Introduction

Over the past two thousand years, Eastern Indonesia has witnessed the emergence of numerous coastal ports, entrepôts, and cities. At the crossroads of maritime trade routes, coastal settlements represented highly dynamic and diverse communities.¹ In the complex multi-ethnic fabric of coastal hubs, interchanges between colonial powers, migrant merchants, and indigenous groups have led to unique pathways of sociocultural and economic change that are relevant to understanding current challenges in eradicating poverty and fostering economic growth.² In Indonesia at large, trajectories of (under)development and low rates of industrialisation have been chiefly interpreted as the outcome of a combination of factors, including Dutch colonial intervention, outdated traditional institutions of land and resource management, and the interests of private international firms.³ Within this rationale, environmental and economic history studies have mainly explained the role of entrepôts through a centre–periphery approach.⁴ Coastal towns are seen as part of larger systems and their economic activities and social lives are dramatically shaped in their development by their position within more extensive maritime networks and their relation to inland societies.⁵ Such a perspective has driven the studies of coastal settlements in Eastern Indonesia and Southeast Asia.⁶ Yet this approach tends to simplify the local processes of power formation and economic growth in many of these “peripheries”, disregarding their distinctive paths.⁷

Several assumptions, which have been recently challenged,⁸ are critical to centre–periphery development models. First, colonial powers often play a considerable role in shaping entrepôts and port towns by controlling and monopolising commerce.⁹ For example, in the case of Eastern Indonesia, the dominance of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the spice trade and the trade in other high-value commodities is invoked to account for the lack of advancement of what is deemed non-profitable regions and towns.¹⁰ Many settlements and ports, such as Ende and Solor along the Savu Sea, a secondary maritime route connecting Timor, Flores, and Solor with the trade centres in Malacca, Singapore, and Makassar, fall within this category. A revised account, however, indicates that it is within these contested areas that piracy and slave trading remained rampant well into the nineteenth century.¹¹ Challenging the modernist idea of European supremacy,¹² it is possible to identify local stories that speak of indigenous hegemony and bureaucratic colonial powers lacking military and political support to dominate resource-poor provinces.¹³ Second, centre–periphery models have often relied on the notion of European entrepreneurs as the driving force behind economic development and dynamism in Eastern Indonesia, a process controlled from the colonial centre in Java.¹⁴ It is now known that Eastern Indonesian societies participated in extensive networks of inter-Asian maritime trade that included Chinese and Arab partners, even after the consolidation of the Pax Neerlandica in the early 1900s,¹⁵ rendering the theoretical framework inadequate to capturing these interactions.

Moving away from purely centre–periphery models of development into more nuanced examinations of what happened at the extremes implies the recentring of the periphery as a place of dynamic agency and change.¹⁶ In such a process, the understanding of the failures of colonial and state actors in establishing a foothold on “peripheral” towns, of the implementation of agricultural development mechanisms, and of the designation of entrepôts and active port towns under the rubrics of “backwaters” and “cash crop providers” become crucial steps to better elucidating the role played by both indigenous and external forces in the continuous exercise of nation building.¹⁷ In maritime landscapes, such an approach can help establish how colonial and state legacies of governance and economic growth policies have contributed to ongoing ecological crises in biodiversity management and habitat degradation.¹⁸ While infrequently encountered among anthropological studies, explorations of the varied historical trajectories of resource use and extraction can help paint a broader picture of networks and circuits of wealth that have given origin to current subsistence strategies.¹⁹ Most significantly, the consequences of development policies speak of underlying conflicts that continue to permeate everyday life in Eastern Indonesia. These conflicts result from the dispossession of land, natural resources, and commercial agency among indigenous actors.²⁰

As this article will argue, despite differing intentions, both colonial and state development programmes are responsible for instituting the economic structures that have resulted in the deindustrialisation, exclusion, and marginalisation of thousands. To that end, I explore the story of coconut cultivation in Ende over the past 150 years. As a commercial town and maritime port in Eastern Indonesia, Ende is second in importance only to Kupang, in Timor, or Waingapu, in Sumba. Through this case study, I investigate how the dynamics among colonial, state, and indigenous actors have resulted in a prolonged peripheralisation of an otherwise thriving and diversified society. Looking into the production of copra, dried coconut husks employed in manufacturing coconut oil, I seek to identify the characteristics that have impeded the emergence of sustainable resource management and hindered long-term economic growth. Through archival and ethnographic work, I revisit the challenges Endenese communities faced as they transitioned through agricultural development, mechanisation, and market integration. From avid entrepreneurs, merciless slave traders, and skilled sailors to artisanal fishermen and subsistence producers, this trajectory includes the institution of a monocrop economy in the early 1900s and its (dis)continuation into present times.

