Showing papers by "Filomeno V. Aguilar published in 2021"

The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor By Ulbe Bosma. Columbia Studies in International and Global History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. ISBN 13: 978-0231188524.

Abstract: On the very first page of the Introduction, Ulbe Bosma lays down very clearly the book’s two concerns. The first: What caused the “reversal of fortune” of Island Southeast Asia, which saw it decline from a prosperous region prior to colonial conquest to become a poor region that relied on the export of agricultural commodities produced by cheap labor? While many will point to colonialism as responsible for the making of such a “periphery,” Bosma disagrees. In fact, he seeks to rebut the argument of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson that the “reversal of fortune” was “the upshot of colonial powers recasting existing extractive systems or institutions in exploitation colonies [in contrast to settler colonies] for their own purposes, which inflicted lasting damage on the institutional arrangements” (p. 5). Bosma argues that poverty is due neither to the economic hegemony of the Global North nor to colonial domination, which was “often a limited and negotiated phenomenon” (p. 4). Colonial powers merely used extant modes of labor control “to mobilize rural populations for commodity production on a massive scale” (p. 4). With his analysis concentrating on Java and what he refers to as the “northern Philippines” (a discomforting term to Filipino readers as it is made to encompass the central Visayas), Bosma’s answer is found in “high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor embedded in patron-client relationships” (p. 1) that predated colonial conquest. He then links this answer to the second question: Why is Island Southeast Asia a massive exporter of labor today? The first five chapters are devoted to answering the first question, while parts of chapter 4, the concluding section of chapter 5, and all of chapter 6 are focused on the second question, a dispersed response that consequently fails to deliver an adequate answer. Chapter 1 explains the indubitable rise in population growth after “Southeast Asia ... went through a phase of demographic decline and economic contraction between 1600 and 1750” (p. 26) due to smallpox as well as piracy. But nutritional levels improved with increased food production, plus “a reasonably effective smallpox vaccination program” (p. 38) in the places that became “the earliest adopters of vaccination” (p. 43). “By the end of the eighteenth century, Java and the northern Philippines were the first to show signs of economic and demographic recovery” (p. 29). In the nineteenth century, “growth returned to Java and the Philippines” (p. 32). With demographic growth, “servile labor” became abundant in “the colonial heartlands of the Philippines and the Netherlands Indies” (p. 69). The second chapter turns to slavery as engendered by global capitalism, boosted by “a growing overseas demand for rice and sea and forest products” (p. 44). Bosma states, however, that “once these territories were relatively safe and yielded sufficient revenue, the battle against slave raiding and trading could be gradually expanded” (p. 45), resulting in autonomous sultanates such as Sulu getting quashed. With Bosma’s tacit assumption of economic rationalism holding sway, he portrays slavery as a “transient phase,” as it was “far more costly as a production system” (p. 61) than