Forests and Forestry, 1823-1941.  Peter Boomgaard with the assistance of R. de Bakker.  Changing Economy in Indonesia (A Selection of Statistical Source Material from the Early 19th Century up to 1940), Vol. 16.  Royal Tropical Institute: Amsterdam, 1996.  184 pp., bibliography.  Reviewed by Pamela McElwee (Yale University, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies).

 Part of an on-going series on economic history source material, this book addresses an extremely important part of the economic history of the Indonesian archipelago: forests and trade in forest-based products.  More a collection of statistical tables than an actual book, Forests and Forestry 1823-1941 nonetheless should be of great use to those working in this specialized area.  The bulk of the book is made up of a series of statistical tables, broken down by dates, places and products.  These give a running history of such issues as forest exports by product volume over time, values of exports from varying regions of the colony, acreage of plantation of teak and other woods, incomes and expenditures of the Forest Service, and estimated total forest areas over time in different locales, among other things.  Compiling these statistics in one place, thereby saving prospective researchers a trip to the Netherlands and endless Dutch translations, will no doubt be helpful to many. 

 As with many works on the economic history of Indonesia, the statistical material for Java is more comprehensive than for the Outer Provinces.  In the case of forestry, this means that disproportionate attention has been paid in the past to the importance of teak forests in Java to the exclusion of the forest products of the outer islands, such as rubbers, rattan, resins, gums, wax, skins and others.  As this book makes clear, however, these forest products (often inaccurately referred to elsewhere as ‘minor forest products’) from the Outer Provinces played an extremely important role in intra-regional and international trade during the colonial period.  However, other than these statistics in forest products trade from the Outer Provinces, most of the remaining statistical tables tell us about forestry in Java only.  

Statistics alone, however, cannot tell the whole story.  How are we to understand why exports of copal (a resin from Agathis dammara trees) rose after 1900 but not before? The average reader needs a good sense of both Indonesian economic history and world trade trends to make sense of some of the implications of the tables.  While the book makes an apology for this (“We do not intend in this chapter to provide a detailed history of Indonesian forestry… the concern here is to present those particularly required for a proper understanding of the tables,” p. 17), the apology falls short for those seeking an in-depth look at forestry issues.  A review of previous works on forestry in Indonesia is too cursory, and other helpful contexts that could have provided perspectives to the tables are missing altogether (For example, what exactly were some of these products used for at their end destinations?  What effect did the Cultivation System have on forestry?  Who were the sorts of people involved in the trade of forest products and how were trading networks run?).  Expanding the introduction and explanatory chapters would have greatly inflated the readership potential of this book.

Statistics also suffer from being the official count only.  There can be no doubt that significant trade in forest products occurred outside the view of the colonial statisticians.   Many forest products have extremely high value to weight ratios, such as resins and bird’s nests, which would encourage smuggling and undertaxation of these products.  There are those traded forest products that, by dint of their seeming insignificance in total export markets (animal skins, certain spices), were not counted at all by colonial economic accounts.  Furthermore, export and import statistics tell us nothing about local uses and in-country trade.  To this end, the book can tell us little about how forests were actually being managed by local people in this period.

In addition to the wealth of information on forest product trade, also of interest are the statistics on forest land cover in the archipelago.  Although these are loosely estimated figures of acreage, they point out several bold facts:  one, Java lost almost half its forest cover between 1840 and 1940.  And two, that this loss of cover can blamed almost entirely on timber exploitation and agricultural expansion.  The book might have done well to include statistics on the expansion of plantation tree crops (rubber, oil palm, coffee) to explain the changes in forest land cover.  This information, however is not included.  What can be inferred to some degree, even without this information, is that -- at least for the case of teak and junglewood forests in Java -- loss of forest cover through small actions of local peoples, such as by swiddening, forest foraging, etc., cannot be used to explain the massive forest loss in this time period.  This conclusion has resonance for today as well, when local actions are often blamed for forest loss, when often the culprits continue to be large scale timber extraction and land clearance for transmigration instead.