Seen by the colonial apparatus as the way to domesticate a “rebellious” group, I also contextualise the failure of development processes as suggestive of a society that resisted integration into a particular ideal of progress. This model, built from rational and moral imperatives, sought to implement intensive agricultural production and pursued the reformulation of customary land institutions restricting the implementation of the new practices. It strongly relied on the proletarianization of the workforce by introducing cash crops, labour programmes, and taxes. Fiscal obligations became essential in domestication and control because of the tendency to use crops to cover taxation. Imposed by colonial, foreign, and national forces as ways to bring modernisation to a stagnant society, development programmes assumed different versions over time. Still, they kept their primary goal: building a “pliable” citizenry prepared for a future of “green” growth and fishing intensification. Yet these policies have had long-term consequences for the regency. Like sugar planters in Java,²¹ any potential that the Endenese had for generating the conditions for internal growth, such as an independent marine mercantile sector, was slimmed down by top-down agricultural programmes and critically diminished by political and economic crises. As of 2020, the Eastern Indonesia region, now characterised by high migration and poverty, has over 70% of its workforce still engaged in the agriculture and fisheries sectors.²²

Thus, a history of patterns of resource use in Ende offers essential lessons for new models of sustainable development and natural-resource management. Albeit at the fringes of the Indonesian archipelago, communities like the Endenese have been neither isolated nor disconnected from major economic centres like Ternate, Ambon, and Makassar.²³ Recent policy instruments such as decentralisation laws or the new agrarian social forestry reform have sought to recreate a federal system that can effectively capture these regional and internal dynamics.²⁴ Efforts continue to contend with top-down implementation formulas and conflicting regulations that impede local participation. Failures to harness local agency into the realisation of a decentralised model allow for the continuation of non-sustainable resource use and corruption, with severe consequences for biodiversity conservation.²⁵ I conclude the article by analysing how governance policies in Indonesia will benefit from looking at the periphery to develop structural long-term solutions across multiple geographical and institutional scales.

Methods: Historical Data and Archival Sources

Data were collected during three field seasons in May–August 2009, November 2010–January 2011, June 2011–January 2013, and subsequent visits in 2019, 2020, and 2022. Research objectives, protocols for data collection, and instruments were reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the University of Georgia (IRB 2010-10808-2) before any activities began. Research permits were also procured through RISTEK (Kementerian Riset dan Teknologi), the Indonesian government ministry that oversees international research and from the proper authorities (Propinsi NTT, Kabupaten Ende). The author followed strict ethical procedures outlined by the IRB and has no conflicts of interest to report. Interviews were used to recreate the genealogical history of the raja of Ende’s family, the Aroeboesman, and the history of two important clans in the area, the Ngobbe and Rodja. Interviews also shed light on the relations between the towns of Numba and Baraai (the latter being less than five kilometres from Ende) and the initial settlement of Ende. Archival research was conducted in Ende and Maumere (Flores, Indonesia), in Yogyakarta and Jakarta (Java, Indonesia), at the Royal Tropical Institute (Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen) in Amsterdam, and at the Catholic Archives at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The reviewed materials included travel accounts, narratives of expeditions, compilations of church and religious activities, and official government reports. Digitised copies of the recollections of Dutch residents in Timor and Dependencies Residencies and of other colonial offices stationed in Sumba and Flores were also consulted on the online website of the National Archives of the Netherlands in The Hague. The primary sources for district-level statistical information were the Bureau of Statistics of Ende (Badan Pusat Statistik Ende, or BPSE), the Bureau of Statistics of Nusa Tenggara Timur Ende (Badan Pusat Statistik Nusa Tenggara Timur, or BPSN), and the Fishing Commission of Ende District (Dinas Kelautan dan Perikanan, or DKP). These offices produced numerous yearbooks and reports that were compared and consolidated to portray the town’s development.

Ende

Arrived at via a multi-leg air journey from Jakarta or a five-day ferry from Surabaya, the city of Ende is politely characterised by Indonesian central government officials as remote (see Figure 1). In a clever twist of words,²⁶ it was described as the “end of the world” by one of the first anthropologists to visit the area in 1949.²⁷ Limited to the south by the Savu oceanic basin and to the north by the Flores Sea, the region is known for its coral reefs and pelagic fishing grounds. In 2020, the population was close to 300,000 people of different ethnic classifications, including Bajau and Bugis immigrants.

View Full Size

Map of Indonesia

Citation: Crossroads 2025; 10.1163/26662523-bja10023

Source: Developed by the author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

The coastal Endenese constitute a littoral society with a rich cultural and religious identity forged over eight centuries of interactions between migrant and local groups.²⁸ Due to their importance in commercial shipping and boat building, Ende and the smaller island of Pulau Ende maintained numerous ties with merchant communities in Java, Malacca, Lombok, Ternate, and Makassar.²⁹ As early as the 1300s, the town participated in the inter-island trade network, operating as a node facilitating exchange between hinterland agricultural products and high-value items such as textiles and guns. During the northwest monsoon winds, the port provided a harbour to Chinese and Javanese merchants on their way to the sandalwood and spice centres in Timor and the Moluccas.³⁰ The arrival of Portuguese and Dutch forces in the following centuries brought conflict to an already unstable region. Groups of Makassarese and Bugis merchants relocated to Ende during numerous migratory waves in the seventeenth century,³¹ and competition between colonial and indigenous powers led to constant skirmishes.

