Suchergebnisse

"Water, in its many guises, has always played a powerful role in shaping Southeast Asian histories, cultures, societies and economies. This volume, the rewritten results of an international workshop, with participants from eight countries, contains thirteen essays, representing a broad range of approaches to the study of Southeast Asia with water as the central theme. As it was exposed to the sea, the region was more accessible to outside political, economic and cultural influences than many landlocked areas. Easy access through sea routes also stimulated trade from an early age. However, the same easy access made Southeast Asia vulnerable to political control by strong outsiders. The sea is, moreover, a source of food, but also of many hazards. At the same time, Southeast Asian societies and cultures are confronted with and permeated by 'water from heaven' in the form of rain, flash floods, irrigation water, water in rivers, brooks and swaps, water-driven power plants, and pumped or piped water, in addition to water as a carrier of sewage and pollution. Finally, the volume deals with the role of water in classification systems, beliefs, myths, illness and healing"--Publisher's description

Too much of what has so far passed for the 'historical background' to Indonesia's environmental problems has consisted of little more than thinly disguised backward projections of modern trends. The writers in this volume report on their own pioneer journeys into the paper landscapes of the colonial literature and archives in search of the real environmental history of Indonesia

A comparison between the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago is for several reasons a rather awkward venture. The sheer difference in size alone, and all that such a difference implies, is enough to deter even the most cautious researcher. Another cause for hesitation is the varying quality of the population data: good statistics for most regions of the subcontinent from 1881 onward, bad statistics for almost all'regions before that date, compared to fairly good statistics for Java for the entire nineteenth century, but virtually worthless data for the Outer Islands during the same period. Finally considerations of a more personal nature can not be regarded as unimportant: I am familiar with the peculiarities of Javanese statistics, much less confident where the Outer Islands are concerned, and more than entirely ignorant of all things Indian. Fortunately I could rely on recent studies regarding the subcontinent, but research on nineteenth century population statistics for the Indonesian Outer Islands is all but non-existent. The sorry state of nineteenth century statistics for the Outer Islands makes one wonder whether anybody can be so foolhardy as to even start sorting them out. So it is hot without serious misgivings that this article has been written.

It was a reluctant Dutch government, representing an equally reluctant Dutch population, that had to recognize the independent Republic of Indonesia in 1949. The so-called decolonization process had been a traumatic experience for all parties concerned. The academic community in the Netherlands was no exception to this rule, and Dutch 'Indonesian studies' went into a long hibernation. This applies particularly to the study of the welfare services, an aspect of Dutch colonial rule that had been the pride and glory of civil servants and scholars alike (many of them former civil servants).

The principal cause of the 1930s depression in Southeast Asia lay outside the region - through a sharp contraction in demand for the region's major commodity exports. But it had important internal causes too: an oversupply of primary commodities and an increasing scarcity of new agricultural land leading to higher rents and lower wages, rising indebtedness and increasing landlessness. This work thoroughly analyses the pre-war depression. It also looks at the changes in the basic structures of the economies of Southeast Asia that were of long-term importance, such as the role of the state in the economy. The authors also draw similarities and contrasts between the 1930s depression and the 1990s Asian crisis

Globalization, environmental change, and social history : an introduction /Peter Boomgaard and Marjolein 't Hart --The El Dorado of forestry : the eucalyptus in India, South Africa, and Thailand, 1850-2000 /Brett M. Bennett --The Mid-Atlantic islands : a theatre of early modern ecocide? /Stefan Halikowski Smith --Environmental change and globalization in seventeenth-century France : Dutch traders and the draining of French wetlands (Arles, Petit Poitou) /Raphael Morera --The colonial famine plot : slavery, free trade, and empire in the French Atlantic, 1763-1791 /Joseph Horan --Environmental changes, the emergence of a fuel market, and the working conditions of salt makers in Bengal, c.1780-1845 /Sayako Kanda --Industrial life in a limiting landscape : an environmental interpretation of Stalinist Social conditions in the far north /Andy Bruno --"Pumpkins just got in there": gender and generational conflict and "improved" agriculture in colonial Zimbabwe /Guy Thompson --Hydro-businesses : national and global demands on the São Francisco River Basin environment of Brazil /Lucigleide Nery Nascimento and Mimi Larsen Becker.