Throughout colonial Indonesia, a common method to determine a boy’s taxable age was to loop a rope around the chest. If the boy’s head fitted through this loop, his chest was still too small and he was too young; if not, he owed the government tax. Analysing unique archival sources from across Indonesia, this book shows how such pragmatic, locally embedded methods often overshadowed formal tax procedures, which colonial officials advanced as civilizing instruments of modernisation and statepower. It exposes taxation as a process in which improvisation, indigenous customs and everyday negotiations tied together formal regulations and ordinary local realities. A must-read for historians of empire in and beyond Southeast Asia, the book reshapes our understanding of colonial governance, challenging grand theories of colonial state formation by revealing the practicalities of everyday colonial rule and the agency of local actors manipulating the system from within.

This article traces Hacking's "looping effect" in colonial policies and practices of taxation, coerced labour, and governance in Indonesia. It argues that knowledge production for the purpose of taxation was a two-way, interactive process which was in particular influenced by complexes of local indigenous social organization, institutions, mentalities, and behaviour as expressed through adat (Indonesian systems of political-social norms and customary law). Such patterns and systems, the article reveals, were internalized into and started working reciprocally with colonial policy, knowledge production, and administrative practices. Taxation made up and changed people, but underlying strategies to categorize and "make known" subjects were also recognized and actively used, evaded, or influenced by these subjects and by local intermediaries. Consequently, colonial knowledge created an institutional framework that reoriented the self-perception of these subjects and intermediaries, which then changed and reconditioned popular responses to the colonial state. Systems of colonial knowledge were thus modified to eventually fit the realities they were supposed to describe, influence, and legitimize, creating a looping effect between colonial, "made up," and actual social realities.

This article explores colonial interpretations of indigenous customary law traditions in nineteenth and early twentieth century Central Java and West Sumatra during Dutch colonial rule. It argues that colonial knowledge production on and attempts at manipulating customary law interacted with indigenous responses to these attempts, generating a plurality of contentious and contested interpretations of customary legal order. Beneath the surface of the tightly knit colonial schemes of supposedly codified 'customary law', these interactions generated a reality of law-making that significantly deviated from initial intentions and concepts of judicial involvement as outlined on paper, thereby engendering novel forms of legal pluralism.

This article discusses the different uses of mandatory labour services, or corvee labour, in nineteenth and twentieth century Indonesia. While slave labour, coerced cultivation and other forms of involuntary colonial labour have been elaborately studied, these much more pervasive and diverse types of mandatory services have not yet received the attention they deserve. The article argues that in Indonesia corvee labour became foundational to the exercise of modern colonial governance and the organization of the colonial state and its fiscal capacity, so foundational, in fact, that it impeded much of the aspirations of colonial civil servants to replace coerced services with monetary taxes. Studying corvee, it shows, elucidates otherwise hidden strategies and practices of the organization of colonial statecraft and governance. As such, corvee labour played a pivotal role in how colonialism unfolded and was experienced.

Colonial deficiencies. Explaining inequality and exploitation in the Dutch East Indies from a practical-administrative perspective This article explores Dutch colonial policy, inequality and exploitation through the prism of practical issues of governance. It draws upon examples from the richly documented history of coerced labour and taxation in Indonesia to argue that colonial policy and resulting forms of exploitation, inequality and malpractice were not simply enacted from the heights of bureaucracy, but constructed on the spot, in daily realities shaped by local circumstances and the responses (rather than the initiatives) of local civil servants to complex governmental issues. For these local officials, striving to maintain balanced budgets and keeping up the overall facade of a stable and successful administration took precedence, which they were rarely able to unite with grander ambitions of governance. Therefore, the consequences of colonialism and how it was experienced should not solely be explained by what colonizers achieved and accomplished but also by their failures and errors, and by what they did not achieve.

Recently, new strands of literature have given impulse to the study of global fiscal history and ‘New Fiscal History and Sociology’,1 which has also spawned renewed interest in the role of taxation in the establishment of colonial empires.2 Surprisingly however, metropolitan and colonial tax regimes are seldom seen through the same reference framework. We demonstrate that colonial and metropolitan tax systems developed in an intertwined way, and that fiscal ideas moved freely through empires. Exemplifying the introduction of taxes in the Netherlands and its colony in present-day Indonesia, the Dutch East Indies, we highlight how metropolitan and colonial tax regimes intertwined, copied from, overlapped with and depended on each other and developed in tandem with one another, demonstrating how important. © The editors and contributors severally 2023.

This chapter investigates the colonial tax system in Indonesia under Dutch rule. It demonstrates how in contemporary colonial logic, taxation, socio-economic development, and equality were seen as intrinsically connected. Taxation, and integrated systems of coerced labour, were presented as important pillars in colonial ‘civilisational’ projects of state formation, governance, and bureaucratisation. Far from simple extractive instruments deployed to fund empire, taxes were seen as integral administrative and disciplinary instruments to enhance economic centralisation, equality, capitalisation, monetisation, and the political transformation and reorganisation of colonised societies. The monetary tax system was designed to curtail the exploitative character of previous systems of labour exploitation and distribute the tax burden more equally among colonised populations across the archipelago. However, the limited capacity and considerable dependence of the Dutch administration on local rulers obstructed the supposed transformative power of taxation. Tensions between colonial policy and practice were resolved on the spot through negotiation, rendering a weak institutional infrastructure and preventing the emergence of a transparent and just bureaucracy, which ultimately only enhanced political and fiscal inequality.