ABSTRACT
The initial practice of permitting peasants to plant coffee near to their homes had the advantage that they could combine the work of tending to the new crop with what had always been their priority: producing food for their own subsistence. Using the balubur – the regents’ own fields – for the compulsory cultivation of coffee, with their subjects coming in turn to the main negorij from near and far, could also be interpreted as a continuation of existing relations of servitude. But the progressive rise in production towards the end of the eighteenth century led to this system being revised. The peasants indicated that there was no more land around their homes to grow more coffee or claimed that these fields were depleted through over-use (De Haan III, 1912: 610). More important than the lack of space in and around the peasant settlements was the fact that it was impossible for the Commissioner and his small staff of coffee sergeants to conduct regular inspections of the numerous and widely scattered plots of land. Both problems made it necessary to organize the cultivation of coffee along different lines, moving it to more remote, as yet uncultivated, land. The objection that the new coffee gardens were further from the settlements was outweighed by the advantage that there was ample space to expand into the forest around them, as they were far from any human habitation and land already in regular use to grow food.
