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Forests and Empire in Modern Asia
Organizer: Anne R. Osborne, Rider University
Chair: Anne R. Osborne, Rider University
Discussants: Nicholas K. Menzies, Independent Scholar, and James McCann, Boston University
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Western forestry spread along with empire throughout Asia. Although scientific forestry began as a unified body of knowledge, it was not imposed on a blank slate, but rather met, collaborated or contested with local knowledge and practice and particular political, economic, social and ecological conditions. This panel examines this encounter in three very different situations. K. Sivaramakrishnan, an anthropologist, investigates the juxtaposition in colonial India of a professionalized environmentalism with regional and local political struggles over forests, and asks whether and how a regional or local environmental awareness emerged from this encounter. Nancy Peluso, an environmental sociologist, explores how professional forestry institutions in Southeast Asia under colonial regimes varied according to local political, economic and ecological conditions, and how after World War II, the FAO successfully promoted a single ideological model which yet faced continuing challenges that often led to failure of practice. Anne Osborne, a historian, examines the introduction of the ideas of Western scientific forestry in China. She analyzes the forces that encouraged adoption of ambitious programs of professional forest management under government auspices, as well as those barriers which prevented their implementation in practice. Nicholas Menzies will comment from the perspective of a trained forester who has done both historical research and field research in China. James McCann will broaden the perspective still further by commenting from the point of view of a specialist on African environmental history.
Forests, Science and Empire in India’s Twentieth Century
K. Sivaramakrishnan, University of Washington
The growing body of historical research on forests, forestry, and imperialism in south Asia has yielded many interesting debates that have now come to inform other historical fields like social history, labor history, legal history, the history of nationalism, and the history of science. But an enduring argument has focused on the relation between the growth and development of scientific ideas relating to forest management and conservation – with consequences for the rise of varieties of environmentalism - and technologies of natural resource management, or appropriation, in the period of modern empires in Asia. The argument has been invigorated by new scholarship on the history of empire forestry. Concerns about how transnational flows of ideas and trained personnel generated a cosmopolitan, professionalized, international environmentalism have been juxtaposed with regional and local political struggles over forests and the lives associated with them. It is now possible to ask: how did foresters, colonial officials, political elites, and ordinary villagers, working together or in opposition in late-colonial forest locations develop something like an environmental awareness? This paper suggests ways to answer this question and the resulting examination of the colonial history of forest science, and related new theorizations of empire and local government, traces out some of the trajectories emerging from recent scholarship on India, science, empire, and forests. The paper also locates the Indian debates on inspirations and patterns of scientific management in world-historical flows and exchanges, and thus, asks what new comparisons become possible, thereby, across Asia.
Empires of Forestry in Southeast Asia
Nancy Lee Peluso, University of California, Berkeley
This paper makes two intertwined arguments through the history of professional forestry institutions in Southeast Asia. First, it qualifies accounts of colonial forestry that emphasize the emergence and spread of a set of common practices developed in Germany and France that are claimed to have refashioned forests in the colonies to make them legible, predictable, and productive. This paper examines the variations in professional forestry produced by the geographically and historically specific politics, economies, ecologies, and practices of producing knowledge and forestry models. This allows a new conceptualization of “empires of forestry”: networks of knowledge, practice, and institutions produced differently in different local contexts, and exchanged across sites through institutions facilitating this exchange. Second, after World War II, the Food and Agriculture Organization organized a new, more global, “empire of forestry,” which more successfully promoted a single model for legitimizing professional forestry as a development enterprise. The capital, technology, and legitimizing narratives that the FAO brought to this task helped national forest departments overcome the ecological, political-economic, intra-governmental, and cultural obstacles that had deterred colonial-era foresters from creating “political forests” in these regions. Challenges to forestry department controls from within state bureaucracies and on the ground continued, creating an odd contradiction between the failure of practice and the success of an idea: of both “forests” as specific types of places and “forestry” as a profession for managing these places. This contradiction is fundamental to understanding many of the conflicts faced in “forest areas” of the world today.
Paper Forests and a Dearth of Trees: Chinese Forestry in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Anne R. Osborne, Rider University
In the late imperial period, Chinese observers and foreign travelers alike deplored the denuded state of China’s landscape. Over-exploitation of forests and a failure to replant not only made timber trees increasingly rare and expensive; even sources of firewood and charcoal were becoming scarce in many areas. Deforestation also contributed to erosion and damage to water-ways and farmers’ fields. There was a quite sophisticated understanding of the processes of deforestation and the negative consequences that followed, and a range of ecologically appropriate remedies was proposed to address these problems. Yet implementation lagged, and China ended the imperial period with only a few weak programs of a forestation in existence. In the early twentieth century, Western ideas, personnel, and techniques of modern forestry were introduced into China and in some cases endorsed by high level officials. Protection of forests came to be seen as one hallmark of a strong modern state. The newly-constituted national government and some regional authorities drew up ecologically appropriate plans to protect or replant forests and strengthen the state. Yet just as in the imperial period, obstacles to practical action on the ground prevented those plans from achieving success. This paper analyzes the commonalities and differences in the ecological understanding expressed in traditional elite writings and Western-influenced environmental awareness. It also analyzes the barriers -- traditional or novel --which helped to stymie implementation of policies to protect China's for