The story so far has concerned a young ‘Scotch adventurer’, as he styled himself, arriving first in London and subsequently in Dutch-controlled Java in search of a financial ‘independency’ that would compensate for the lack of material resources of the Highland gentry family into which he was born. In London, he had been no more than a clerk (albeit it a privileged one, since his employers were also closely connected socially with his own kith and kin) in an East India house in the City. Java, where he had arrived in that house's employ in 1820, seemed to offer altogether better possibilities. Breaking with the London house and the trajectory of subordinate employment that they had envisaged for him, he set up as a coffee-planter in the island's interior, using a minute amount of capital provided (however unwittingly) by his maternal uncle.

Within less than two years of his arriving in Batavia, however, Maclaine's plantation, and the commercial ventures associated with it, had already reached a sufficiently parlous state to force him to re-connect with his erstwhile London employers and their Calcutta associates on terms that they dictated. Meanwhile, in Java itself, and as we saw in the previous chapter, his stake in the coffee ‘industry’ was threatened on a number of fronts by the Dutch colonial government's suppression of the lease-hold system on the basis of which his plantations had been established, and by the outbreak two years later in 1825 of a major insurrection against the Dutch in the area of south central Java where his operations were located.

It is improbable nonetheless that Maclaine could have anticipated what was actually in store for him. Between 1820 and 1827 he first dallied with the idea of setting up as a merchant in Batavia and then established himself as a deeply impecunious coffee-planter in the mountains of central Java. Subsequent to that, his investment there was placed in jeopardy by the hostility of the Indies government and threatened with destruction in a major colonial war. Moreover, as if that were not enough, he had to contend with commercial hazards that had to do, among other things, with a very significant curtailment of the import of British cottons into Java, with the rapacity of his overseas partners and with the spectacular default of a key associate on Java itself.

Maclaine arrived in Batavia in July 1820 aboard the ship Mary Anne, together (as we have just seen) with a cargo of cotton piece goods dispatched by the East India house for whom he had been working in London. Founded in its colonial form by the VOC early in the seventeenth century, Batavia was at one time an essentially Chinese city flying a Dutch flag. When Maclaine arrived there, it had long ceased to be that, but was still a city with a large and commercially dominant Indies-Chinese (in modern parlance, Chinese- Indonesian) minority made up both of recent arrivals and of families who had been long settled there. It was merchants from this group of Batavia's ethnically and culturally very mixed population with whom most of the recently arrived Maclaine's business dealings took place. Maclaine also found himself, however, among a small community of European merchants, the majority of them British – a legacy (as we have seen in an earlier chapter) of the British occupation of the island from 1811 until 1816 by East India Company forces during the later stages of the Napoleonic Wars.

It is to this context that the present volume is addressed, in so far it relates to an individual – and the enduring mercantile firm that he helped found – whose career was enmeshed not only in maritime empire in Southeast Asia but also in some of the early nineteenth-century world's most dynamic commodity chains. As such, it constitutes a history of the nexus between a particular person and a complex and evolving commercial system that was both imperial and global. The focus is on the young émigré Scot Gillian Maclaine and his activities as a trainee in a London ‘East India’ mercantile house and subsequently in colonial trade and plantation in the erstwhile Netherlands Indies (present-day Indonesia) – and on the island of Java in particular – during the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

The book is more than a biography, however, since the story of Maclaine's activities as both merchant and planter intersects with key debates about the dynamics of Western imperialisms in Asia; the imperatives of commodity chains and the character of ‘diaspora’ commercial networks; and the associated – and problematic – nexus between colony and metropole. It is distinctive in that it essays an in-depth, ‘micro-level’ account of developments that are known to historians primarily on a broad ‘macro-level’. Some similar studies exist in relation to European mercantile activities in the Indian sub-continent and China during the nineteenth century. However, none have been essayed hitherto in relation to the Southeast Asian region in which Maclaine operated during the period with which the present study is concerned.