Some local sources that combine interviews and historical evidence indicate that a rajadom was created in the 1630s to combat the Portuguese, making the Coastal Endenese a separate, self-identifying group.³² Only recognized in VOC documents (korte verklaring, or brief treaties and agreements conducted by the company) in 1793, the kingdom of Ende relied on the commerce of enslaved people and other commodities such as birds’ nests, beeswax, cinnamon, beads, horses and cattle, lime and sulphur, textiles, and cotton.³³ Rarely discussed in commercial documents, Dutch merchants used the port of Ende in their route from Batavia to Kupang in the first half of the 1600s to restrict Portuguese influence and secure commercial relations.³⁴ Such relationships are mentioned in 1638 when the Dutch missionary Heurnius visited the area.³⁵ Yet additional evidence suggests that exchanges with the Dutch occurred as early as 1613, if not before, when an officer from Apollonius Schotte, a captain from the Dutch East India Company, reached Pulau Ende.³⁶ In 1691, a postholder was established in Barai, confirming Ende’s subordination to the company.³⁷ However, the control of trade in this region was beyond the company’s intent and capacity, as later sources discuss when assessing Endenese piracy in Sumba, and the presence of Dutch officers was discontinued.³⁸

Around the mid-to-late-1700s, Ende’s influence in the region began to grow, and by the first decades of the nineteenth century, Endenese groups controlled most trade throughout the Savu.³⁹ Its religious and cultural identity, mixing Muslim, Bugis, Bajau, and local belief systems, facilitated the establishment of commercial operations across nearby islands. Although Bima attempted to claim sovereignty over the polity, the Endenese remained relatively independent until Dutch military intervention one century later.⁴⁰ Each year, hundreds of boats left Ende in expeditions and military campaigns against any potential competitor that could challenge its dominance. In alliance with other groups, Endenese chiefs conducted raids as far as Timor and Rote and plundered foreign ships. Despite colonial efforts to cease all slavery as far back as 1839, the polity represented a relatively consolidated maritime force in the inter-island slave trade.⁴¹ At the time of its commercial apogee in the 1880s, local clans engaged in a burgeoning shipping and merchant industry with an extensive presence in coastal towns elsewhere in Flores, such as Aimere, Mauwaru, and Tonggo.⁴² This was also documented in interviews conducted by the author in 2011, 2012, and 2023 with village and lineage (suku) leaders from Ende, Numba, and Pulau Ende, who still have families in these towns. Colonies were established in northern and western Sumba, from which thousands of enslaved people were dispatched each year to Timor, Bali, Lombok, Bima, and Makassar (see Figure 2). Enslaved people also travelled as far as the islands of Madagascar, Mauritius, and Reunion.⁴³

View Full Size

Map of Ende regency

Citation: Crossroads 2025; 10.1163/26662523-bja10023

Source: Developed by the author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Even though the shipments of Endenese trading vessels often included high-priced textiles, coconuts, and cinnamon, the trade of enslaved prisoners constituted the most valuable cargo. Enslaved people were exchanged for rice, gunpowder, and firearms, which helped support marauding and plundering. In his article of 1877, “Iets over Endeh” (Some facts about Ende), the Dutch officer Samuel Roos described the local Endenese economy as predominantly sustained by selling slaves and piracy.⁴⁴ Given the geography and soil quality of the southern coasts of Ende, the area was unsuitable for intensive agricultural production. Except for a few dry-season cultigens such as beans and tubers, Endenese relied on slavery for much-needed agricultural imports. This dependence posed very concrete challenges for colonial control. Yet the trade in enslaved people was not only an economic strategy but a culturally sanctioned means of subsistence.⁴⁵ Like other Indonesian groups, Endenese society was highly stratified into three classes: nobles, warriors, and commoners. Considered part of the populace, enslaved people were at the bottom of the social hierarchy and could be inherited as property.⁴⁶ Most significantly, enslaved people were not only procured through warfare; falling into slavery could be the result of unpaid debts or the failure to meet other obligations.⁴⁷ Anyone could become a slave, and the number of slaves that a person had was a mark of status.

Notwithstanding the social and cultural functions performed by the institution of slavery, enslaved people were essential to the Endenese economy for several reasons. Chief among them was the production of foodstuffs, as observed by Roos. In fact, he indicates that productive activities such as farming and fishing were less intensive among Endenese households than in other coastal societies.⁴⁸ When not procured through exchanges with hinterland groups or due to inter-island trade, food resources were harvested by enslaved people or the poor.⁴⁹ Emphasising their acumen in business, Roos describes the Endenese as traders in the true sense of the word. Following Makassarese and Bugis customs, then deemed the most advanced in the region, Roos mentions that the Endenese had seen much more of the world than other indigenous groups and had a highly developed intellect.⁵⁰ In the eyes of Roos, Ende was a very active town with lower poverty levels than other places in the province.

