case in A colonial economy in crisis, the ongoing work of Maitrii Aung-Thwin has made less and less tenable the long-prevalent understanding of the year and a half of violence in Lower Burma that began in December 1930 as a single rebellion under unified leadership; see, for example, Aung-Thwin, Maitrii, ‘Genealogy of a rebellion narrative: Law, ethnology and culture in colonial Burma’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 24, 3 (2003): 393–419Google Scholar.
30 Brown, A colonial economy in crisis, pp. 101–6.
31 Ibid., p. 107. Note that Brown once more discusses Adas's second book, Prophets of rebellion, and its treatment of Hsaya San, not The Burma delta. Again, as in his renewed critique of Scott, the continuities in the concerns of ‘Rural distress’ and A colonial economy in crisis are rather startling.
32 Ibid., p. 39
33 Ibid., p. 111.
34 Places made internationally infamous, as it happens, by the destruction that cyclone Nargis visited upon them in May 2008.
35 Brown, A colonial economy in crisis, pp. 109–10.
36 Ibid., p. 109.
37 Brown's application of the same logic to the cases of the Chao Phraya and especially the Mekong deltas, which remained largely free of depression-era rebellion, is similarly intriguing; refer to ibid., pp. 112–13.
38 Ibid., pp. 110–11. The quotation comes from the page 111 and is followed by an odd reference to tenants hoping to become owner-cultivators; see next paragraph of this review.
39 Ibid., p. 110.
40 In addition to archival holdings in London, Delhi and Rangoon, the nine reels of micro-film, in Delineating British Burma: British official and confidential print (Leiden: IDC Publishers, 2005) might be one place to start. This is to say nothing of Burmese-language materials, of which neither Brown nor Adas makes any use at all.
41 Significant English-language works include Ingram, James C., Economic change in Thailand, 1850–1970 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Small, Leslie E., ‘Historical development of the Greater Chao Phraya water control project: An economic perspective’, Journal of the Siam Society, 66, 1 (1973): 1–24Google Scholar; David B. Johnston, ‘Rural society and the rice economy in Thailand, 1880–1930’ (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976); Kaida Yoshihoro, ‘Irrigation and drainage: Present and future’, pp. 205–45, and Motooka Takeshi, ‘Rice exports and the expansion of cultivation’, pp. 272–334, both in Thailand: A rice-growing society, ed. Ishii Yoneo (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1978); Feeny, David, The political economy of productivity: Thai agricultural development, 1880–1975 (Vancouver and London: University of British Columbia Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Brown, The elite and the economy in Siam c.1890–1920, cited above; and Manarungsan, Sompop, Economic development of Thailand, 1850–1950: Response to the challenge of the world economy (Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, 1989)Google Scholar.
42 Ten Brummelhuis, King of the waters, p. xiv.
43 Ibid., p. xiii.
44 Ibid., pp. xiii, 54, 145 n. 12.
45 Ibid., pp. 2–3, 357.
46 Ibid., p. 359.
47 See, for example, Homan van der Heide's active interest in socio-political issues and his short-lived attempt to institutionalise grass-roots water boards in ibid., pp. 260–74.
48 Ibid., p. xiii.
49 Ibid., p. 10.
50 That scholarship includes Wyatt, David K., The politics of reform in Thailand: Education in the reign of King Chulalongkorn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Bunnag, Tej, The provincial administration of Siam: The Ministry of the Interior under Prince Damrong Rajanubhab (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Brown, Ian, The creation of the modern Ministry of Finance in Siam, 1885–1910 (London: Macmillan Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Noel Battye, ‘The military, government and society in Siam, 1868–1910’ (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1974). As ten Brummelhuis perceptively notes (p. xv), the ‘powerful, pervasive and public cult’ of King Chulalongkorn that has emerged in the past two decades did not influence either his 1985 dissertation or this English translation. On that cult, refer to Stengs, Irene, Worshipping the great moderniser: King Chulalongkorn, patron saint of the Thai middle class (Singapore and Seattle: NUS Press and the University of Washington Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
51 Bangkok: Ministry of Agriculture, Kingdom of Siam, 1903. Chapter 5 (pp. 129–60) of King of the waters is largely devoted to a close summary of the General report and a discussion of its underlying vision.
52 ten Brummelhuis, pp. 86–9.
53 Refer to The Ramkhamhaeng controversy: Selected papers, ed. James F. Chamberlain (Bangkok: The Siam Society, 1991).
54 The excellent maps and diagrams and the remarkable photographs – the latter shared with ten Brummelhuis by Homan van der Heide's daughter herself (p. xv) – that grace King of the waters only enhance that effect.
55 Small, ‘Historical development of the Greater Chao Phraya water control project’, p. 6, and Fineman, Daniel, A special relationship: The United States and military government in Thailand (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), pp. 117–19Google Scholar.
56 See, above all, ten Brummelhuis, ch. 9 (pp. 275–312), for detailed treatment of Homan van der Heide's difficulties in arranging timely disbursement of funds needed for the ongoing construction of locks and the role of such difficulties in precipitating his separation from Siamese service.
57 ten Brummelhuis, p. 348.
58 Homan van der Heide's contest with ‘the Borisat’ (company) is the particular focus of chapter 7 (pp. 197–238) of King of the waters, but ten Brummelhuis also makes clear elsewhere that royal concern over its activities numbered among reasons for hiring the Dutch engineer in the first place and that individuals associated with the Rangsit project assumed authority over Siam's irrigation ‘policy’ in the wake of his dismissal from service and return to Java. For extant scholarship on the project, refer to Asawai, Sunthari, Prawattisat khlong rangsit kanphatthana thidin lae phonkratop to sangkhom pho. so. 2431–2457 [The history of the Rangsit canal: Land development and its impact on society, 1888–1914] (Bangkok: Thammasat University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Johnston, ‘Rural society and the rice economy in Thailand’; and the same author's ‘Opening a frontier: The expansion of rice cultivation in central Thailand in 1890s’, Contributions to Asian Studies, I9 (1976): 27–43, and ‘Rice cultivation in Thailand: The development of an export economy by indigenous capital and labor’, Modern Asian Studies, 15, 1 (1981): 107–26.
59 ten Brummelhuis, p. 162, notes the preparation of a Thai-language summary of the General report for the use of King Chulalongkorn's ministers immediately following its submission. It is not clear from his discussion whether a copy or copies of this summary remain in the National Archives of Thailand or whether a translation of the complete report was subsequently prepared.
60 ten Brummelhuis, p. xiv, notes very pointedly his decision effectively to ignore ‘[t]he contemporary climate of opinion [that] could press me to position the Dutch engineer in colonial or post-colonial terms’ and instead to focus on more serious aspects of Homan van der Heide's career in Siam.