Maclaine was a major, yet a now virtually unknown, figure and the creator in the 1820s of a European mercantile network in Asia, centred on the Batavia (Jakarta) firm of Maclaine Watson, that long outlasted its founder. It became, over the century and a half of its existence, one of colonial Indonesia's key commodity traders and, as such, very heavily involved in the trade in sugar that constituted the single most valuable of the Java's exports and secured the Netherlands Indies a position at the apex of the huge international market for this form of sweetener. It was a formidable record, but a poorly documented one.

The commercial network that Gillian Maclaine established in Southeast Asia was part of what has been identified as an ‘… expatriate maritime business community that was deeply embedded in … imperial territories’. Nonetheless, the commodity chains – coffee, cotton goods and (most probably) opium – in which Maclaine Watson was enmeshed were global as well as imperial in character, and the dynamics that drove their commercial (and plantation) ventures had at least as much to with world markets as with ‘empire’ per se. At same time, moreover, the Maclaine Watson network remained a partnership of family businesses whose structure set it apart from a dominant contemporary trend (if such indeed it was) toward the evolution of the ‘visible hand’ of a centralised, formal hierarchy of impersonal control and management. One closely associated characteristic was that the network likewise remained outside the web of metropolitan control and direction that, classically, constituted a hallmark of late-era imperialism. Instead, the network's continued existence for well over a century after its founder's death not only demonstrates the vitality and relative autonomy of developments on the so-called ‘colonial periphery’. It also underscores, while complicating somewhat, a variety of ongoing analyses of the long-term significance of the intra-Asian mercantile activity (as distinct from bilateral, inter-continental trade between Asia and ‘the West’) in which the network was predominantly engaged. On these several counts, it can be argued that Gillian Maclaine left behind him a quite singular enterprise.

A Network of Family Firms and the Scots’ Diaspora

Gillian Maclaine became the co-founder of Maclaine Watson in Batavia in 1827, when the new firm supplanted the earlier business of Gillian Maclaine & Co., in which he had been partner with associates in London and Calcutta. The new firm had no such ties, but was closely linked in Southeast Asia with two other firms in Java and one in Singapore, all three of which Maclaine had played some part in establishing. The resultant Maclaine Watson ‘network’ – in Batavia Maclaine Watson itself, McNeill & Co. in Semarang, Fraser Eaton in Surabaya and Maclaine Fraser in Singapore – functioned throughout is existence as a network of mercantile firms with interlocking memberships but with no obvious ‘head office’. To a remarkable degree, it remained a partnership of family businesses in which many but by no means all the partners came from inter-related Scots families.

Gillian Maclaine boarded a Dutch frigate, the Anthony, in Rotterdam in the middle of February 1832, and after what he reckoned to be a relatively swift passage to the Indies, arrived off Batavia early in June. For Maclaine personally, and for the business that he had co-founded in Batavia some five years earlier, the voyage was a momentous one. At one and the same time, he found both a wife and a very substantial entry into Dutch official circles in the colony.

Maclaine's projected marriage to Catherina van Beusechem had been the subject, so it would appear, of considerable heart-searching on her future husband's part (of her own feelings, little has survived beyond a formulaic letter to her mother-in-law). There was, of course, the matter of the disparity of their ages, ‘she being only 18 and I alas! nearly 34 – nearly double hers’. More to the point, would his family at Ardtornish be dismayed that he had not married a fellow Scot?

By 1816 Gillian Maclaine, the man who went on to found Maclaine Watson, was in his eighteenth year. The elder child of an impoverished Highland laird, Allan Maclaine of Scallastle, he faced a common enough problem among those of his kind. The island of Mull, where his father had inherited a problematic claim to a small estate, together with the peninsula of Morvern on the adjacent mainland, was an economy and society in transition. Large-scale sheep farming was replacing crofter-rents and military service as the basis for the tenuous prosperity of the island's small gentry elite. This posed problems for young men like Maclaine. Several of his paternal uncles had served in the British army, and a well-deserved reputation for military valour, in tandem with a presumably suitably dashing manner in Regency London, had brought two of them the prize of a rich wife. But the war with Napoleon was over and for the younger generation there were no similar opportunities. In this sense, and disregarding personal proclivities, it was no accident that Maclaine's only sibling went into the Church and that his foremost cousin, Donald Maclaine of Lochbuie, followed him into business. Nor did Maclaine's own immediate family circumstances make his prospects any more promising.

