SUBJECTS, LAWMAKING AND LAND RIGHTS: AGRARIAN REGIME AND STATE FORMATION IN LATE-COLONIAL NETHERLANDS EAST INDIES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Upik Wira Marlin Djalins August 2012 © 2012 Upik Wira Marlin Djalins SUBJECTS, LAWMAKING AND LAND RIGHTS: AGRARIAN REGIME AND STATE FORMATION IN LATE-COLONIAL NETHERLANDS EAST INDIES Upik Wira Marlin Djalins, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 In this dissertation I interrogate colonial state formation in the Netherlands East Indies between 1870 and 1939, using the lens of land appropriation sanctioned by colonial laws. Drawing on archival sources from the Netherlands and Indonesia, I dissect the constitution of the colonial agrarian regime as a distinctive project of state- making in which the colonizer and the colonized actively participated. My key objective is to foreground the role of the colonized subjects and the autonomy of their enunciations and strategies in the everyday making of “the state,” a contrast with many accounts of state-making in the Netherlands East Indies. I argue that the constitution of the colonial agrarian regime involved not only lawmaking, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the making of subjects. I also argue that it was human agents having myriad forms of association with state institutions who carried out these practices, such that they blur the boundary between “the state” and “subjects.” Drawing on Abrams and Foucault, I focus on a number of critical subject—Native intellectuals, Dutch planters, and Native and Indo-European politicians among others—and their discursive battles to showcase how the complex relations of state formation and practices unfold. This focus, away from the state as a reified object of study and into the various processes of state-making, offers an understanding of the tensions and convergences between the colonizers and the colonial subjects. Training the gaze upon colonial subjects renders visible a process of colonial state formation that was not consisted of a continuous stream of one-way domination. Rather, colonial state formation emerges as pulsations of power—one moment contracting, the next expanding—and as interplays of power rife with ambivalence and contestations in which a wide spectrum of the colonized subjects played indispensable roles. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Section removed at author’s request, April 2018. DEDICATION iii For Sidi Yaseen Samara Chitre iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Section removed at author’s request, April 2018. v Section removed at author’s request, April 2018. vi Section removed at author’s request, April 2018. vii Section removed at author’s request, April 2018. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ......................................................................................... iii DEDICATION .............................................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................. v TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................. ix LIST OF MAPS ............................................................................................................ xii LIST OF TABLES ...................................................................................................... xiii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ..................................................................................... xiv INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 About the Dissertation .............................................................................................. 4 Theoretical Anchor ................................................................................................... 7 Studying the Elusive State .................................................................................. 8 Theorizing Colonial State ................................................................................. 11 Law and Colonialism ........................................................................................ 15 Colonial Legal Provisions on Land ............................................................ 16 Subjectivity and Agency ................................................................................... 20 Training the Gaze in Two Regions of Java ............................................................ 22 The Volksraad and Colonial Lawmaking ......................................................... 31 Outline of Dissertation ........................................................................................... 34 A Note on the Terms Used ............................................................................... 36 CHAPTER 1: Legal Education in Late-Colonial Indonesia: Subject Formation, But Not Quite ............................................................................................................... 38 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 38 The Beginning: The Rechtsschool 1909–1928 ....................................................... 42 Between Intellectual and Moral Responsibility ............................................... 43 Technologies of Subject Formation .................................................................. 46 The Paradox of Moral Education ..................................................................... 49 Studying Law in the Metropole: Leiden University United Faculty of Law and Letters .............................................................................................................. 54 Academic Statuut 1921: The Foundation for the Netherlands East Indies Law Study ................................................................................................... 55 The Netherlands Indies Law Curriculum at Leiden ......................................... 57 Subject Formation or Self-Constitution? .......................................................... 61 Dawn in the Colony: Batavia Rechtshoogeschool ................................................. 65 Teach Them No Latin ....................................................................................... 67 Paul Scholten and the Curriculum Development for the Batavia Rechtshoogeschool ..................................................................................... 70 Reactions in the Local Newspapers .................................................................. 75 The Rechtshoogeschool in Action .................................................................... 78 Discursive Spillover: Legal Discourse among the Native Population ................... 81 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 84 ix CHAPTER 2: Becoming Wadoeng West: A Short, Entangled Biography of Land in Banjoewangi, East Java ............................................................................................ 88 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 88 The Law Made the Land ......................................................................................... 90 Agrarian Laws in the East Indies ............................................................................ 94 Becoming Wadoeng West .................................................................................... 102 The Men Made the Law: Wadoeng West in the Volksraad ................................. 110 Reports from Besoeki and the Binnenlands Bestuur’s Last Say .......................... 117 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 122 CHAPTER 3: Constituted Subject and Autonomy: Soepomo, Adat Land Rights, and Agrarian Reorganization in Surakarta, 1900–1920s ............................................ 126 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 126 Colonial Subjects as “Active” Natives ................................................................. 128 The Making of Soepomo ...................................................................................... 132 Constructing Native Land Rights Using Adat Law .............................................. 140 The Invention of Adat Law ............................................................................ 141 Van Vollenhoven’s Basic Structure of Adat Land Rights .............................. 143 Agrarian Reorganization in Surakarta, 1912–1924, through the Eyes of a Native Scholar ...................................................................................................... 147 Building an Argument: Four Processes in Surakarta Agrarian Reorganization .......................................................................................... 150 Javanese Ethics at Play ............................................................................. 151 Four Stages of the Reorganization ........................................................... 154 Exposing Colonial Hidden Agenda ................................................................ 158 Critiquing the Principalities’ Mimicry ..........................................................