ABSTRACT
With the arrival of the Portuguese and the Spaniards in the Indonesian Archipelago shortly after 1500, a large number of new crops, mostly originating in the Americas, were added to the existing repertoire. In this article, I deal with one subsistence crop, maize (corn), and one predominantly commercial crop, tobacco. Both crops spread rather rapidly and widely, and in many areas they came to play an important, sometimes even dominant, role in agriculture. By now, it would be as difficult to imagine every-day life in Indonesia without maize and tobacco as trying to think of a Europe without potatoes, or an Africa without cassava. Today, maize and tobacco are regarded as traditional Indonesian crops, and in some areas, such as Bengkulu [Sumatra] and Central Sulawesi, maize and/or tobacco have been incorporated in local myths of origin. 1 Claims once made for the Indonesian or Asian origin of both crops 2 have by now been refuted, but they clearly indicate that many people—Europeans and Indonesians alike—found it hard to believe that there had ever been an Indonesia without maize and tobacco.
