In densely settled wet-rice areas much of the loss of population was caused by destruction of food crops-either as a tactic of war or as a result of … - Anthony Reid
" "In densely settled wet-rice areas much of the loss of population was caused by destruction of food crops-either as a tactic of war or as a result of the passage of thousands of troops. In Sultan Agung's campaigns in 1620-25 against the coastal regions of East Java and Madura, eighty thousand troops besieged Surabaya and its nearby towns off and on for five years, devastating all the rice crops and even poisoning and damming up the river water of the city. The Dagh-Register recorded that after these campaigns "in Surabaya not more than 500 of its 50 to 60,000 people were left, the rest having died or gone away because of misery and famine" . Even on the side of Mataram there must have been enormously heavy losses, not only from the famine and disease that beset the unsuccessful besiegers of Batavia in 1628-29, but also from "the lack of men, so that they had not been able to bring the water to the rice fields" during the wars against Madura in 1624, with the result that the major rice-growing areas of Mataram itself were barren.
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About Anthony Reid
Anthony Reid (19 June 1939 – 8 June 2025) was a New Zealand-born historian of Southeast Asia.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
A.J.S. Reid
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Anthony John Stanhope Reid
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Tony Reid
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The Makassarese of Sulawesi were reputed in the sixteenth century to be resisting Islam because pork was their major meat source. According to the local chronicle of Bulo-bulo in the Sindjai region, when this district was invited to accept Islam in the seventeenth century by the ruler of Makassar under the veiled threat of war if it refused, one prominent chief defiantly declared that he would not bow to Islam even if the rivers flowed with blood, as long as there were pigs to eat in the forests of Bulo-bulo. Miraculously, the story goes, all the pigs disappeared that very night; so the chief and all his men were obliged to convert.
Around 1500 Java was the largest single exporter of slaves, perhaps as a result of the divisive wars of Islamization. Through the still Hindu ports of Sunda Kelapa and Balambangan, Java supplied much of the urban working class of the Malay cities. Islamization created a major change in the nature of slave trading, since the shari'a law forbade the sale or enslavement of fellow Muslims. Once Islam completed its conquest of Java in the sixteenth century, that island ceased to export its people. The major Muslim cities were thenceforth supplied with slaves from beyond the frontier of Islam. Aceh obtained its servile labour from Nias, southern India, and Arakan; Banten and Makassar from the Moluccas and Lesser Sunda Islands; Patani from Cambodia, Champa, and Borneo. Certain small sultanates, notably Sulu, Buton, and Tidore, began to make a profitable business of raiding for slaves in eastern Indonesia or the Philippines and marketing the human victims to the wealthy cities-or to the expanding seventeenth-century pepper estates of southern Borneo .
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