Taming the coolie beast plantation society and the colonial order in southeast Asia

When Van den Brand wrote his pamphlet Millions from Deli, in the beginning of the twentieth century, it shocked public opinion in the Netherlands. The pamphlet documented tales of horror, which were everyday experiences of the coolies on the tobacco plantations in the Dutch colony of Sumatra. The rumblings which the pamphlet caused shook the government and it ordered an investigation. Its findings came to be known as the Rhemrev Report.

The Report was eventually suppressed by the Dutch government because it revealed a state of affairs even more horrifying than what the Millions from Deli had disclosed.

Professor Breman came upon the Rhemrev Report accidentally in the archives while working on migrant labour in South and Southeast Asia. Confidential comments made on the Report by powerful public figures were all intact. The result is the present book.

The Coolie Beast unfolds the social organization on the plantations in Sumatra. Class structure was organized along racist lines into white planters and Asian coolies, and the latter were further divided into head foremen, foremen, workers and contract workers. Only a handful of coolies were not inden tured. The bondage notwithstanding, labour relations were thoroughly capitalistic in nature. The historian and the economist will find the comparison with plantations in the Americas and elsewhere interesting. Political scientists and the general reader will find this book revealing for yet another reason. Breman gives a graphic description of the manner in which scandals were suppressed by the policy-makers both in the colony and in the home-country. The element of deception implicit in such dealings, seems particularly sinister because it mixes so well with the fact of colonial governance. People in positions of power will perhaps feel uncomfortable with this book, while others get to see the political backyard, similar the world over.

This is an angry book, powerfully written and it backed by sound scholarship. It is an excellent example of historical anthropology which is becoming important here and in the West.