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"Tania Murray Li brilliantly combines the analytic rubrics of Foucault, Marx, and Gramsci to explain 'the will to improve' as an essential though poorly understood component of rule in Indonesia. This is not your grandmother's ethnography: the well-written chapters are packed with the conflicts, contestations, and uncertainties that characterize power relations. Deeply engaged with the processes and practices that shape peoples' lives, Li's book should be required reading for scholars interested in how power works and for development practitioners everywhere."--Nancy Lee Peluso, author of "Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java"

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THE WILL TO IMPROVE

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Acronyms............................................viiGlossary of Indonesian Terms................................ixAcknowledgments.............................................xiIntroduction: The Will to Improve...........................1Contradictory Positions.....................................31Projects, Practices, and Effects............................61Formations of Capital and Identity..........................96Rendering Technical?........................................123Politics in Contention......................................156Provocation and Reversal....................................192Development in the Age of Neoliberalism.....................230Conclusion..................................................270Notes.......................................................285Bibliography................................................337Index.......................................................367

Chapter One

This chapter explores two of the contradictions I outlined in the introduction, contradictions deeply embedded in the will to improve. The first is the contradiction between the promotion of capitalist processes and concern to improve the condition of the dispossessed. I examine how this contradiction played out through a series of governmental assemblages, each with its characteristic diagnoses and prescriptions, its preferred way of balancing profits, native welfare, and other "specific finalities." The second is the way that programs of improvement designed to reduce the distance between trustees and deficient subjects actually reinscribe the boundary that positions them on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide. This boundary is the contradictory foundation that makes colonial and contemporary improvement programs thinkable, anxious and doggedly persistent. Yet it is not self-evident. It is produced through situated practices that can be critically explored.

My examination in this chapter takes the form of a history of government, teasing out the problems that various authorities sought to address, the techniques they deployed, their contradictions, and their effects. It is an overview, covering in schematic form a period of two centuries (1800-2000), with particular emphasis on the island of Java, the focus of colonial attention before the Netherlands East Indies Empire was "rounded out" in the period 1900-1910. Subsequent chapters, focused on the highlands of Sulawesi, examine governmental programs of the colonial and contemporary periods at much closer range.

Although I have arranged the parts of the chapter in chronological order, this is not a narrative of governmentality rising. It is not the case that late colonial rule overcame the racism and despotism of earlier regimes, nor did independence bring all citizens into the nation on an equal basis. The governmental assemblage that took shape on Java early in the nineteenth century was far more optimistic about the capacity of Indonesians to develop their own capacities through a "normal" process of self-improvement than the assemblage that emerged under Suharto in the New Order, in which the boundary separating trustees from those they would know and improve was sharp indeed. Arguments about the racial superiority of Europeans, relatively inchoate for more than two centuries while the Netherlands East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) competed with other parties for a share and eventual monopoly of trade in the archipelago, became much more pronounced after 1800 when the Dutch crown assumed sovereignty. They were entrenched in separate legal systems and reached their peak under the ethical policy (1905-30), precisely the moment when the white man's burden of improving Native lives was most clearly enunciated. As I will show, this was also the period when the "otherness" of the Natives, their ineffable difference, was conceptually elaborated, empirically investigated, and made the basis for policies aimed to restore "tradition" and harmonious, Asiatic village life.

THE RIGHT TO RULE

As far as possible, the voc ruled indirectly. It reinforced the powers of local rulers so that they could extract more profits for themselves, and for the company, by intensifying existing systems of appanages, tax farms, forced labor, usury, and trading monopolies. In Java, it used Chinese as agents in its collection system. Its objectives were not governmental-it did not intervene in native lives in order to improve them or make them more secure. It reserved discipline for the population of the territory it ruled directly-a minute proportion of the territory that later became the Netherlands East Indies. Even then, it asserted detailed control only when this was necessary to maximize profits. The predominance of the VOC's extractive orientation is evident from its accounts. It paid stockholders an average of 18 percent per year for two hundred years (1602-1800), a return so high the company was eventually bankrupt.

The bankruptcy of the voc obliged the Dutch crown to assume direct responsibility for the Indies in 1800. Thereafter, Dutch authorities became more deeply involved in the lives of subject populations in some parts of the archipelago-namely Java, parts of Sumatra, and the northern tip of Sulawesi. Over much of the rest of the archipelago, Dutch rule remained nominal, taking the form of treaties and contracts with local rulers to protect Dutch commercial interests. Only in 1900-1910 did the Dutch establish territorial control over the entire archipelago by the extension of existing contracts in some areas, and direct military action in others.

The reasons for the territorial extension and intensification of Dutch rule around 1900 are the subject of debate. Although some historians have argued that the Dutch were obliged to consolidate their hold over territory to ward o competing colonial powers, others argue that the spheres of influence of Britain, France and the United States were stable by 1900, and Dutch interests were sufficiently protected by the British as arbiter mundi. The argument that commercial motives prompted intensification is persuasive for some parts of the archipelago but not others. Many expansionary ventures "made little sense in terms of economic profitability" and some were "financially disastrous." Costs could easily outrun returns. State-owned mines and plantations plus port duties added important sources of revenue, but European corporations paid little tax. Military ventures could be ruinously expensive, the prolonged Aceh War (1873-1903) a case in point.

Decisions about territorial expansion, argues Benedict Anderson, "were made in Batavia rather than The Hague, and for local raison d'etat." What were these reasons? By the end of the nineteenth century, Robert Elson observes, the "right to rule was no longer a function of divine anointing, or possession of the palace or regalia, but rather of secular efficiency, formalized order, and getting things done." Local rulers had always been awkward partners for the Dutch, routinely despised, critiqued, and sometimes unseated for their despotic ways and personal failings. What changed around 1900 was not the conduct of local rulers, but the practices and assumptions of the...