In the decades that followed Roos’s accounts, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, integration into the world economy became inevitable, which led to a rapid conversion of economic and production patterns. The Endenese economy transitioned from the trade of enslaved people, shipbuilding, and cargo freight to the production of agricultural staples such as coconuts and coffee for export to Java (see Table 1).⁵¹ Under the guise of eliminating piracy and securing the region for trade, the direct intrusion of the colonial government in Flores in 1903 terminated slavery and dramatically altered local shipping and commercial activities.⁵² With the destruction of the city in 1907 and the introduction of KPM (Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij, or the Royal Packet Navigation Company), the main royal shipping line, the balance of power shifted hands, and the Endenese lost their trading supremacy to Dutch, Arab, and Chinese merchants.⁵³ As a result, the number of freight ships of Endenese origin travelling as far as Singapore declined, and important trade networks that had remained hidden or ignored by colonial powers disappeared. Regular visits from Makassarese, Butonese, and Bugis merchants to the bay decreased considerably.⁵⁴ The steamers of KPM represented a strong competitor: smaller local vessels were at a disadvantage in navigating the strong currents and reefs of the many straits of the Savu.

View Full Size

View Full Size

Main historical events at Ende, Nusa Tenggara Timur

Citation: Crossroads 2025; 10.1163/26662523-bja10023

• Download Figure
• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

In addition to the reorganisation of shipping in the area to the advantage of the colonial state,⁵⁵ the territory within the regency was financially restructured to fund infrastructure development.⁵⁶ A system of taxes, forced labour, and tolls was established that supported the rebuilding of the port and the completion of major roads.⁵⁷ As a result of colonial intervention, the Endenese entrepreneurial merchant spirit rapidly and dramatically changed.⁵⁸ Elicited through interviews that told stories of oppression by the Dutch, the disintegration of coastal clans seems to have been contemporary to assimilation processes and changes in internal polity borders.⁵⁹ With new systems of education and civil administration, the district was apportioned between the two major kingdoms of Lio and Ende, a division that continued until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Most importantly, changes in customary institutions further eroded economic relations at the clan and lineage level, with colonial programmes and missionary propaganda demonizing indigenous inheritance and land use practices that obstructed progress.⁶⁰ In the decades that followed Japanese occupation and the creation of the Indonesian Republic, Dutch and European influxes of funding tied to religious instruction made critical contributions to agricultural development in Ende.⁶¹ Nowadays, the regency is known for its limited technological modernisation and high dependence on agricultural outputs for subsistence. However, more details are necessary to understand this shift in economic direction and its long-term consequences for the population. In the next section, I discuss significant policies from both colonial and state actors and how they have set the frame of agricultural development in the regency and Eastern Indonesia at large.

Colonial and State Policies for Agricultural Growth in Flores and Eastern Indonesia

In the early 1900s, when almost all of Eastern Indonesia came under the control of the colonial government, new government policies focused on the socialisation of agriculture and the production of agricultural commodities for the external market.⁶² As colonial officers noted, the intention behind this shift was to transition from extensive agricultural production to more sustainable means that could restore soil quality in some cases but also increase crop yields.⁶³ The administrative intervention of islands like Bali, a major copra producer, and the high global demand for copra led the colonial government to pass specific measures that sought to regulate the quality and processing of copra around the 1910s. The trade of insufficiently dried nut husks or mixtures was banned in ordinances from 1915 and 1917, and a system of indigenous agricultural officials, called mantri, was implemented.⁶⁴ In the districts of Flores, programmes were introduced to facilitate rice irrigation and the adoption of other crops, such as coffee. At the larger regional level, the colonial government was interested in positioning this area as a premium source of copra, which was highly valued due to its multiple applications.⁶⁵

Copra was not only used for its culinary attributes but was also employed in manufacturing soap, margarine, explosives, and other derivatives. Coconut oil was regularly used in cooking, lighting, and hair care.⁶⁶ Given the increasing demand for the commodity, colonial plans sought to aggressively increase production against the competition from the Philippines and the Malayan peninsula. Throughout the archipelago, new plantations were opened in Java, Sulawesi, Sumatra, and the Moluccas in 1889.⁶⁷ By the inter-war period, the Netherlands Indies provided about one-third of world exports, and coconuts represented approximately 80% of the total volume of exports for Eastern Indonesia.⁶⁸

Most significantly, the development of this commodity for export in Eastern Indonesia not only resulted in new production and distribution relations but also held strategic value in the birth of a new industrial and economic era in the Netherlands Indies. In the larger towns, such as Makassar, the colonial government created the necessary financial conditions for credit systems that enabled export and shipping companies to operate, solidifying the structure of an internationalised economy that could conduct transactions in foreign currencies. By “relatively” opening through programmes that encouraged external investment, European and American traders now had access to Indonesian commodities for the first time. In this context, copra exports could function as a warranty against declines in the domestic economy. While in the newly expanded plantations coconut production was seen as a source of employment and poverty reduction,⁶⁹ changes fell short of altering production conditions. Capital investments were predominantly oriented towards improving the commerce in raw materials and not necessarily modernising methods of cultivation, processing, or industrial manufacturing.⁷⁰ As indicated by colonial officers, copra was seen as an attractive crop to the local population due to its low level of effort during cultivation, lack of maintenance and demand for technical expertise, and high resistance to aridity.⁷¹ For example, in Ende, speculation was made that professionalisation would render cultivation unappealing and possibly run against long-standing customary institutions.⁷²

