Peter Boomgaard
Professor Peter Boomgaard (1946) is the coordinator of the EDEN (Ecology, Demography and Economy in Nusantara) research programme being carried out by the KITLV. The programme deals with the environmental history of Indonesia between 1600 and 2000. Now in its final phase, the EDEN project has produced (and will go on producing) a large number of articles, in addition to various monographs. Recently, Peter Boomgaard was featured in a Discovery Channel documentary on man-eating tigers, a spin-off of his EDEN research.
Peter Boomgaard is professor of Environmental and Economic History of Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, at the University of Amsterdam, and he is a senior researcher at the KITLV. He was trained as an economic historian at the Free University, where he was granted his PhD in 1987 (cum laude), on the basis of a dissertation on the link between population increase and economic growth in Java in the nineteenth century. He has held positions at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Free University, Amsterdam, and the Royal Institute for the Tropics, also in Amsterdam. He was the director of the KITLV from 1991 to 2000.
Peter Boomgaard published on Dutch social history and the social and economic history of Mexico and Suriname, before he turned almost entirely to the economic, social, demographic, agricultural, medical and environmental history of Indonesia, and, recently, of Southeast Asia as a whole. He has also written about the history of science regarding Southeast Asia. He has published over 100 articles and 22 books (in English, Dutch, Indonesian, French, and Spanish), in addition to numerous reviews. Between 1982 and 1996, he was the editor of the series of statistical source material Changing Economy in Indonesia. He is also a founding member of the European Association of South-East Asian Studies (EUROSEAS), of which he was the secretary between 1992 and 2004, and a member of the editorial boards of four international scholarly journals.
Contact:
A full list of KITLV publications and their authors can be obtained from our archive of annual reports.
Interview with Peter Boomgaard on Friday 12 February 2010:
Selected Publications
(with David Henley) (eds.), Credit and Debt in Southeast Asia, 860-1930: From Peonage to Pawnshop, from Kongsi to Cooperative. Singapore: ISEAS, 2009. (195 pp.)
(with Dick Kooiman and Henk Schulte Nordholt) (eds), Linking destinies; Trade, towns and kin in Asian history. Leiden: KITLV, 2008 (277 pp.)
(with Greg Bankoff) (eds.), A History of Natural Resources in Asia: The Wealth of Nature. New York/Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 [288 pp.].
(ed.), A world of water; Rain, rivers and seas in Southeast Asian histories. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007
Southeast Asia; An Environmental History Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007
‘The making and unmaking of tropical science; Dutch research in Indonesia, 1600-2000’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 162-2/3 (2006):191-217.
‘Cockfights and quailfights in Indonesia, 800-1950; Male versus female agression’, in Pierre Le Roux & Bernard Sellato (eds.), Les Messagers divins; Aspects esthétiques et symboliques des oiseaux en Asia du Sud-Est/Divine Messengers; Bird Symbolism and Aesthetics in Southeast Asia, pp. 119-160. [No pl.:] Éditions Connaissances et Savoir/SevenOrients/ IRASEC, 2006.
(with David Henley and Manon Osseweijer) (eds.), Muddied waters; Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on management of forests and fisheries in Island Southeast Asia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2005.
(with David Henley) (eds.), Smallholders and stockbreeders; Histories of foodcrop and livestock farming in Southeast Asia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004.
‘‘Primitive’ tiger hunters in Indonesia and Malaysia, 1800-1950’, in John Knight (ed.), Wildlife in Asia; Cultural perspectives, pp. 185-206. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
‘Human capital, slavery and low rates of economic and population growth in Indonesia, 1600-1910’, Slavery & Abolition; A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 24-2 (2003):83-96. [Also in Gwyn Campbell (ed.), The structure of slavery in Indian Ocean Africa, pp. 83-96. London/Portland: Frank Cass, 2004.]
’Smallpox, vaccination, and the “Pax Neerlandica”; Indonesia, 1550-1930’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 159-4 (2003):590-617.
‘Bridewealth and birth control; Low fertility in the Indonesian Archipelago, 1500-1900’, Population and Development Review 29-2 (2003):197-214.
‘In the shadow of rice; Roots and tubers in Indonesian history, 1500-1950’, Agricultural History 77-4 (2003):582-610.
‘From subsistence crises to business cycle depressions, Indonesia 1800-1940’, Itinerario 26-3/4 (2002):35-49.
Frontiers of fear; Tigers and people in the Malay world, 1600-1950. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2001.
(with Janneke van Dijk), Het Indië boek. Zwolle: Waanders, 2001.
‘Crisis mortality in seventeenth-century Indonesia’, in: Ts’ui-jung Liu et al. (eds), Asian population history, pp. 191-220. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
(with Ian Brown), Weathering the storm; The economies of Southeast Asia in the 1930s depression. Singapore/Leiden: ISEAS/KITLV Press, 2000.
‘Oriental nature, its friends and its enemies; Conservation of nature in late-colonial Indonesia, 1889-1949’, Environment and History 5 (1999):257-292.
(with F. Colombijn and D. Henley) (eds), Paper landscapes; Explorations in the environmental history of Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997. [Verhandelingen KITLV 178.]
(with the assistance of R. de Bakker), Forests and forestry 1823-1941. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 1996. [Changing Economy in Indonesia, Vol. 16.]
(with P. Alexander and B. White), In the shadow of agriculture. Non-farm activities in the Javanese economy, past and present. Amsterdam: KIT, 1991.
Children of the colonial state; Population growth and economic development in Java; 1795-1880. Amsterdam: VU University Press [for CASA], 1989. [CASA Monographs 1.]
