Ulrike Kirchberger

German scientists in the Indian forest service: A German contribution to the Raj?

The British government started to take a serious interest in forest administration in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Indian Forest Service was established in the 1850s and 1860s. Previously, British politicians had been indifferent to forest conservation in India. While forest conservators operated in some areas of British India, no coherent policy or administration existed on an all-Indian basis. European knowledge of tropical forests was still in its infancy, and it was widely believed that forest resources in Asia were inexhaustible. The East India Company, and later the British government, had therefore adopted a laissez-faire attitude towards European activities in the rain forests of the territories they controlled. European interest in Asian forests was concentrated on the precious teak timber. Because private business companies had unrestricted access to the forests in the first half of the nineteenth century, teak forests were exploited on a large scale. To gain access to the valuable teak trees, European export businesses destroyed large parts of Indian and Burmese forests. The annexation of the Tenasserim provinces in the First Burmese War from 1824 to 1826 was followed by an almost complete destruction of the teak forests by private companies. Such deforestation had disastrous ecological and social consequences.

German Overseas Interests in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain

The volume questions traditional nation-centred narratives of the Empire as an exclusively British undertaking by concentrating on the transnational networks of German migrants, pursued over more than two centuries in a multitude of geographical settings within the British Empire.