Impact of the Gutta Percha Trade – Change and Challenge

chapter 8 Impact of the Gutta Percha Trade – Change and Challenge

As a rule, traders bringing down gutta get so pillaged on the road that barely half the amount originally started with reaches the station … from all accounts things are as usual in a very unsettled state in Ulu Trusan and numbers of complaints have been made …1 sarawak gazette, 1 March 1892 ∵

Continuing the analysis of who benefited and who suffered when local societies were drawn into the global economy, this chapter considers two quite different developments promoted by the rise of the gutta percha trade. One is at the commercial level in the mechanisms of trade. The trade encouraged the move to monetization – a hallmark of communities embracing the external economy. On the other hand, community relations were changed. Resource hostili- ties arose – a somewhat neglected aspect of regional history. The gutta percha ‘wars’ were disruptive to communities and even facilitated the cession of parts of Brunei territory to Sarawak. The findings set out in the chapter emphasize a violent aspect of this trade, and trade at the cross roads of local-external re- lationships. While monetization and warfare are at two extremes of trading interaction, the disparity between the two underlines the process of upheaval and the importance of local factors in the response to the process of change.

Monetization

At the end of the month … a party of nearly two hundred Dyaks [depart- ed] on a trading venture, and in search of work, jungle produce &c left … taking with them upwards of $10,0002 sarawak gazette, 1 Jan. 1890

1 Sarawak Gazette (hereafter sg), 1 March 1892, p. 56. 2 sg 1 January 1890, p. 12.

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Like many Southeast Asian societies, Sarawak communities relied mainly upon barter trade prior to interaction with the nineteenth-century global economy, and barter continued to be a key means of trade throughout the century.3 In parallel with the role of rice and cloth and other items in the barter trade de- scribed above, as Sarawak became more closely connected with the external economy, monetization came to occupy a greater role in the local trade net- work. This process had a chequered history, in part reflecting different cultural preferences in the forest economy, and also because of problems of shortages of currency supply. In some areas, wealth was still calculated in brass guns rather than currency.4 The Consular Report for 1863 noted that Dayaks near Kuching preferred payment in money to that in beads, gongs and other articles – while further away there was a shortage of currency and preference for beads, brassware and traditional forms of exchange.5 In 1875 the Resident in Upper Sarawak reported that very few groups paid their taxes in rice, as had tradition- ally occurred, but eked out their rice with money payments, raised by neglect- ing their farms and undertaking employment or seeking jungle produce.6 The bazaar was a focal point for monetization, indeed bazaars were neces- sary for monetization to develop. For example, at Oya, the Chinese bazaar was so successful by 1878 that traders introduced ‘ready money purchase’ as agents for Kuching bazaar merchants.7 Bazaar traders could handle larger amounts of produce when they had cash available. Cash was a useful addition to exchange of goods, particularly if there happened to be a shortage of goods to trade – as occurred during periods when trade in forest produce was brisk and bazaars sold out of the things that gutta percha collectors were interested in purchasing. Chew believes the arrival of Chinese traders in Sarawak provided an impetus for monetization; prompted, he believes, by the ‘relentless’ extraction of forest product by the indigenous population for sale to Chinese traders, with an in- creasingly sophisticated use of money as a medium of exchange.8 The Iban quest for jars, as suggested in Chapter 7, also contributed to the growing rise of a monetized economy in Sarawak, as Iban sought currency in order to purchase

3 See also W.G. Huff, ‘Bookeeping barter: Money, credit, and Singapore’s international rice trade, 1870–1939’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 26, 1989, pp. 161–189; R.A. Cramb, Land and Longhouse: Agrarian Transformation in the Uplands of Sarawak, Copenhagen, Nias Press, 2007, and D. Chew, Chinese Pioneers on the Sarawak Frontier, Singapore, Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1990. 4 sg 16 April 1875. 5 Consular Report on the Trade of Sarawak for 1863, bsp 1865 [3478], p. 30. 6 sg 17 August 1875. 7 sg 24 June 1878, p. 44. 8 Chew, p. 108.