Comments by "Alexander Sylchuk" (@sshko101) on "Sugar Capitalism in Colonial Indonesia" video.

  1. I think that this "colonial exploitation" narrative is a bit overrated. Just checked statistics and actually Ukraine at the same time produced comperable ammount (maybe slightly more) of sugar throughout 19th century. Maybe Java island is few times smaller than my country, but still we don't live in tropics and sugarbeet is less efficient in producing sugar. At the same time in the whole Europe we were second in sugar production, only after Germany. I think that it's not a secret that the rest of european countries were making sugar aswell. We were also a part of foreign empire (russian one), but the businessmen were all local. While working conditions maybe weren't the best, as in the rest of the world, but the sugar mills owners invested heavily in all sorts of our social sphere, like schools and hospitals and in our local ukrainian culture (despite all the prohibitions from the russian government). Our sugar producers have formed surgar syndicate at some point (later in the 19th century). And it wasn't fair for our local consures since it costed few times more for the locals than for the foreign importers. So like brits drank tea with ukrainian sugar a lot cheaper than we did... but hey, sugar is deadly actually. Some of our "sugar" businessmen invested heavily in our metallurgy, which was later expropriated by russian bolsheviks and named after lenin. In the soviet times we even managed to produce almost 7 million tons of sugar (in 1978), although almost half of it was made out of cuban sugar cane. Even like last year we produced 1.4 million tons of sugar despite the war, while whole Indonesia have made only 2.5 million tons of sugar. For a moment, whole Indonesia is few times larger than Ukraine and they have tropical climate and no active war of such scale.
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