Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia a Longue Durée Perspective

Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia A Longue Durée Perspective David Henley and Henk Schulte Nordholt d Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia <UN> Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Edited by Rosemarijn Hoefte (kitlv, Leiden) Henk Schulte Nordholt (kitlv, Leiden) Editorial Board Michael Laffan (Princeton University) Adrian Vickers (Sydney University) Anna Tsing (University of California Santa Cruz) VOLUME 300 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vki <UN> Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia A Longue Durée Perspective Edited by David Henley Henk Schulte Nordholt LEIDEN | BOSTON <UN> This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License, which permits any non-commercial use, distri- bution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. The realization of this publication was made possible by the support of kitlv (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies). Cover illustration: Kampong Magetan by J.D. van Herwerden, 1868 (detail, property of kitlv). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Environment, trade and society in Southeast Asia : a longue durée perspective / edited by David Henley, Henk Schulte Nordholt. pages cm. -- (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde ; volume 300) Papers originally presented at a conference in honor of Peter Boomgaard held August 2011 and organized by Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-28804-1 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-28805-8 (e-book) 1. Southeast Asia--History--Congresses. 2. Southeast Asia--Civilization--Congresses. 3. Southeast Asia--Environmental conditions--History--Congresses. 4. Southeast Asia--Commerce--History--Congresses. I. Henley, David, 1963- editor. II. Schulte Nordholt, Henk, 1953- editor. III. Boomgaard, P., 1946- honouree. IV. Bankoff, Greg. Deep forestry. Container of (work): DS525.32.E58 2015 959--dc23 2014048006 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/ brill-typeface. issn 1572–1892 isbn 978-90-04-28804-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-28805-8 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by the Editors and Authors. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv. This book is printed on acid-free paper. <UN> Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Introduction Structures, Cycles, Scratches on Rocks 1 David Henley and Henk Schulte Nordholt 2 Deep Forestry Shaping the Longue Durée of the Forest in the Philippines 15 Greg Bankoff 3 Breeding and Power in Southeast Asia Horses, Mules and Donkeys in the Longue Durée 32 William G. Clarence-Smith 4 Under the Volcano Stabilizing the Early Javanese State in an Unstable Environment 46 Jan Wisseman Christie 5 History and Seismology in the Ring of Fire Punctuating the Indonesian Past 62 Anthony Reid 6 The Longue Durée in Filipino Demographic History The Role of Fertility Prior to 1800 78 Linda Newson 7 Glimpsing Southeast Asian Naturalia in Global Trade, c. 300 bce–1600 ce 96 Raquel A.G. Reyes 8 Ages of Commerce in Southeast Asian History 120 David Henley 9 Pursuing the Invisible Makassar, City and Systems 133 Heather Sutherland <UN> vi Contents 10 The Expansion of Chinese Inter-Insular and Hinterland Trade in Southeast Asia, c. 1400–1850 149 Kwee Hui Kian 11 From Contest State to Patronage Democracy The Longue Durée of Clientelism in Indonesia 166 Henk Schulte Nordholt 12 Visual History A Neglected Resource for the Longue Durée 181 Jean Gelman Taylor List of Writings of Peter Boomgaard 203 References 215 Index 255 <UN> Acknowledgements In August 2011, kitlv organized a workshop to honour professor Peter Boomgaard on the occasion of his retirement. We thank kitlv for financing this workshop on the longue durée in Southeast Asian history, which formed the basis of the present book. We thank Ellen Sitinjak and Yayah Siegers for their indispensable assistance in organizing this meeting. We also express our gratitude to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (knaw) for subsidizing the Open Access publication of this book. Finally we are grateful to Ireen Hoogenboom for the careful and efficient way in which she edited the present volume. David Henley and Henk Schulte Nordholt <UN> chapter 1 Introduction Structures, Cycles, Scratches on Rocks David Henley and Henk Schulte Nordholt The purpose of this book is to celebrate the work of Peter Boomgaard, recently retired from the University of Amsterdam and the Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (kitlv) in Leiden. Boomgaard is among the leading historians