Java has a larger population than Russia. It's smaller than Japan but has a bigger population. It's nearly 8x denser than neighboring Sumatra. Why? Is it volcanoes? Trade? Immigration? colonization?
Tomas - Boy do I have the book for you. It turns out that none other than Clifford Geertz wrote a whole book (one of his most influential in fact) on exactly this subject. Like, literally exactly this subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Involution
Basically you are on the right track that it has to do with the social demography of rice production in that specific environment. You can go grow rice in a labor extensive (slash and burn) or labor intensive way (paddy based). Java and Bali are the most populated regions of Indonesia and they both are organized around sawah, or paddy based production. It turns out that rice responds to manual labor better than any other cereal crop. In other words, rice yields go up with the intensity of labor inputs, not literally infinitely but it can seem that way (think about people standing in a paddy transferring individual shoots of rice into the ground at very careful intervals and then tending that tiny paddy obsessively over months). Over time, as the farms get subdivided down through family succession the pressure on individual units of land to produce enough rice to sustain a nuclear family goes up. The response is to have more kids so that you can pour more labor into the paddy so that you can squeeze more rice out of it. More kids means more subdivision through succession, and so on and so on over many many generations.
I literally spent 1 week researching this independently, with basically no source summarizing everything, patching together everything myself—including reading obscure maps of soil quality—only to find this packaged in a 60yo book...
Thank you for the reco!
From what I can read in the Wikipedia article and the ChatGPT summary, the rice-feeds-ppl-feed-rice is indeed a big piece. I didn't know about the role of Dutch pressure, but that makes sense. But the summaries don't shed any light on the fertility of the different lands. For example, the slash-and-burn was more common in Sumatra, but AFAIK rice paddies were simply not viable there because of the soil, so this piece was not as much cultural, but geological.
Anyway, fascinating. Thanks for sharing! ChatGPT and I are having a debate about it right now :)
Jan 24, 2023·edited Jan 24, 2023Liked by Tomas Pueyo
It's been 20 years since I read the book but yes he does go into the colonial antecedents. I can't remember how that played into it. I also can't remember off-hand why Bali/Java went sawah while the other islands remained under swidden systems, whether it had something to do with the geological substrate or was somehow sociologically driven. I suspect the latter. One thing you have to remember re: fertility is that a big proportion of the labor inputs into the paddy under involution are precisely aimed at maintaining and feeding the productivity of the soil. This is done first through the engineering and maintenance of the paddy itself but then through careful collection and application of human and animal fertilizer (and unfortunately eventually synthetic fertilizers as well) and through the cultivation of symbiotic pisciculture in the paddy. The fish fertilize the paddy, eat pests (like mosquito larvae, for a start), and provide a supplementary source of protein for the family. The other thing to note of course is that not all these people are obviously able to stay on the land. They are constantly being spun off into nearby urban areas as surplus labor but the farms are still there with this built in logic to produce ever more people, or at least they are still there until they get eaten up by expanding urban settlement. Once it has built up that population density has an immense gravity to it. Even if the farms were totally dispensed with that huge urbanized population becomes a self-perpetuating mass that takes several generations to shrink, let alone dissipate. It's not surprising that many generations of policy efforts to induce resettlement to less settled (e.g. economically stagnant) islands have been unsuccessful. It's too hard, expensive, scary, etc. to move and what are the opportunities being offered, really? A contrast case can be found within China. I haven't done this at all and don't know anything certain about it but I'm sure that if you look into Southern Yunnan (i.e. the location of all the mind boggling pictures you've ever seen of endless minutely terraced rice paddies in China) you will find that a very similar process of agricultural involution was at play there for many generations, probably centuries. But it may be that Southern Yunnan does not still hold a disproportionately large-in-Chinese-terms population because China is such a huge ecosystem and the growth of China's coastal industrial zones has been so hot the last 30 years that yes, that rural surplus was drained away into other opportunity zones. Indonesia is no China, and what it does have in terms of an industrialized economy is concentrated in the same areas that produced the population surplus in the first place. Cheers - CS
Well, all that careful tending of rice paddies is done all over southern China, from Sichuan/Szechuan with its massive population in a basin to the 2 Hu’s (Hunan and Hubei) which produce 50% of China’s rice to the economically vibrant and historically rich Yangtze River delta (where Shanghai is). They just don’t need to terrace up mountains as they have more flat land.
