By the late nineteenth century, private companies and state authorities had transformed the East Coast of Sumatra, an agricultural region in the northwestern side of the Netherlands Indies, into a primary site for producing and testing global cash crops. Central to this intermingling of world commerce and colonial pursuit was how extractive practices reconfigured local environments in which living beings operated.
Underscoring architecture as key to the profound transformation, this dissertation traces the conversion of native land into industrial plantations and the creation of an extensive network of buildings sustaining commodity production. Each chapter explores a different type of space that speaks to the entanglement between spatial practices and resource extraction.
Chapter One attends to the formation of plantation fields that was characterized by the persistent appearance of soils and fires as both objects of control and modes of resistance. Chapter Two deals with efforts to make tobacco leaves uniform, which hinged on experimenting with cultivation techniques and reformulating the design of processing facilities. Chapter Three highlights the role of agricultural experiment stations deployed by trade associations to eliminate plant diseases and increase crop production. Chapter Four focuses on migration offices that were distributed in more than a hundred locations to maintain the influx of labor from China, India, and Java to the plantation estates in the region.
Analyzing primary sources—land concessions, planting maps, corporate photographs, technical drawings, and institutional reports, among other forms of documents—produced by plantation companies, trade associations, research institutions, and state agencies, this dissertation proposes that those spaces constituted a material practice that built commodities, thereby giving form to their appearances, amounts, categorizations, and other aspects that eventually contributed to their market values. Yet, amid the reordering of environments caused by the extractive process underlying commodity production, soils, fires, plants, microbes, and different groups of people also emerged across episodes as environmental actors, both informing and distorting those spaces.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/phxn-jt65 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Honggare, Robin Hartanto |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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