ABSTRACT
Early accounts of Dutch expansion overseas describe the rule of the Javanese princes as feudal. Use of this term is, however, based not on an in-depth study of indigenous social organization, but suggests a rather loose parallel with the agrarian order in Medieval Europe, with princes, vassals and subject peasants as the main actors. Burger, for example, described a social landscape populated by subsistence and village-based households supplying goods and services to the feudal nobility (Burger I 1975: 33). Van Leur rectified this viewpoint by arguing that the structure of power in the large Javanese principalities was different from what was understood under feudalism in Europe. The difference lay mainly in the way in which power was exercised, rather than in how the peasants were coerced into providing goods and services. Van Leur follows Max Weber in describing the pre-colonial state in the interior of Java as patrimonial-bureaucratic. It was a regime in which sovereignty and the right to property were concentrated in the person of the king. Family members and a chain of favourites shared in the king’s rule, without ever being entitled to use their positions of eminence to claim any independent authority or legal security. Their main tasks were to collect tributes and to mobilize military and labour power for the monarch (Weber 1922: 679-723). More recent authors have also characterized these societies as patrimonial (including Schrieke I: 169-221; B. Anderson 1972: 8-22 and 33-43). Wittfogel suggested a different model referred to as ‘oriental despotism’ to describe the specific nature of the early agrarian civilizations in Asia. The strongly centralized despotic rule of the king was founded on large-scale irrigation works constructed with peasant labour. This is a variant of the theory of the Asian mode of production that Tichelman applied to pre-colonial Java (Tichelman 1975; see also P. Anderson 1974: 462-549).