Jan 25, 2023·edited Jan 25, 2023Liked by Tomas Pueyo
Reading through your comment, I can't help but reflect on the fact that the Netherlands, which colonized Java, is itself also known for quite intense agriculture and heavily engineering their environment in pursuit of their goals. So it makes you wonder if there is some causal link going in one direction or the other...maybe the Dutch already had the mindset of maximizing yields from a small area of land and then brought that approach to Java? Or going the other way, maybe this approach occured in Java and then it was brought back to the Netherlands by returning colonial officers or Javanese immigrants? Either way, it seems unlikely to me that this same model would have been followed if Java had been colonized by a less densly populated country e.g. Russia.
The volcanoes are the source of the rice. They make the land boggy as they extrude clay after baking it and reducing it to ash.
With the clay, the nutrient rich ash, full of iron, subsidises fishing as well as population grown, everything a simple family unit needs can be carved or woven locally if they have a source of nutrition. And can stop us English stealing it all.
As an Indonesian that live in Java Island. I approve this article.👍
Adding to that, Javanese people have a very polite character (not in japanese polite sense). Helping each other even stranger. If you go to java and ran out of money. You still going to survive because their hospitality.
I hope you will like my posts when I get started here. I would like to know a lot more about your weather, a closed book to me. I don't suppose you have any English language weather resources I can use?
Hello if you wanna ask about the weather here you can talk to me because I have an interest in metereology and happen to live in Java and been to many cities there too, for book I suppose there’s not any if I could remember correctly
This is my first read on Substack and I absolutely loved the way you shared the information with sources. I'm always intrigued with geography and maps so I will be bookmarking this and will go read your next article!
volcanoes in java do erupt every few years, on average every eight years and in the last 100 year is every 3 years, and lava isn't the thing that renew/fertilize the land, it's the volcanic ash that is carried by the wind for many kilometers from the erupting volcano
Jan 31, 2023·edited Jan 31, 2023Liked by Tomas Pueyo
What a great reading about Java! But I would like to "clarify" a bit that the "Borobudur was built by the Srivijaya" narration (Non-local Javanese kingdom) isn't really correct. After the founding and the reading of the Sojomerto inscription in Central Java, local historian experts start to believe that the Shailendra Dynasty—even if it was shadowed by the Srivijaya—was actually a local Javanese ruler. Hoping you can check out a lot more about Borobudur because this notion about who-built-it is currently on rise for our neighbor nation's supremacist propaganda.
Anyway, love this article. You've done such an excellent job, Tomas! Looking forward for your another work. Matur nuwun wis nyerat babagan Jåwå!
Fascinating read. Loved the maps. However, a little too dismissive of the historical reasons. Java has always (at least for millions of years) been volcanic and fertile, which doesn't explain the more recent population boom.
Historic trade routes were quite different. While Malacca was a historic trading port, it declined quite quickly when Europeans arrived. The Portuguese, who conquered it, had stiff competition from the English elsewhere in Malaya (and who would eventually set up Singapore as their trading base - and current centre for trade in the region. Malacca, meanwhile, never recovered) and, importantly, the Dutch.
Although it may not seem that way now, the Dutch were a colonial powerhouse during this period. They capitalised on the spice trade, wresting all control away from the Portuguese (except in far off East Timor) and keeping the English well off to the margins. Meanwhile, the Dutch had established their power base in Java, particularly their capital Batavia - now Indonesia's current capital and biggest city, Jakarta - and shifted the trade routes at the time through the nearby Sunda Strait.
While they did eventually conquer the rest of the archipelago, it's important to note that the Dutch consolidated their power and concentrated the development of their colonial empire from Java exactly over this period of population expansion. As spices declined in value and importance, the Dutch turned their attention to cash crops. Java, being so fertile, was perfect for this. So successful were their efforts at ramping up agriculture that Java is now synonymous with one of those cash crops, coffee.
