Labor, wages, and living standards in Java,
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P I M D E Z W A R T * A N D J A N L U I T E N V A N Z A N D E N **
*International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands, pza@iisg.nl
**Utrecht University, The Netherlands, jvz@iisg.nl
The development of living standards in Java has long been a subject of scholarly interest.
A number of scholars have suggested that between and Southeast Asian living stan-
dards declined significantly. The present article contributes to these issues by calculating
long-term real wages for Java between and , following Allen’s subsistence basket
methodology. New data on wages and prices were collected from the Dutch East India
Company (VOC) archives and connected to data on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The resultant long-term real wage developments show a slightly different picture of Javanese
living standards than that which has emerged from the literature to date.
. Introduction
Two recent debates in economic history have stimulated the study of comparative living stan-
dards in the past. A methodology for computing internationally comparable real wages has
been developed in recent years following the discussion on the Great Divergence between
Europe and Asia. This methodology was pioneered by Allen (). The divergence debate ini-
tially stimulated real wage comparisons for between Europe on the one hand, and China,
India, and Japan, on the other (Allen et al. ). The debate over the colonial origins of (under)
development has furthered investigation of real wages in many former European colonies in
Africa and the Americas (e.g., Allen et al. ; Arroyo Abad et al. ; Frankema and Van
Waijenburg ). Southeast Asia is an important region in both these debates. In his book
on the Great Divergence, Pomeranz (, pp. – and ) suggests life expectancy and
average income in parts of Southeast Asia between and the early nineteenth century
were on a par with (or better than) Europe. While Acemoglu and Robinson (, pp. –
) recently pointed to Southeast Asia as a region where the Europeans (mainly the Dutch)
introduced extractive institutions that led to “reversing development”.
While some studies on comparative standards of living in nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Java (Van Zanden ) and Indonesia (Baten et al. ; Foldvari et al. ) have appeared in
the past decade, consistent estimates of living standards from the seventeenth century do not
exist. The lack of data for the earlier period has obviously been the major obstacle.
Nevertheless, for more substantiated conclusions about the long-term development of living
standards on Java, and claims of “divergence” or “reversed development”, such evidence is
of vital importance.
How living standards developed in Southeast Asia in general and Java in particular is a subject
of some discussion. Reid (, ) suggested that Southeast Asian living standards declined
in the seventeenth century and Boomgaard (, pp. –) found a declining trend in real
wages in Java between and and suggests that this trend continued over the nineteenth
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