Peter Boomgaard

The making and unmaking of tropical science: Dutch research on Indonesia, 1600-2000

The history of scientific research undertaken by Europeans in regions where they were the colonizing powers has been a popular and well researched topic for two decades now. A growing number of studies, with some preponderance of botany and medicine, have appeared on colonial and protocolonial science in the Americas and in Asia, and it seems likely that this is more than just a fad. However, scientific research by Europeans on and in the Indonesian archipelago does not figure prominently in this literature. Very few scholars working on Indonesia – with Lewis Pyenson (1989, 1998) as the main exception – have specialized in this potentially rewarding field. In order to give an impression of topics that could profitably be addressed, this article presents an overview, in very broad outline, of European – and particularly Dutch – scientific research on Indonesia during the last four centuries, with emphasis on the periods of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) and the Dutch colonial state.

'Smallpox, Vaccination, and the 'Pax Neerlandica'; Indonesia, 1550-1930'

Just a few years ago, many in the health community assumed that small pox had run its course. What were generally regarded as the last stocks of the smallpox virus, kept in two institutes, one in Novosibirsk, Russia, and one in Atlanta in the United States, were going to be destroyed on 30 June 1999. This was 20 years after the world had been officially declared free of smallpox and 201 years after the publication of Edward Jenners discovery of the smallpox vaccination (1798). However, during the late 1990s mount ing evidence suggested that the Russians had developed massive numbers of biological weapons, some of which were based on smallpox. Destruction of the American stocks was thereupon postponed. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, followed by the anthrax scare in October of the same year, created the right circumstances for the decision, taken in November 2001, definitely not to destroy the virus. Barely a year later (late 2002), many coun tries were actively engaged in the planning and implementation of new vac cination programmes against smallpox. This seems to be a good moment to take a look at the role of smallpox and vaccination in the past, when the disease was not just a scare, as it is today, but a gruesome everyday reality for millions. The bulk of this article presents factual information regarding smallpox in Indonesia, which is hard to come by in the more accessible literature, particularly for the period prior to 1800 and for the Outer Islands, that is, all areas outside Java. I argue that the vacci nation programme achieved success in Java much earlier than in most Outer

Introduction: Natural resources and the shape of Asian history, 1500-2000

Historians of Southeast Asia have often ignored the question of natural resources, mainly accepting them as a given and passing on to what they identify as the central issue, trade. Anthony Reid’s important two-volume revisionist history of the region even goes so far as to classify the early modern period as “an age of commerce,” emphasizing exchange as the economic activity of significance (Reid 1988–93). Yet exchange is only one aspect of a process that includes both the market destination and the production source as part of a global commodity chain. And while it is certainly not our intention to ignore any of these components, the focus of this volume is on the way the extraction and export of natural resources affects the development potential of the societies and locations wherein they lie (Bunker 1984). Southeast Asia has never been just an entrepot, simply a “gate to China” through which goods produced elsewhere passed. It has also been an important supplier of raw and semiprocessed materials. It has historically been part of a worldwide, if bounded, network of exchange that predates 1500 and that tied the region closely to India, China, and Japan (Abu-Lughod 1989). That this network evolved over the past five centuries into a global commodity system in no way lessens the significance of the preexisting ties and their effects on the peoples and environments of the region.

Land Rights and the Environment in the Indonesian Archipelago, 800-1950

Abstract This article has two basic aims. First, I discuss several notions regarding long-term changes in land-tenure arrangements, mainly in what is now Indonesia. I argue that the character of these changes is often badly understood, partly because the older literature has been misrepresented, partly because the older literature was wrong, and partly because many scholars implicitly or explicitly appear to believe in “stages theories” (best known among scholars under the German term Stufentheorie), which posit fairly uniform and unidirectional stages of land-tenure development across the board. Second, this article deals with environmental causes and effects of long-term land-tenure developments in the Indonesian Archipelago. Land tenure and conservation are hotly debated at present, but the historical substance in such debates is meagre, usually going back no further than the 1950s or 60s. Nor does there seem to be much interest in the environmental roots of land-tenure arrangements, perhaps because the participants in the land-tenure-and-the-environment debate are mainly anthropologists and environmentalists, who might find such topics of antiquarian importance only. As an historian I cannot share this view.