Albeit indirectly, colonial policies that facilitated the creation of financial institutions offered the basis for protecting large-scale European interests against those of indigenous trade operators.⁷³ Makassar became the economic and political centre of Eastern Indonesia. Under the guise of organising the sector, long-standing connections between international exporters and local ports ruled by indigenous polities such as Ende were severed.⁷⁴ The dominance of Singapore as a free port was challenged, and Chinese and Arab merchants were integrated into the colonial monopoly of coconut oil production. Taking over the role of indigenous middlemen and seafarers in many places, these migrant populations could mobilise critical resources on a scale that was probably not available to the smaller polities, which were now struggling with incorporation into the colonial apparatus. For example, some Arabs obtained leases to grow coconuts before the First World War, and Chinese companies opened new subsidiaries throughout the eastern archipelago’s smaller ports.⁷⁵ The large entrepôt of Makassar was the central hub for all of Eastern Indonesia’s copra and integrated all inter-island trade carried out by middlemen and intermediaries.⁷⁶ In this port, the machinery required for producing, storing, and exporting coconut oil was to be found.⁷⁷ Displaced from the role of traders within the productive cycle, indigenous economies became the providers of the dried coconut husks that would be pressed into oil in the colonial centre and then shipped to China, France, Germany, and Denmark.

Seen from this perspective, colonial efforts were very profitable. For example, the share of indigenous products in agricultural exports for the outer provinces of Indonesia combined increased dramatically from 43% in 1911–1915 to 65% in 1936–1940.⁷⁸ Agricultural concessions in the outer islands, including Flores, saw a dramatic growth from 40,200 hectares under state lease or management in 1875 to a peak of 3,430,000 hectares in 1927.⁷⁹ Crops like copra produced significant earnings, as will be discussed below. Yet, the story of commercial success on a national or provincial scale does not accurately reflect what happened at the lower regency level in the eastern provinces. In Flores, because there were few to no estates regulating production, local households relied on a combination of strategies, including arboriculture with dry-season food crops such as maize, manioc, and green beans. Given the limited nature of these subsistence economies, the growth in export volumes at the province level did not necessarily improve living standards among the population.⁸⁰ Furthermore, demographic changes probably increased pressures on subsistence staples, leading to scarcity.⁸¹ The coconut-based economy experienced additional setbacks due to the 1929 Great Depression, the outbreak of the Second World War, and the Japanese occupation of the archipelago in 1942. Falling prices in the external market led to a decrease in the exporting of raw materials such as copra and considerably diminished values on the local market.⁸² Agricultural production saw a time of stress, including losses in total cultivation area and average productivity per hectare, as all development programmes stopped and substantial loss of equipment and gear was experienced.⁸³

Important changes in the economic development of Eastern Indonesia were only seen in the 1950s, post-independence, and more systematically in the 1960s and 1970s. The germ for these macroeconomic policies originated in the economic direction adopted by the new Indonesian government. After the war, the country faced staggering rates of poverty, a sizeable agrarian workforce, and minimal levels of industrialisation. Efforts were made to increase the production of staples such as rice and the production of export goods such as rubber, coffee, and coconut.⁸⁴ However, achieving a high level of agricultural performance that could increase Indonesia’s competitiveness in foreign markets was a complex problem. The country lacked basic civic, financial, and industrial infrastructure that could support an orderly development process, including adequate management and administration institutions. Most of the population lived below the poverty line without access to essential health, sanitation, and educational services.⁸⁵ Thus urgent plans for industrial development, such as “Sumitro”, ran parallel with efforts focusing on improving agricultural management based chiefly on cooperatives and empowering smallholders.⁸⁶ Crucial reforms in village-based institutions, training, and capacity development programmes were instituted to support the larger economic plan.

But throughout the 1950s the country suffered high inflation rates, instability, and malcontent, creating a complex socioeconomic situation. The position of foreign enterprises was highly uncertain as the country pursued nationalisation in line with socialist policies. The early 1960s were characterised by conflict between more moderate and radical factions of the government, the military, and the Communist Party of Indonesia that led to nationwide purges, massive killings, and violence.⁸⁷ Beyond the volatile political context, fuelling dissatisfaction were the revenues from booming prices for commodities that drove prices in the domestic market higher. Earnings continued to be concentrated in intermediary sectors and were distributed unevenly along the production chain, with farmers only receiving a small fraction of the total proceeds.⁸⁸ These difficulties ultimately translated to declining output in crucial crops, especially from estate agricultural concessions. As an illustration, the number of Coconut estate crops decreased nationally from 684 in 1940 to 112 in 1958, remaining at that low level until at least the early 1960s.⁸⁹ The levels of copra purchased from eastern provinces, the country’s primary copra producing region, dropped in 1958 and 1959 due to political instability in Sulawesi, along with logistical difficulties, smuggling, and under-invoicing practices, as reported in the following sections. Given their trade connections to Makassar, it is hard not to project similar impacts for smallholders in Flores. In fact, in interviews, older Endenese boat captains recalled this as a time of uncertainty, where decisions were made about continuing shipping and freight activities. In short, in its first attempt at agricultural development, the new government failed to realise its ambitious growth programmes, maintain pre-war production levels, and institute the sustainable modernisation of the sector. Total Indonesian copra exports were reported to decrease from 346,100 metric tons in 1952 to 112,100 metric tons in 1967, according to official records.⁹⁰ Amid political and economic challenges, the perspective was “bleak” for coconut smallholders in the short and long term.⁹¹