Perhaps the real kicker is that the Dutch were so determined to squeeze every ounce of money out of their newfound cash crops that they even brought in the colonial policy of the Culture System, which forced farmers to produce crops for their colonial masters. Essentially indentured labour. The rapid rise in labour intensive agriculture required more people to work the land, which fed back into growing more rice, which provided more people, which required more rice, more people, more rice, etc. It became a cycle/spiral that spurred itself on until it created a population boom.
It was a combination, or confluence, of all these different reasons that the population exploded. You could argue that it would never have happened had the conditions and timing not been perfect.
I hear you, and you’re right that an article like this is by definition simplistic. A lot of what you say is true, but there’s a crucial underlying question: what was correlation and what was causation?
If the Dutch had caused Java, you would see a completely outsized growth in Java. But that’s not what the data says. I couldn’t find data before 1790 on population, but by then Java was already the most populated island in the archipelago. So the source of Java’s population advantage predates that date, and likely predates the Dutch too.
Another factor to consider is that the Javanese rice culture is very similar to that of southern China. But also similar to Bali and the Philippines in terms of density.
Bali was not the capital, but shares the volcanic land. So do the Philippines, which had a completely different overlord in the Spanish, who didn’t use it for staple crops at all.
All of this points to the fact that the Dutch probably pushed Java to be more productive (and populated) *because* it was fertile, not the other way around.
I just want to add about the Dutch. Formerly there was VOC who found shorter naval route from Cape Horn directly to Sunda Strait, in their effort to find the shortest route to Maluku (the spice island). The direct route from Cape Horn to Sunda Strait was the key advantage VOC had over their competitors. This was before Suez Canal was built.
They acquired Batavia (now Jakarta) as spice trade post. Later on they found Java's fertile soil, conquered Java, pushed the production.
Despite the colonial policing I think that if a culture is abused long enough it rends to get rid of its masters, either marrying them, or violently ending tyranny. If on the other hand, a simple political situation matures peacefully, colonialists tend to operate efficiently with international trade that all profit in.
I suspect that is the reason things worked out so well until the late 20th century and communists ruined it all. For everyone, everywhere!
Thanks for covering Indonesia, as a Javanese I found this article pretty accurate! I didn't realize how densely populated Java is until I visited other regions of Indonesia & other countries 😂
There are a lot of ricefields, forests, and remote villages here too so it don't feel that dense, especially if you live in the suburbs. It feels dense if you live in the bigger cities.
When I grew up in Wales UK; The population was about 16 people to the square mile. My people all had to migrate to English cities to work silly hours-o'clock until it was time to go home.
I always love your articles. I was just at Borobudur Temple this past weekend, though, and it’s solidly in Central Java, not on Sumatra, as the photo caption says!
Interesting article ! I live in Java myself and I found this article quite enlighting of why this island is crowded and I found some other new information about this island too. Because I do not know why Java has to be this crowded and become like a center of view in this country. Everything has to be compared to Java. It has the most educated people, it has best schools and universities, the most modern island, most biggest modern cities, but we are struggling with many problems like clean water, trash problem, land subsidence, bad air quality, etc. So yes it will be nice I think to reduce the density like transmigration program, but unfortunately larger part of Javanese has developed a culture saying 'mangan ra mangan kumpul' it means whether we have something to eat or not, we should stay together. So it will be hard for the program to run smoothly. It's just FYI though, nice article 👍
Borobudur Temple is located in Central Java. It was built when the Syailendra dynasty was in power in the ancient Mataram kingdom. it was not built by Sriwijayan. https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borobudur
So from the timing I guess it's the Singhasari that crossed the Indian Ocean and colonised Madagascar? I always thought it was fascinating that a civilisation would have the technology and population to do trans-oceanic colonisation centuries before the Europeans, yet stopped at a single Island.
It's also ironic that as you point out, much of the economic model that sustained the early European colonisations in that area was based on spices. We didn't have spices, and that gave demand for a high value per kg trade in Europe, which sustained the colonisations.
So if the Singhasari had not had such great spices right there, would they actually have colonised the world?
And as you can see there, they didn't stop at a single island, but did need better tech to reach islands farther out
You're asking an interesting question on the spices. Arguably no, because the Singharasi disappeared before the Portuguese could discover the region. But under what you're asking, there's another Q, which is: In a different world, could the cultures that have emerged in this part of the globe have conquered the world instead of the Europeans?
