Karo

Karo country extended across the highlands and their approaches to the eastern Sumatran coast. Agricultural villages maintained relationships with the Malay trading districts of Deli and Langkat, connecting the interior with the Strait of Malacca. Salt carriers remembered as perlanja sira travelled on foot between the uplands and coastal markets, exchanging inland products for a necessity unavailable from highland fields. Routes through the forest and along rivers thus linked communities on both sides of the mountain margin.

John Anderson's mission from Penang in 1823 provides a detailed early nineteenth-century view of this commercial world. He encountered Karo communities closer to the coast than later linguistic maps might suggest and distinguished the Karau-Karau from other peoples collectively called Batak. His account emphasized their cultivation and involvement in commerce. The coastal pepper economy drew on such producers before European tobacco plantations transformed the lowlands. Highland agriculture, salt exchange and connections with port rulers therefore formed an established network by the early nineteenth century, with Karo households participating in wider markets while retaining village and kinship institutions of their own.