The Miser's Store: Property and Traditional Law in the Governance of the 'Native' Economy

Recent studies of 'liberal governmentality' have examined how state actions regulate the ideally self-regulating economic sphere [Burchell, 1991]; this article highlights the particular dilemmas of liberal governmentality in a colonial arena where not one, but two types of economy were posited. By analysing the system of traditional property law implemented by the Dutch in two locations in central Sulawesi, Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), I show that property is only an indifferent marker of class, and that the limits of surplus extraction are set by control of other means of production. By arguing that both 'traditional' and 'capitalist' economies are embedded in the same local legal culture, I hope to demonstrate that a shift from the one to the other cannot of itself offer the promised benefits of modernity.