I'll have to think about that. One thing that was good from SE Asia is that there's so many islands, which is great for trade. But it's hard to create an empire with so many islands, which means it's hard to build a power center. As such, Europe, the Middle East, India, and China had an advantage.
I believe the Chinese under the Khans sent ships to Europe (Admiral XI there is no way for me to check as I am having to use Bing, ATM. and it is worse than Google Shadow Bans) but getting them through teredo worms and pirates was always the problem. World trade had to wait until the English developed copper sheathing and later creosote and the like, as anything unseasoned and treated would fall apart mid ocean. Most shipping anyway, had to wait for the Chronometer. Until then, coasting was the only way to keep your ship in the family until you retired.
Dear Thomas, as usual an interesting article, thanks. One notes however, that at the end the explanation is basically "“Java has many volcanoes and… something something fertile land. More food, more people.”
Flat terrain actually not good for rice farming. Paddy needs water in specific amount. Having flat terrain is bad for water management. Having flat terrain meaning the water have nowhere to discharged in heavy rain. It also means it's hard to reroute water when there's no rain.
Terracing mountainous terrain works better because water can be charged/discharged easily between terraces level. In heavy rain you can sacrifice the lower terraces. When there's no rain you can sacrifice the top terraces. On flat terrain you lose them all.
Terracing also reduce soil degradation and nutrient losses.
Tomas - Boy do I have the book for you. It turns out that none other than Clifford Geertz wrote a whole book (one of his most influential in fact) on exactly this subject. Like, literally exactly this subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Involution
Basically you are on the right track that it has to do with the social demography of rice production in that specific environment. You can go grow rice in a labor extensive (slash and burn) or labor intensive way (paddy based). Java and Bali are the most populated regions of Indonesia and they both are organized around sawah, or paddy based production. It turns out that rice responds to manual labor better than any other cereal crop. In other words, rice yields go up with the intensity of labor inputs, not literally infinitely but it can seem that way (think about people standing in a paddy transferring individual shoots of rice into the ground at very careful intervals and then tending that tiny paddy obsessively over months). Over time, as the farms get subdivided down through family succession the pressure on individual units of land to produce enough rice to sustain a nuclear family goes up. The response is to have more kids so that you can pour more labor into the paddy so that you can squeeze more rice out of it. More kids means more subdivision through succession, and so on and so on over many many generations.
Unbelievable.
I literally spent 1 week researching this independently, with basically no source summarizing everything, patching together everything myself—including reading obscure maps of soil quality—only to find this packaged in a 60yo book...
Thank you for the reco!
From what I can read in the Wikipedia article and the ChatGPT summary, the rice-feeds-ppl-feed-rice is indeed a big piece. I didn't know about the role of Dutch pressure, but that makes sense. But the summaries don't shed any light on the fertility of the different lands. For example, the slash-and-burn was more common in Sumatra, but AFAIK rice paddies were simply not viable there because of the soil, so this piece was not as much cultural, but geological.