His father had been declared insane in 1800, two years after Gillian's birth and was to spend the remainder of his long life (he died in 1842) in an asylum near Edinburgh. In his absence, Gillian and his brother Angus were brought up by their mother, Marjory Gregorson and her as yet unmarried brother, John Gregorson of Ardtornish. John Gregorson was a man of some substance, like his father before him taksman or bailiff and rent-collector for the Duke of Argyll in this part of the western Highlands.

Gillian Maclaine (he spelled his first name that way throughout his life) lightheartedly styled himself early in his career in the East as a ‘Scotch Adventurer’. Yet, this was too modest a designation for an individual who went on to found a major and enduring mercantile business in colonial Indonesia and who, when he first arrived on the island of Java at the beginning of the 1820s, was both well educated and had several years of commercial experience behind him in the UK. Like many of his European counterparts, his career located him in the realms of Western empire-building in nineteenth-century Asia. More specifically, as we shall see, like so many of his British contemporaries, his own personal trajectory was framed within the context of the ongoing history of the British East India Company (EIC) that formed a ubiquitous presence in the world in which Maclaine operated. Even so, his location there was distinctive – though hardly unique – in so far as his activities as both merchant and planters straddled two very different empires: the British one from which he heralded and the Dutch one in the Netherlands Indies where he worked and settled. The imperial context in which he was enmeshed, however, was integrated with a global one that, in part, subsumed it.

For Maclaine was not only positioned, at times somewhat awkwardly, along one of the nineteenth century's (lesser) imperial fault lines. At least as crucially, he was positioned along commodity chains that extended between the Americas, Europe and the heartlands of Asia and whose key dynamics, though far from independent of ‘empire’, nonetheless exhibited a substantial degree of autonomy from it. At the same time, however, Maclaine's engagement in commodity chains is easily misunderstood, particularly so, indeed, if those chains are viewed (predominantly or exclusively) in terms of a ‘World System’ that subordinated a (colonial) ‘periphery’ of raw material production to a (metropolitan) manufacturing ‘core’.

In fact, Maclaine's activity on the colonial ‘periphery’ of empire complicates significantly any notion that he was thereby subservient to, or simply the agent of, metropolitan ‘core’ interests in whatever form. His career in the Indies certainly started that way.

In the mid-1880s, when most sugar manufacturers in Java were in extremis on account of a sudden and dramatic fall in world sugar prices, an apologist for the industry published a book in Amsterdam under the polyglot title of Suikerlords [Sugar lords]. It was a spirited defence of Java's sugar manufacturers and traders, whose purportedly profligate behaviour over the preceding years was widely blamed for the financial predicament in which they now found themselves. Yet the book was no mere polemic, since it drew on the author's extensive experience of the Indies over the preceding twenty or more years, and came from the pen of a man who was wellknown and respected in Dutch business circles. He had been the founder, a few years earlier, of the Koloniale Bank, an enterprise that became one of the major pillars of the Java sugar industry for the next half-century of its colonial-era existence. The title that Jan Hudig had chosen was deliberately ironic. Indeed, the whole point of his account was to establish the solid bourgeois rather than quasi-'Asiatic’ or seigniorial credentials of the Indies sugar manufacturers who had dominated the Java industry over the last few decades. It was to their formidable accumulation and investment of capital that he now he sought to draw attention (and to which we shall return later in the chapter).

Despite the efforts of Hudig (and, until recently, very few others), the colonial or 'Indies’ bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century Java have enjoyed a mixed history. Indeed, according to some accounts they scarcely figured at all. Rather, the bourgeoisie were judged to have been marginal to projects for large-scale commodity production in the colony, since such projects continued to be masterminded by the Indies state through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This judgement is simply wrong. Between the 1840s and 1880s, Java sugar had been transformed (as we have seen) by an industrial project, grounded in the state's commandeering of land and labour and, initially, by the state's direct provision of finance. Contrary to some lingering notions about the dynamics of capital in Java in the mid-nineteenth century, however, this industrial project was closely linked to the spawning of a bourgeoisie, without whom it would scarcely have reached the stage of development that it did.