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Book Review
| Smallholders and Stockbreeders: Histories of Foodcrop and Livestock Farming in Southeast Asia. Edited by Peter Boomgard and David Henley. Leiden, The Netherlands: KITLV Press, 2004. vii +344 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $30.00.
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| This edited collection is an ambitious attempt to do several things: to juxtapose essays about the history of agriculture from several different geographical regions within Southeast Asia, to bring together scholars from several different countries to do so, to write about crop agriculture in Southeast Asia with a focus more upon foodcrops than export or cash crops, and to make a start at exploring the largely unstudied histories of livestock in that region. These ideas first manifested themselves as a conference panel in 2001, and the twelve essays that comprise this volume are revised from that program. The resulting volume is impressively international, with authors from six countries, and with a somewhat wide geographic scope (though Indonesia is the geographic focus for half of the essays). Their attempts at foodcrop and livestock histories (six essays on each) in many cases pointed out both the difficulty of finding sources to sustain such agendas, and also the relatively scanty secondary literature on those topics. As such, this book serves a useful function in codifying the current "state of the field," but also suggests as many questions as it answers, providing a good starting point for further research and analysis. Although the book aspires to a broad coverage, the practicality of narrowing such vast topics to twelve essays resulted in the preponderance of the foodcrop materials dealing with rice cultivation (with one interesting essay on sago palm flour), and the livestock essays being evenly divided between three about horses, and three about cattle and buffalo (with minimal mention of other animals). While providing environmental historians with a much needed view of Southeast Asian agricultural history, at times the book proved frustrating because of its lack of appropriate connections with American and European environmental history literature. |
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The better essays were focused on the diffusion and exchange of crops, animals, and agricultural technologies throughout the Indian Ocean world, and later, through colonialism. One of the successes of this volume was its lack of simplistic explanations for such complex processes as the spread of rice cultivation. As Henley and others show, the decision to plant rice (or not) is enmeshed within a web of cultural, political, economic, and ecological factors. Similarly, the changing fates of cattle, buffalo, and horses in Southeast Asia reflect transnational systems of economic exchange, but also factors as local as the need for Madura farmers to have bulls for culturally important local races. |
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This book will be of interest to specialists in agricultural history and Southeast Asia. Some of the essays have a broader appeal—for instance, Bankoff demonstrates the impact of colonial gender ideologies on horse breeding in the Philippines; Le Coq, Trebuil, and Dufumier discuss the impact of development policies and the Green Revolution on Mekong Delta rice farming. The book also could be a useful supplement to graduate courses in world or Asian environmental history, not least because most of the authors write from outside the typical environmental history tradition. |
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Michael Lewis is an associate professor of History and director of the Environmental Issues Program at Salisbury University, and the author of Inventing Global Ecology (Ohio, 2004). |
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