Agricultural Growth in Indonesia: Productivity Change and Policy Impact Since 1880. By Pierre van der Eng. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. Pp. xiii, 375. $79.95

colonial legislation and commissions leading to communal mataqali tenure—about which nonhistorians do rather make heavy weather—were designed to complement this assurance by preventing further alienation of Fijian-owned land. This, it was held, individual tenure would probably end in, if not cause. Not "European theory and convenience as much as Fijian practice" guided colonial policy (p. 208), then, but a desire to keep as much land as possible in Fijian ownership, under whatever form of title might in practice present itself. Mataqali tenure's recognition was actually an anti-European expedient adopted early this century. Commercial occupancy had been "communal" but has become the reverse, in a process leading to informal arrangements that Ward describes well. Chiefs, though, despite his authority H. J. Rutz (p. 244), were hardly "part of an invented tradition." Utopia is yet to find. If something nearer is to be found in individual tenure, then should not the advice be more specific and culturally nuanced with detailed instructions about how in practice, whatever protection may be made available at law, the needy and perhaps senior relations are to be turned away from household, farm, pot, or bank account?