of Southeast Asia in the longue durée – that is, over very long periods of time. He single-handedly pioneered the field of Indonesian environmental history, and is the author of the only comprehensive book to date on the environmental history of Southeast Asia as a whole (Boomgaard 2007b). He has written the standard work on the population history of Java (Boomgaard 1989a), and the only book to date on the history of the relation- ship between tigers and people anywhere in the world (Boomgaard 2001a). Besides his own books he has edited or co-edited 15 collective volumes, written more than 70 chapters in edited volumes, and published more than 40 journal articles, most of them dealing with environmental history or with other aspects of the longue durée in Southeast Asia. His fascination with the long term is illustrated by such characteristic Boomgaard titles as ‘Land Rights and the Environment in the Indonesian Archipelago, 800–1950’ (Boomgaard 2011), ‘Economic Growth in Indonesia, 500–1900’ (Boomgaard 1993), and even ‘Early Globalization: Cowries as Currency, 1600 bce–1900’ (Boomgaard 2008c). Boomgaard’s eye for the broad scheme of things has led him to some unex- pected and trail-blazing conclusions. He showed, for instance, that Java de- urbanized under colonial rule, the proportion of its population living in towns falling in the course of the nineteenth century, whereas the opposite had usu- ally been assumed (Boomgaard 1989a:110–116). He definitively disproved the once popular theory that Javanese villages were colonial inventions or cre- ations (Breman 1980; Boomgaard 1991). He pointed out that tigers, in Southeast Asia, were not creatures of the natural forest, but thrived where human action created open landscapes rich in large prey animals like deer and pigs, so that tigers were effectively symbiotic with people and for a long time tiger numbers rose rather than declined as the human population of the region increased (Boomgaard 2001a:22–24). He was among the first to understand the impor- tance of traditional fertility control methods to the demographic history of © david henley & henk schulte nordholt, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004288058_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License. <UN> 2 Henley and SCHULTE NORDHOLT Indonesia (Boomgaard 1989a:192–196), and later showed how traditional social institutions such as bridewealth and slavery created incentives for women to practice birth control (Boomgaard 2003a, 2003b). His ongoing work on the his- tories of medicine and forestry in Southeast Asia may be expected to yield comparably radical and productive insights. For all his fascination with the ‘big picture’, Boomgaard has seldom been tempted into abstract or theoretical speculation. On the contrary, a look at his publication list (reproduced at the end of this volume) reveals a trademark interest in the worldly, the earthy, even the seamy and sinister side of Southeast Asian history: roots and tubers, leprosy and syphilis, cockfighting and tiger- baiting, bestiality and incest. Above all, Boomgaard is a richly empirical scholar whose publications are mines of information that others, if they wish, can use to generate and test hypotheses quite different from those which he himself advances in relation to them. We believe that the contributions included in the present volume are written in this same empirical spirit, with attention to detail as well as to the broad sweep of history. In order to honour Peter’s contribution to Southeast Asian history, in 2011 we invited some of his closest colleagues to address the question of what new insights a long-term historical perspective adds to our understanding of Southeast Asia. This book is the end result. The time span covered is from about 800 to 2000 ce: that is, from the time of Borobodur to the present. While few chapters cover the whole of this period, all deal with a time span of at least two centuries, and all are concerned with the historiographic big picture: the identification of processes and events that have shaped and changed the region in lasting ways. The immediate methodological advan- tage of such a long-term perspective is that it forces us to overcome the com- partmentalization imposed by conventional historical periodization, by which each era tends to be portrayed in terms of a different set of analytical concepts coined by a different group of historians claiming expertise in that particular era. Among Boomgaard’s most important sources of intellectual inspiration over the years has been the great French historian Fernand Braudel, by whose work he has described himself as ‘deeply influenced’ (Noordegraaf 2006:50).

Load more