Histories of the Borneo Environment Economic, Political, and Social Dimensions of Change and Continuity

About this book

In light of the tremendous changes that have come to the island of Borneo in recent decades, this volume takes a detailed historical look at its environment from native, colonial, and national perspectives. It examines change and continuity in the economic, political, and social dimensions of human-environmental interactions. Reflecting the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of environmental history, the book brings together an international group of historians, anthropologists, geographers, and social foresters, all looking through a historical lens at the environment in Brunei, the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, and the Indonesian province of Kalimantan.

Reed L. Wadley is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Other contributors include George N. Appell, Carol Carpenter, Amity A. Doolittle, Michael R. Dove, Christina Eghenter, Monica Janowski, Lesley Potter, Graham Saunders, Bernard Sellato, and Eric Tagliacozzo.


Table of Contents:

Introduction: Environmental histories of Borneo / Reed L. Wadley

Part One: Distant and local economies
Onto the coasts and into the forests: Ramifications of the China trade on the ecological history of northwest Borneo, 900-1900 CE / Eric Tagliacozzo
Forest for food, forests for trade - between sustainability and extractivism: The economic pragmatism of traditional peoples and the trade history of northern East Kalimantan / Bernard Sellato
Histories of conservation or exploitation? Case studies from the interior of Indonesian Borneo / Cristina Eghenter
Commodity and environment in colonial Borneo: Economic value, forest conversions and concern from conservation, 1870-1940 / Lesley Potter

Part Two: Colonial and national resource politics
Boundaries, territory, and resource access in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, 1800-2000 / Reed L. Wadley
Controlling the land: Property rights and power struggles in Sabah, Malaysia (North Borneo), 1881-1996 / Amity A. Doolittle
The 'poison tree' and the changing vision of the Indo-Malay realm: Seventeenth to twentieth centuries / Michael R. Dove and Carol Carpenter

Part Three: Social transformations
Dismantling the cultural ecosystem of the Rungus of Sabah, Malaysia: A history of how the ideology of Western institutions led to the destruction of a Bornean environment / George N. Appell
Rice as a bridge between two symbolic economies: Migration within and out of the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak
Epilogue: In the eye of the beholder - development or exploitation? Changing perceptions of the Borneo environment

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