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1. Free and unfree labour in colonial Southeast AsiaChallenging Hegel’s famous dictum that only the ruler is free in oriental societies, historians and anthropologists have catalogued a bewildering variety of conceptions of freedom and bondedness throughout Asia. The existing levels of social differentiation and the concomitant constraints on labour were rather inconvenient for colonial administrations who aimed at simplifying this diversity for revenue purposes and ‘freeing up’ labour for global commodity production. Both civil servants and European plantation owners spoke of free labour, an objective that they expected to accomplish by curbing the claims on labour by local patrimonial structures. It has often been observed that this was just replacing one system of unfreedom by another: tributary labour was quite often just replaced by regimes of colonial coerced labour on construction sites or plantations. Or to mention another example, the same colonial powers who combated different types of slavery including debt-slavery legalized migratory labour under coerced circumstances by establishing the institution of so-called indentured migrations. Cases from the Netherlands Indies, the Malay states, and the Philippines will be discussed within the wider framework of debates on what free and unfree labour might mean in different historical contexts.2. Global sugar and local taste in IndiaBefore oil became the world’s prime commodity, sugar was the most valuable bulk. In the nineteenth century, the emergence of industrial beet sugar complexes in Europe and the industrialisation of cane sugar production in its colonies brought refined sugar within reach, first of European and later of American and Asian masses. From the 1860s onwards, Asian producers and consumers increasingly began to play a role in the world market for industrial sugar. Java, Mauritius, the Philippines and Taiwan became important sites of production, whereas Japan, India and China were opened up as markets for industrially manufactured white crystalline sugar. Urban middle classes throughout the world became consumers of massive quantities of these sugars, but local sugars did not entirely disappear. As this lecture will detail, this was particularly not the case in India, which has been the largest producer of sugar for most of human history. In this country raw sugar, so-called gur, continues to be extremely popular until today not just for its price but even more so for its taste. This item has even become part of a global discourse against refined industrial sugar as unhealthy and devoid of any nutrients beyond sucrose.3. Commodity production and transforming village production: comparing Madras and JavaIn the early years of the nineteenth century, colonial administrators of British India and the Netherlands Indies were mulling over the question how to raise agricultural productivity in their newly acquired territorial possessions to strengthen the economic basis for their emerging colonial apparatuses. The combination of securing property rights (giving the peasants a legal and registered title on their land) and raising a moderate land rent were considered as the most appropriate means to enhance agricultural output both for local and global markets. These principles were put in practice through the so-called ryotwari land rent system, which Thomas Munro introduced in Madras, a model that was also followed by Thomas Stamford Raffles in Java. Things turned out less favourably for local rural societies in the two areas, however. Whereas large groups of peasants did become increasingly reliant on cash crops, it was not thanks to the attractions of the global market, but as a result of indebtedness and pressure from wealthier and more powerful farmers. This lecture aims to discuss different social configurations at the village levels that emerged in the course of colonial commodity production.4. From colonial to global knowledge: circuits of botanistsIn the era of colonial monopolies of precious items like spices, plant knowledge was usually acquired through espionage and species were obtained through smuggling. This began to change by around 1800, when knowledge was spread through the increasing mobility of planters across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean spaces. Planters from the Caribbean started indigo and sugar plantations in South and Southeast Asia for example. But even more than these individuals the scientific rules of knowledge dissemination and publication began to cut through colonial boundaries in the course of the nineteenth century. While ‘classical colonial history’ would point out the importance of the imperial experimental stations in Pasuruan, Bogor, Coimbatore, Barbados and so on, backed up by their metropolitan institutions like Kew Gardens and Wageningen Agricultural University, colonial boundaries hardly existed for botanical knowledge. On the basis of concrete examples of circulations of plant species and botanical knowledge, planters’ mobility and the dissemination of knowledge by experimental stations, this lecture aims at exploring how we should define these circuits vis-à-vis existing literature on colonial structures of knowledge production.Dates and places:1 Free and unfree labour in colonial Southeast Asia , séminaire de Maurice Aymard, Jean-Yves Grenier, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Alessandro Stanziani, le lundi 10 mars, salle 1, 105 bd Raspail, 17-20 heures2 Global sugar and local taste in India dans le cadre du séminaire de Françoise Sabban,Caroline Bodolec, Frédéric Obringer jeudi 13 mars, salle 681, 190 avenue de France, 11-13 heures.3 Commodity production and transforming village production: comparing Madras and Java , séminaire de Laurent Berger le lundi 17 mars, salle 1, 105 bd Raspail, 11-13 heures4 From colonial to global knowledge: circuits of botanists, Séminaire central du Case, le 27 mars : 10-12 heures, Maison de l'Asie, 22 avenue du Président Wilson, 75016 ParisM° Iéna ou Trocadéro