After the fall of President Sukarno in 1967 and with the beginning of the “New Order” under President Suharto, a set of quinquennial development programmes was introduced. The REPELITA programmes (Rencana Pembangunan Lima Tahun, five-year economic development plans) ran from 1969 to 1999 and oriented efforts towards developing the agricultural industry. The objectives were to support the growth of production for export along with trade value in foreign markets.⁹² Internally, actions were directed at achieving self-sufficiency in foodstuffs and substituting imports by exploiting provincial resources to an “optimal level”.⁹³ First, among commodities, rice became the focus of government efforts through programmes like Operation Fertile Islands (Operasi Nusa Makmur).⁹⁴ To achieve the self-sufficiency goal, investment priorities were placed on large-scale irrigation and rice cultivation projects in Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi, leading to an imbalance in the distribution of resources among regions.⁹⁵ Most significantly, the policies of the New Order inherited the crucial challenge of securing agricultural growth in a country that lacked the basic infrastructure and technological development needed to support such expansion. Facing this reality, funds from programmes were predominantly allocated to improving communication, transportation, and infrastructure, with agricultural sectors receiving a tiny portion of the total budget. In Eastern Indonesia, a region characterised by swidden agriculture, smallholder plantations, subsistence fishing, and forest arboriculture, work was directed at the husbandry sector, which was perceived as the critical potential for the area. Despite the poor soil conditions and lack of available water, rice was favoured over dry-season crops such as maize or green beans in the first programmes. Considering this, from 1968 to 1972, copra exports declined critically from two-thirds to 6% of total exports, while other agricultural commodities made substantial gains in the province.⁹⁶ The planting of coconuts and the development of factories only became a target of the REPELITA programmes in the late 1970s and early 1980s,⁹⁷ along with the intensification of the fisheries sector.⁹⁸

One key factor in understanding the limited success of the REPELITA programmes is the adoption of a static pattern of growth to attain economic development. This constitutes a type of expansion defined by increases in production through traditional practices with low levels of technological innovation.⁹⁹ Agricultural intensification occurs as the frequency of cultivation of plots increases, fallow or resting periods are eliminated, and cultigens are extended to other areas. To that end, geared to assisting individual small croppers, initial REPELITA interventions in Eastern Indonesia focused on developing extension services, making planting resources accessible through a few scattered seed nurseries, and strengthening the limited available credit for farmers.¹⁰⁰ Operations met with poor results due to a lack of staff and funding resources. In fact, after the first REPELITA programme, the overall advance of the eastern provinces was prolonged and only sped up with the expansion of the mining and industrial sectors.¹⁰¹ The central government incorporated plans in REPELITA II and III for realising regional and limited liability companies that could catalyse essential infrastructure development. But in the eastern provinces the programmes made few inroads at modernising agricultural production. Farmers continued to rely on simple tools such as sticks and hoes to cultivate their parcels or harvest copra,¹⁰² and did not employ fertiliser or insecticide regularly.¹⁰³

A second factor that explains the lack of success of the initial REPELITA programmes was their structure. To prioritise and distribute funds efficiently, the Directorate of Rural and Urban Planning, with the help of local governments, selected new areas of development within provinces for each REPELITA programme. Sectoral projects created an uneven pattern of growth at the regional and local levels that did not result in the harmonious or consistent improvement of productivity in the agricultural sector or among farming households. Focusing only on a handful of individuals in each locality to introduce innovations, who were usually the most politically influential farmers, contributed to processes of elite capture.¹⁰⁴ As a consequence, in locations like Ende practices continued to rely on artisanal methods.¹⁰⁵

The 1990s saw economic liberalisation policies through REPELITA V and VI, specifically through the creation of Pakjun 91 (Paket Kebijakan 91), a new packet of policies. These new instruments were intended to generate significant investment opportunities for private sectors that could reduce unemployment, raise rural incomes, and incentivise growth. To this end, the Pakjun 91 programme reduced import tariffs, simplified marketing channels, and created more favourable conditions for investment. The programme effectively opened the coconut trade by reducing inter-island trading tariffs. As a result, merchants were virtually free to export and import copra and coconut oil at meagre costs, once again increasing the vulnerability of smallholders to price fluctuations on the market. In 1997, the Asian Economic Crisis brought the New Order to an end, and with the country’s transition to a democratic type of government the REPELITA programmes were abandoned.

However, the new economic direction consolidated some of the changes introduced by REPELITA VI, which marked the beginning of decentralisation efforts in natural-resource management, among other issues.¹⁰⁶ These changes were subsequently formalised in the 1999 “decentralisation laws” (Law 22/1999 and Law 25/1999) aimed at promoting devolution and local autonomy.¹⁰⁷ The government perceived decentralisation as a critical factor in devolving control to provincial and local authorities that were in a better position to carry out and implement economic growth plans. Most importantly, with the new policies, the authority to decide revenues was now in the hands of the regional and district governments. Additional instruments such as Law 7/2014 on Trade, Law 18/2012 on Food, Law 13/2010 on Horticulture, and Law 19/2013 on the Protection of Farmers also sought to improve overall conditions in the agricultural sector, including local welfare and protective measures against foreign markets.¹⁰⁸ None of these measures, however, have made any dents in the conditions of agricultural production in Ende to this day. Facing high levels of corruption, the implementation of decentralisation policies has run into impediments associated with a lack of resources and coordination, strong top-down, centralised control, and the absence of a continuous flow of funding support that could support the long-term sustainability of most efforts.¹⁰⁹