Anyway, fascinating. Thanks for sharing! ChatGPT and I are having a debate about it right now :)
It's been 20 years since I read the book but yes he does go into the colonial antecedents. I can't remember how that played into it. I also can't remember off-hand why Bali/Java went sawah while the other islands remained under swidden systems, whether it had something to do with the geological substrate or was somehow sociologically driven. I suspect the latter. One thing you have to remember re: fertility is that a big proportion of the labor inputs into the paddy under involution are precisely aimed at maintaining and feeding the productivity of the soil. This is done first through the engineering and maintenance of the paddy itself but then through careful collection and application of human and animal fertilizer (and unfortunately eventually synthetic fertilizers as well) and through the cultivation of symbiotic pisciculture in the paddy. The fish fertilize the paddy, eat pests (like mosquito larvae, for a start), and provide a supplementary source of protein for the family. The other thing to note of course is that not all these people are obviously able to stay on the land. They are constantly being spun off into nearby urban areas as surplus labor but the farms are still there with this built in logic to produce ever more people, or at least they are still there until they get eaten up by expanding urban settlement. Once it has built up that population density has an immense gravity to it. Even if the farms were totally dispensed with that huge urbanized population becomes a self-perpetuating mass that takes several generations to shrink, let alone dissipate. It's not surprising that many generations of policy efforts to induce resettlement to less settled (e.g. economically stagnant) islands have been unsuccessful. It's too hard, expensive, scary, etc. to move and what are the opportunities being offered, really? A contrast case can be found within China. I haven't done this at all and don't know anything certain about it but I'm sure that if you look into Southern Yunnan (i.e. the location of all the mind boggling pictures you've ever seen of endless minutely terraced rice paddies in China) you will find that a very similar process of agricultural involution was at play there for many generations, probably centuries. But it may be that Southern Yunnan does not still hold a disproportionately large-in-Chinese-terms population because China is such a huge ecosystem and the growth of China's coastal industrial zones has been so hot the last 30 years that yes, that rural surplus was drained away into other opportunity zones. Indonesia is no China, and what it does have in terms of an industrialized economy is concentrated in the same areas that produced the population surplus in the first place. Cheers - CS
Well, all that careful tending of rice paddies is done all over southern China, from Sichuan/Szechuan with its massive population in a basin to the 2 Hu’s (Hunan and Hubei) which produce 50% of China’s rice to the economically vibrant and historically rich Yangtze River delta (where Shanghai is). They just don’t need to terrace up mountains as they have more flat land.
Reading through your comment, I can't help but reflect on the fact that the Netherlands, which colonized Java, is itself also known for quite intense agriculture and heavily engineering their environment in pursuit of their goals. So it makes you wonder if there is some causal link going in one direction or the other...maybe the Dutch already had the mindset of maximizing yields from a small area of land and then brought that approach to Java? Or going the other way, maybe this approach occured in Java and then it was brought back to the Netherlands by returning colonial officers or Javanese immigrants? Either way, it seems unlikely to me that this same model would have been followed if Java had been colonized by a less densly populated country e.g. Russia.
It is very possible.
A deep dive into the Netherlands is in my books. So I might look into it!
The volcanoes are the source of the rice. They make the land boggy as they extrude clay after baking it and reducing it to ash.
With the clay, the nutrient rich ash, full of iron, subsidises fishing as well as population grown, everything a simple family unit needs can be carved or woven locally if they have a source of nutrition. And can stop us English stealing it all.
As an Indonesian that live in Java Island. I approve this article.👍
Adding to that, Javanese people have a very polite character (not in japanese polite sense). Helping each other even stranger. If you go to java and ran out of money. You still going to survive because their hospitality.
I hope you will like my posts when I get started here. I would like to know a lot more about your weather, a closed book to me. I don't suppose you have any English language weather resources I can use?
Hello if you wanna ask about the weather here you can talk to me because I have an interest in metereology and happen to live in Java and been to many cities there too, for book I suppose there’s not any if I could remember correctly
Love the article. I can get "bachelor degree" with this LOL.
Really great article, simple yet detailed. Kudos!
You're welcome!
This is my first read on Substack and I absolutely loved the way you shared the information with sources. I'm always intrigued with geography and maps so I will be bookmarking this and will go read your next article!
It was a pleasure to read.
Very glad to hear!
volcanoes in java do erupt every few years, on average every eight years and in the last 100 year is every 3 years, and lava isn't the thing that renew/fertilize the land, it's the volcanic ash that is carried by the wind for many kilometers from the erupting volcano
Correct!
What a great reading about Java! But I would like to "clarify" a bit that the "Borobudur was built by the Srivijaya" narration (Non-local Javanese kingdom) isn't really correct. After the founding and the reading of the Sojomerto inscription in Central Java, local historian experts start to believe that the Shailendra Dynasty—even if it was shadowed by the Srivijaya—was actually a local Javanese ruler. Hoping you can check out a lot more about Borobudur because this notion about who-built-it is currently on rise for our neighbor nation's supremacist propaganda.
Anyway, love this article. You've done such an excellent job, Tomas! Looking forward for your another work. Matur nuwun wis nyerat babagan Jåwå!
Thanks, corrected!
I didn’t know about the polemic. Ugh.
Fascinating read. Loved the maps. However, a little too dismissive of the historical reasons. Java has always (at least for millions of years) been volcanic and fertile, which doesn't explain the more recent population boom.
