All too often the study of land tenure in agrarian states is treated either as a dimension of economic organization or, with respect to its more specifically formal characteristics, as pertaining to the sphere of law. With both approaches there is the danger of ignoring or at least underplaying the fact that the formulation and regulation of tenural arrangements is an expression of the political order of society. Paradoxically, familiarity with this idea has tended to limit its appreciation. Awareness of the ‘classic’ and explicit example of feudalism and its place in grand social theory may well direct attention away from the detailed examination of more diffuse forms of the relation between land tenure and political structures. Such a lack of interest is readily observable in the case of Thailand where the history of the relationship is both unusual and highly significant for the analysis of contemporary social change.

When in 1913 Count van Hogendorp edited the letters and papers of his ancestor Willem, who had served in Java as one of the secretaries of the Commissioner General Du Bus from 1825 to 1829, he characterized the early nineteenth century in Java as a time of ‘systems.’ His use of this word was not meant to be complimentary. Ancestor Willem had taken great pride in being the inspirational genius behind one such ‘system’; one, incidentally, which was not adopted.The characterization of the time seems to me particularly relevant as an opening wedge into the contents and theme of this paper, for all 'systems' relative to nineteenth-century Java had at their core the stimulation of export commodities derived from the agricultural process. A system, as I use the term here and as it was used by nineteenth-century policy planners, was an orderly andlogical arrangement of thoughts and objects into a complex .whole according to some scheme which drew its inspiration from fundamental economic and social principles. Such systems for Java were devised bypersons in positions of high authority either in Europe or in Java on the basis of what they had seen or heard about Java. Invariably the purpose of the system was to make the island of Java profitable to its European‘possessor’; the prevailing colonial theory holding that through treatyand conquest the European power had gained sovereign rights over the land and its people and should make use of them in accordance with its best judgment. Such judgment was embodied in a ‘system’ which hopefully provided benefits for both the possessor and the possessed.

IN the post-1857 decades of the nineteenth century, the British rulers of India controlled the vast territory and population of the Indian subcontinent (of the size and cultural diversity of Western Europe) under nearly ideal conditions of peace, stability and order. By this time as well, they could count on the active cooperation and loyalties of both old and new major indigenous elites in urban and rural India. The annual and decennial assessments of the ‘Moral and Material Progress of the Peoples of India’ recited to Parliament the areas in which appreciable progress had been made.On the material side, British policy makers in the latenineteenth century concentrated imperial or state resources in agricultural development. Their simultaneous, often conflicting, goals were soto improve the security and efficiency of food-crop production that they could eliminate or at the very least sharply diminish periodic drought-inspired dearth and famine mortality in the countryside. The other major goal was to develop substantial export crops—wheat, cotton,sugar, indigo, tea, coffee, opium, etc.—as income producers for thepeasant, the landlord and for the regime. To meet both objectives the Government of India directed its major resources into capital investment in public works: immense canal systems designed to improve andextend cultivation; railroads, to draw production from remote areas to the seacoast; breakwaters, warehousing, docks, navigational aids at the great port terminii to increase the speed and security and reduce the costof sea-borne exports. These public enterprises meshed with intricate structures of agency houses, export brokers, and commission agents,both British and Indian, who jointly penetrated to the most distant centers of cash crop production.

SINCE Malaysian independence over two decades ago, rubber production there has undergone a significant and far-reaching structural transformation, in social as well as economic dimensions. This transformation represented the outcome of policy responses to changing world market conditions for the export of natural rubber, which coincided with a political transition to independence and parliamentary government. In its response, government policy since the mid-1950s released many of the earlier administrative constraints on the spread of new rubber planting. The ensuing entrepreneurial re-awakening led to large-scale re-planting and new planting with high-yielding rubber. This increasingly widespread wave of technological innovation was accompanied by the dissolution of marginal estate enterprises, which was more than offset by a parallel expansion of peasant participation in rubber cultivation. Productivity and therefore producer incomes generally tended to improve, notwithstanding cyclical fluctuations in world rubber prices. Yet, by the middle 1970s this policy trend favouring technological cumentrepreneurial innovation appears to have altered direction. Indeed,recent Malaysian rubber policy indicates that structural transformation has run its course, at least for present intents and purposes. As will be seen, the current policy goal has reverted to protecting the newly established economic and social order in the Malaysian rubber planting against further pressures for developmental change.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the three Southeast Asian societies of Thailand, Burma, and Vietnam were confronted rather suddenly with a large and growing foreign demand for their principal product, rice. Without detailing the development of this demand, we may note that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European countries had begun not only to consume large amounts of rice as a cheap dietary staple, but also to make use of it in the brewing industry, as a supplement to wheat in flour products, as a starch for sizing textiles, and as feed for livestock. At the start of the nineteenth century, new milling and processing techniques enabled European consumers to look abroad for their rice needs, and the Indian provinces of Bengal and Madras and portions of the southern United States became major sources of supply. Towards the middle of the century, the Indian Mutiny and the American Civil War disrupted these sources at a time when improvements in transportation were making it possible for European importers to purchase their rice in even more distant areas, primarily Southeast Asia.

The economy which evolved during the last phase of Sri Lanka's colonial rule under the British (1796–1948) has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention in the recent years. Much of the writing which has emerged is descriptive by nature; the concern has been to lay bare the manner in which the economy took its shape and not to provide an analytical framework to explain the developments of the colonial era. This is not to say that conceptualizing has been wholly absent. Indeed, one particular conceptual treatment of the economy of British Sri Lanka has produced an interpretation which has gained wide currency and it has now acquired considerable influence over the economic literature concerned with the country.