Today, most regencies of Eastern Indonesia, like Ende, are characterised by a combination of traditional and non-mechanised agricultural production, with individual incentives driving modernisation. Colonial programmes, state-sponsored REPELITA programmes, and decentralisation efforts have made only a modest difference in the well-being and incomes of the rural sectors.¹¹⁰ The trend of industrialisation and modernisation that could support economic growth and prosperity still needs to be realised, and substantial needs continue to be experienced in basic infrastructure. Most importantly, the static pattern of intensification has resulted in the overuse and degradation of topsoil, erosion, and deforestation. Habitat degradation due to excessive labour, modification in periods of fallow, and introduction of variants that deplete soils of nutrients have led to a progressive reduction of the marginal benefits that farmers perceive over time. Responses to the environmental crisis mimic those experienced elsewhere in the developing world since the 1980s. Fostered by pressures from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations Development Programme, the country has welcomed the expanding role of non-governmental organisations (NGO s) in resource management.¹¹¹ Economic growth is partly driven by environmental sustainability concerns, at least superficially.¹¹² Throughout Eastern Indonesia, numerous NGO s funded by international organisations, such as the Nature Conservancy, the United Nations Environment Programme, Swiss Contact, and Oxfam, have opened offices and implemented small-scale projects. Much work remains to be done to assess these new mechanisms’ contributions to rural livelihoods.

In the next section, I examine coconut cultivation in Ende to better understand how colonial and state-led policies have impacted coastal communities within this regency. Based on the timelines of significant policy changes, I establish a periodisation that characterises five different phases in the evolution of coconut production.

Green Gold: Coconut Production and Commodity Dynamics in Ende

Discussion: Periphery and Uneven Patterns of Development

Archival sources, historical reconstructions, and ethnographic information provide evidence of the singular trajectory followed by the port town of Ende in the past one hundred years. At the local level, Ende transitioned from a marine rajadom specialised in trade to a cash crop economy with negligible food cultivation and finally to a society that consistently depends on migration and agricultural production to meet its needs. Dramatic livelihood transitions are evidenced, for example, in the tenfold increase in fishing landings over the past hundred years and the growth of active fishers that has characterized the past several decades.¹⁹³ Most interesting is the progressive loss of indigenous trade and cultural networks brought about by the pacification process in the early 1900s. These systems, which operated hidden from or ignored by colonial powers, speak of a complex inter-island world in which the Endenese established alliances with kings as far as Ternate. Some of these dynamics, often captured in relations of vassalage and oral contracts, are still traceable through ethnohistorical reconstructions and histories of mobility. With changes in customary institutions and the redrafting of the regency into the Dutch administrative system,¹⁹⁴ the Endenese suffered foundational alterations in their social and power structures that further undermined their economy.¹⁹⁵ In contrast to this cosmopolitan ethos that characterized pre-modern engagements is the hyper localized reality of the coastal Endenese. In the wake of the economic independence and profitability seen in the nineteenth century, Ende is now a subsistence economy that is highly dependent on central government economic aid and remittances from migrants for its survival. For example, in addition to the intensive exploitation of its natural resources, Ende relies now on the importing of essential staples such as rice at subsidized rates to meet nutritional needs. No industries operate in the area, only small independent ventures funded by national and international organisations. What explains such a transition?

In this final discussion, I argue that Ende exemplifies a town exposed to discontinuous development and modernisation policies. At first, such policies were intended to control and demobilise a rebellious, independent, and bellicose population; later policies addressed Ende in terms of a poor and marginalised society. While the colonial and Indonesian state development plans had many differences, both ultimately addressed Endenese as subjects of limited agency who needed to be integrated into an agricultural production system to realize development. They were considered human capital, operating within a narrow niche with minimal opportunities for mobility.¹⁹⁶ Contrary to previous observations by chroniclers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that emphasized the enterprising nature of the Endenese, colonial and Indonesian state government intervention perspectives speak of a society that lacked entrepreneurial spirit, showing a persistent prejudice against local production systems.¹⁹⁷ Such narratives ultimately validate colonial interventions in favour of fostering external capital investments rather than local initiatives. In these discourses, plagued by poverty and insufficiencies, it becomes an essential duty of the government to bring about the conditions of change and to generate the necessary competencies to support independence, self-reliance, and democracy.¹⁹⁸ These ideas are also reflected in the implementation of the first economic programmes adopted by the country, where agricultural growth calls for the involvement of extensive capital, the re-education of the population, and the implementation if capacity improvement programmes. Yet, the various development approaches discussed above, such as quinquennial government plans, have had limited effects on smallholder productivity and incomes.