Historic trade routes were quite different. While Malacca was a historic trading port, it declined quite quickly when Europeans arrived. The Portuguese, who conquered it, had stiff competition from the English elsewhere in Malaya (and who would eventually set up Singapore as their trading base - and current centre for trade in the region. Malacca, meanwhile, never recovered) and, importantly, the Dutch.
Although it may not seem that way now, the Dutch were a colonial powerhouse during this period. They capitalised on the spice trade, wresting all control away from the Portuguese (except in far off East Timor) and keeping the English well off to the margins. Meanwhile, the Dutch had established their power base in Java, particularly their capital Batavia - now Indonesia's current capital and biggest city, Jakarta - and shifted the trade routes at the time through the nearby Sunda Strait.
While they did eventually conquer the rest of the archipelago, it's important to note that the Dutch consolidated their power and concentrated the development of their colonial empire from Java exactly over this period of population expansion. As spices declined in value and importance, the Dutch turned their attention to cash crops. Java, being so fertile, was perfect for this. So successful were their efforts at ramping up agriculture that Java is now synonymous with one of those cash crops, coffee.
Perhaps the real kicker is that the Dutch were so determined to squeeze every ounce of money out of their newfound cash crops that they even brought in the colonial policy of the Culture System, which forced farmers to produce crops for their colonial masters. Essentially indentured labour. The rapid rise in labour intensive agriculture required more people to work the land, which fed back into growing more rice, which provided more people, which required more rice, more people, more rice, etc. It became a cycle/spiral that spurred itself on until it created a population boom.
It was a combination, or confluence, of all these different reasons that the population exploded. You could argue that it would never have happened had the conditions and timing not been perfect.
I hear you, and you’re right that an article like this is by definition simplistic. A lot of what you say is true, but there’s a crucial underlying question: what was correlation and what was causation?
If the Dutch had caused Java, you would see a completely outsized growth in Java. But that’s not what the data says. I couldn’t find data before 1790 on population, but by then Java was already the most populated island in the archipelago. So the source of Java’s population advantage predates that date, and likely predates the Dutch too.
Another factor to consider is that the Javanese rice culture is very similar to that of southern China. But also similar to Bali and the Philippines in terms of density.
Bali was not the capital, but shares the volcanic land. So do the Philippines, which had a completely different overlord in the Spanish, who didn’t use it for staple crops at all.
All of this points to the fact that the Dutch probably pushed Java to be more productive (and populated) *because* it was fertile, not the other way around.
I just want to add about the Dutch. Formerly there was VOC who found shorter naval route from Cape Horn directly to Sunda Strait, in their effort to find the shortest route to Maluku (the spice island). The direct route from Cape Horn to Sunda Strait was the key advantage VOC had over their competitors. This was before Suez Canal was built.
They acquired Batavia (now Jakarta) as spice trade post. Later on they found Java's fertile soil, conquered Java, pushed the production.
Despite the colonial policing I think that if a culture is abused long enough it rends to get rid of its masters, either marrying them, or violently ending tyranny. If on the other hand, a simple political situation matures peacefully, colonialists tend to operate efficiently with international trade that all profit in.
I suspect that is the reason things worked out so well until the late 20th century and communists ruined it all. For everyone, everywhere!
Thanks for covering Indonesia, as a Javanese I found this article pretty accurate! I didn't realize how densely populated Java is until I visited other regions of Indonesia & other countries 😂
There are a lot of ricefields, forests, and remote villages here too so it don't feel that dense, especially if you live in the suburbs. It feels dense if you live in the bigger cities.
When I grew up in Wales UK; The population was about 16 people to the square mile. My people all had to migrate to English cities to work silly hours-o'clock until it was time to go home.
I always love your articles. I was just at Borobudur Temple this past weekend, though, and it’s solidly in Central Java, not on Sumatra, as the photo caption says!
Thanks. Corrected!
