Research Paper
Sweet equality: Sugar, property rights, and land distribution in colonial Java✰

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2023.101513Get rights and content
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Abstract

This article exploits a unique district-level dataset to investigate the relationship between sugar cultivation, property rights systems and land distribution in colonial Java around the turn of the twentieth century. We demonstrate a negative and statistically significant relationship between sugar cultivation and the landholder Gini. An IV strategy, employing a newly computed index of sugar suitability as instrument, suggests that this effect is causal. It is argued that sugar production in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stimulated the expansion and persistence of communal landholding. This communal landholding consequently led to more equally distributed plots among landholders in the early twentieth century. We emphasize the importance of local property rights institutions in mitigating the effects of export production on socioeconomic outcomes.

Keywords

Colonialism
Institutions
Inequality
Cash crops
Indonesia

JEL classification

N35
N55
P48
Q15
Q17

Data availability

  • Data and code have been made available on OpenICPSR.

Cited by (0)

✰

We thank Pim Arendsen, Zina Janssen and Stefan de Jong for valuable research assistance and we acknowledge financial support from the Netherlands Research Council (NWO) for the project “Unfair Trade? Globalization, Institutions and Inequality in Southeast Asia, 1830–1940″ (grant no. 275-53-016). We are grateful to Pierre van der Eng, James Fenske, Ewout Frankema, Daniel Gallardo-Albarrán, Leander Heldring, Mark Hup, Michiel de Haas, Alexandra de Pleijt, Dietrich Vollrath, Jan Luiten van Zanden, and participants of the Online Economic History of Developing Regions seminar in June 2021, the Wageningen Economics Seminar in November 2021, the Utrecht Economic and Social History seminar in February 2022, the EHS conference in Cambridge in April 2022, the “Globalization and Long-Run Development in Asia and Africa” Workshop at Wageningen University in June 2022 and the XIXth WEHC in Paris in July 2022, as well as the editor and anonymous referees for this journal, for useful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. Any errors or dubious interpretations are ours alone.

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.