Colonial and state narratives of development ignore that alterations in the sources of subsistence among the local populations and their exclusion from the newly redrafted trade circuits not only undermined their economic alternatives, but also led to critical recesses in the control of and production of raw materials. The substitution of indigenous commercial actors with Chinese and Arab middlemen curtailed the society’s ability to grow in fundamental ways. In the case of coconut exports, the production structure also restricted the capacity to accumulate capital, with high revenues only experienced by producers and not by harvesters. It is probably true that the changes necessary to make the agricultural production sector profitable required fixed or coordinated exchange rates and trade policies that could control prices and fluctuations in conjunction with support for small businesses. Moreover, for village ventures that sought to modernise and expand the range of products manufactured, there was a need to secure the continuous provision of good quality raw materials and to identify trade partners beyond the regency level. Unfortunately, state-level policies that attempted to empower local villages failed to meet many of these conditions, a situation that continues into the present.

In this regard, it should be said that compared to seafaring and shipping, copra and coconut production continue to be unappealing and risky options for smallholders. The market continues to be very unstable, and it requires a level of coordination and logistics that neither the local nor the central governments have been able to produce.¹⁹⁹ In this respect, the compulsory introduction of monocrop economies, both under colonial and more recent export-oriented Indonesian state plans, should be considered an element of the domestication, subordination, and precarization of an otherwise highly dynamic productive apparatus. The reduction in livelihood alternatives makes these populations vulnerable to oscillations in external demand, creating a dependency on a centre that effectively views them as colonies or peripheries, even after the implementation of decentralisation models. Throughout the process of peripheralisation, former entrepôts become invisible to the centre as they are transformed into providers of raw resources. Most significantly, the positioning of rural economies as subservient to the larger commodity market makes them highly susceptible to the policies issued by a centralised government that ignores local conjunctures and adaptation strategies that rely on agricultural diversification.

As a result of static growth models and unequal development programmes across Eastern Indonesia, de-industrialisation has become an outcome of peripheralisation.²⁰⁰ For example, the modernisation of small-scale fisheries, marine stocks being the resource with the highest potential for growth in Eastern Indonesia, has been undertaken tangentially; cumulative investment from 1967 to 1999 was reportedly only 1.37%.²⁰¹ Insistence on self-sufficiency in rice has also relegated the agricultural development of subsistence crops such as maize and beans, which are of crucial importance to the population and the ecosystem.²⁰² Farming policies that have led to the peripheralization of Ende probably exacerbated the use of damaging resource extraction practices and had critical effects within the communities themselves.²⁰³ Uneven intensification of agricultural outputs, inconsistencies, and short-termism towards the externalities associated with environmental exploitation have compromised the sustainability of resources. With negligible long-term income effects, these top-down, centralized policies have facilitated the loss of traditional land allocation management systems and a prosperous shipping industry that was essential in supplying resources in the inter-island trade in the past centuries.

In the future, environmental historians, anthropologists, and natural resource managers should consider the importance of peripheralization processes to the establishing of resource dominance. This includes exploring how what once were rich cosmopolitan hubs have been relegated to marginality, a process that has led to their “invisibilisation” by central elites. It also may require careful documentation of informal trade networks tangled within larger commercial circuits, the value of moral economies, and the embeddedness of economic institutions into patterns of mobility and circulation of people. Such a study allows for eliciting hidden subsistence strategies and their continuation as forms of resistance and adaptation to new economic uncertainties. Peripheralisation does not indicate irrelevance to maintaining a central elite but speaks of the need to relegate others to usurp their resources.²⁰⁴ Ports like Ende become invisible yet essential to the continuation of dominance within a struggle or contested space.

Looking at the broader interconnections, the bundle of relationships and rights that emerged in these littoral societies, with a keen ethnographic and critical eye, becomes essential to envisioning the characteristic patterns of development that these societies followed and how processes of proletarianization have resulted in ecosystems’ degradation. Life histories and interviews provide the only cues to the consequences of economic transitions and development programmes and how local communities have coped. Collaboration with indigenous leaders is crucial to attaining realistic and practical natural resource management policies that acknowledge the realities of different economic trajectories. Awareness of the biases and asymmetries in the interpretation of the role played by entrepôts and port towns, how such centre–periphery models may dismiss the influence of “backwater” colonial districts and localized patterns of development, constitutes a much-needed step to understand better the current resource crises we are facing.

As new governance regimes are being proposed at the provincial level to address resource depletion, it is essential to see that entrepôts and former port towns are not isolated relics of tradition. The cultures and interactions that emerged in these locales are highly relevant to understanding the wider context in which resource use and competition issues arise in this region.²⁰⁵ Thus, even when considered peripheral geographically, communities like Ende are connected to trade and technological centres in a plurality of ways.²⁰⁶ While they have been relegated to government priorities, they have become very attractive to illegal fishing operations such as shark finning or slash-and-burn practices that bring about erosion and further degradation.²⁰⁷ In these cases, Chinese or Javanese market partners create demand pressures for illegal commodities. Not accounting for these interconnections within policy and governance mechanisms has severe consequences for biodiversity conservation and the success of any development programme. Ultimately, environmental degradation reverts to the long-term sustainability of local livelihoods within the community, which are based on resource commodities and contribute to exacerbating poverty. Understanding the outcomes of peripheralization at the fringes of more centralised systems is essential to navigating the trade-offs between economic growth and environmental degradation.