Prof. Boeke was a Dutch academic cited in the source document DLP-84-Atjeh for his observation on the resilience (Dutch: veerkracht) of the Acehnese economy and society through the closing decades of colonial rule, whose work belongs to the body of late-colonial scholarship that sought to characterise the dual economy (Dutch: duala economie) of the Netherlands Indies and the place of the outer territories (Dutch: Buitengewesten) within it. His remarks on Atjeh place the residency (Dutch: gewest) of Gouvernement Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden within the broader pattern of economic life that the Netherlands-Indies state had inherited from the Agrarian Law of 1870 (Dutch: *Agrarische Wet*) and the long pacification that followed the Atjeh-oorlog of 1873–1904.
Contribution to Colonial Economics
Boeke’s observation on the resilience of the Atjehnese economy reflects the late-colonial concern with the question of how a society that had undergone a thirty-year colonial war could recover, in the space of a generation, sufficient demographic and economic buoyancy to be ranked among the more productive gewesten of Sumatra. His work fits within the wider tradition of Dutch colonial economics that produced the surveys of the 1910s and 1920s — the De Buitenbezittingen series of the Encyclopaedisch Bureau, the 1920 Volkstelling, and the Acheh-demographic-and-economic-survey of 1935 — by which the colonial state sought to measure the human and economic resources of the territories it had only recently subdued. Boeke’s remarks on Atjeh, by emphasising the capacity of the indigenous economy (Dutch: inheemsche economie) to absorb and recover from the disruptions of conquest, contribute to the diagnosis of the gewest’s position within the wider Netherlands-Indies dual economy.
The Dual Economy and Atjeh
The framework of the dual economy, with which Boeke’s name is associated in the source, distinguished between the Western, capital-intensive plantation sector — concentrated on the east-coast residencies of Sumatra and the lowlands of Java — and the indigenous, village-based economy of rice cultivation, garden produce, and petty trade. In Atjeh the dual structure was particularly marked: the plantation sector, developed after the construction of the Atjeh railway and the Great Atjeh Road (Dutch: *Groote Atjehweg*), was concentrated along the east coast and around Koeala Simpang and Besitang, while the indigenous economy — based on the pepper gardens (Dutch: pepertuinen), the rice lands of the river valleys, and the coffee and copra smallholdings of the Gajo highlands — continued to occupy the great majority of the Atjehnese population. Boeke’s observation on the resilience of the Atjehnese economy is therefore also a remark on the capacity of the indigenous sector to persist under, and recover from, the dislocations of the colonial project.
See Also
- Atjeh
- Gouvernement Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden
- Aceh War
- Pacification of Atjeh
- Agrarische Wet 1870
- Dutch East Indies
- Atjehspoorweg
- Atjehweg
- Gajoland
- Koeala Simpang
- Besitang
- Acheh demographic and economic survey (1935)
Source
DLP-84-Atjeh.pdf, pp. 8–9.