Published in Architectural Encounters in Asia Pacific: Built Traces of Intercolonial Trade, Industry and Labour, 1800s-1950s, edited by Amanda Achmadi, Paul Walker and Soon-Tzu Speechley. Bloomsbury (September 2024), 36-50.
The increasing demands for tobacco and rubber in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century not only expanded the production of commodities but also intensified the circulation of workers in the East Coast of Sumatra. Plantation companies, represented by their associations (DPV and AVROS), established immigration institutions to maintain the labour supply in the region. Crucial to their success in bringing hundreds of thousands of workers to plantation estates was the establishment of recruitment routes and transitory nodes both inside and outside of the Dutch colony. This paper examines the construction of labour mobility supporting the region’s commodity industries, which involved activating a constellation of buildings in more than one hundred locations, from Semarang to Hong Kong, to facilitate the systematic documentation and selection of labourers as well as their transportation. I characterize this practice as infrastructuring by way of investigating the materiality and continuous reworking of the migration system.
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