Sowing

Over three centuries ago, coffee came to Indonesia.

When the East Indiaman bearing the first few seedlings of coffee made landfall in Java, the drink was already old.

Ethiopians - and, per legend, their goats - had already come to enjoy the coffee plant by the 9th century; by the 16th, the Arabian peninsula had fully embraced its stimulating properties as the first public coffeehouses were built in cities like Mecca and Cairo. After a brief hiccup, in which Pope Clement VIII was obliged to convince local Venetian clergy that this curious new juice of life was in fact not "of Satan", Europeans were eager to secure their share of the brew.

So it was not long before the Dutch, shrewd and enterprising as always, smuggled a handful of seedlings east. After an unsuccessful attempt in India, the plants took root in the fertile soil of Java in 1699. Within scarcely a dozen years, their harvests were being auctioned in Amsterdam. What had taken centuries to travel from Ethiopia to Yemen, leapt to Indonesia and onto European tables in a single generation.

From this point in the story, the injustice stops being incidental and becomes policy.

The Dutch did not bring coffee to Java out of botanical curiosity. The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie — the VOC, that peculiar invention of early capitalism, part trading company, part sovereign state — wanted returns. And coffee, it turned out, returned more than handsomely. By the early 18th century, Javanese coffee had flooded the Amsterdam market so completely that it undercut prices from Yemen's established trade. The VOC, never ones to let a good monopoly go to waste, tightened their grip. Local rulers were coerced into delivery quotas; Javanese farmers, who had tended rice paddies and spice gardens for generations, found themselves growing coffee for their unwanted and unasked for masters.

When the VOC collapsed under the weight of its own corruption in 1799, one might have expected relief. Instead, the Dutch state simply picked up where the Company had left off — and, in 1830, refined the arrangement into something altogether more brutally systematic. They called it the Cultuurstelsel, the Cultivation System. The name, with its air of benevolent agricultural planning, belied something far uglier.

Under its terms, Javanese farmers were required to dedicate a portion of their land, officially a fifth often far more, to export crops chosen by the colonial government. Coffee was chief among them. The harvest went to the Dutch. The profit went to the Dutch. What remained for the petani, the farmers themselves, was often too little to live on. Rice paddies shrank. Famine followed. Between 1843 and 1848, entire regions of Central Java suffered catastrophic food shortages — not because the land or farmers had failed, but because of ruthless exploitation of the land and its people.