Interesting article ! I live in Java myself and I found this article quite enlighting of why this island is crowded and I found some other new information about this island too. Because I do not know why Java has to be this crowded and become like a center of view in this country. Everything has to be compared to Java. It has the most educated people, it has best schools and universities, the most modern island, most biggest modern cities, but we are struggling with many problems like clean water, trash problem, land subsidence, bad air quality, etc. So yes it will be nice I think to reduce the density like transmigration program, but unfortunately larger part of Javanese has developed a culture saying 'mangan ra mangan kumpul' it means whether we have something to eat or not, we should stay together. So it will be hard for the program to run smoothly. It's just FYI though, nice article 👍
Don't sell you souls to the devil and globalism, you will end up eating your children like the Chinese do.
Very interesting and well-written article again, thanks! Nothing to add or comment, except that the Borobudur is on Java, not Sumatra ;-)
Borobudur Temple is located in Central Java. It was built when the Syailendra dynasty was in power in the ancient Mataram kingdom. it was not built by Sriwijayan. https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borobudur
I was going to write the same thing. The Borobudur Buddhist temple is in central Java. I've visited it, but I've never been to Sumatra.
Thanks. Corrected!
Perfectamente explicado y de forma muy amena. Gracias¡¡
A ti por leerlo!
Very cool visuals !! Thanks Tomas.
So from the timing I guess it's the Singhasari that crossed the Indian Ocean and colonised Madagascar? I always thought it was fascinating that a civilisation would have the technology and population to do trans-oceanic colonisation centuries before the Europeans, yet stopped at a single Island.
It's also ironic that as you point out, much of the economic model that sustained the early European colonisations in that area was based on spices. We didn't have spices, and that gave demand for a high value per kg trade in Europe, which sustained the colonisations.
So if the Singhasari had not had such great spices right there, would they actually have colonised the world?
Thanks!
Not sure? It depends what you mean by colonizing Madagascar.
In this article, I show how the first Malay settlement in Madagascar is from 500 AD
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/how-transportation-technologies-spread
And as you can see there, they didn't stop at a single island, but did need better tech to reach islands farther out
You're asking an interesting question on the spices. Arguably no, because the Singharasi disappeared before the Portuguese could discover the region. But under what you're asking, there's another Q, which is: In a different world, could the cultures that have emerged in this part of the globe have conquered the world instead of the Europeans?
I'll have to think about that. One thing that was good from SE Asia is that there's so many islands, which is great for trade. But it's hard to create an empire with so many islands, which means it's hard to build a power center. As such, Europe, the Middle East, India, and China had an advantage.
I believe the Chinese under the Khans sent ships to Europe (Admiral XI there is no way for me to check as I am having to use Bing, ATM. and it is worse than Google Shadow Bans) but getting them through teredo worms and pirates was always the problem. World trade had to wait until the English developed copper sheathing and later creosote and the like, as anything unseasoned and treated would fall apart mid ocean. Most shipping anyway, had to wait for the Chronometer. Until then, coasting was the only way to keep your ship in the family until you retired.
Dear Thomas, as usual an interesting article, thanks. One notes however, that at the end the explanation is basically "“Java has many volcanoes and… something something fertile land. More food, more people.”
Hahaha I guess that could be one reading!
Let me rephrase the "something something", which my editors told me to cut—they were right.
First statement: "Java has many volcanoes, which mean fertile soils, and hence lots of food and population."
Main issue with that: "Yeah but that makes a lot of assumptions in the middle that don't make sense to me:
- Sumatra is the same, and has a fraction of the population.
- Same thing for other islands.
- How fertile can it really be with hundreds of years of agricultural exploitation?
Final statement:
"- Sumatra is different because it has fewer volcanoes, more mountains, and a land that is old and leached.
- Other islands have either no active volcanoes, more than active volcanoes, or are very small and don't matter.
- Volcanoes replenish fertility through ash
- Actually yes, volcanic soil is that fertile."
Hope this makes sense
Flat terrain actually not good for rice farming. Paddy needs water in specific amount. Having flat terrain is bad for water management. Having flat terrain meaning the water have nowhere to discharged in heavy rain. It also means it's hard to reroute water when there's no rain.
Terracing mountainous terrain works better because water can be charged/discharged easily between terraces level. In heavy rain you can sacrifice the lower terraces. When there's no rain you can sacrifice the top terraces. On flat terrain you lose them all.
Terracing also reduce soil degradation and nutrient losses.