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Peter Boomgaard

Boomgaard

Over the last decades, Professor Peter Boomgaard has been mainly interested in the environmental history of Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, between c. 1500 to c. 1950. He published numerous books and articles on this topic. This research interest partly coincided with other topics he investigated and published on, such as economic, social, demographic, agricultural, and medical history, the history of credit and debt, and science and technology studies, mainly regarding Southeast Asia. Within the field of environmental history, Boomgaard has written mainly about forestry, crops, and wild and domesticated animals. In 2007, he published the only textbook so far on environmental history of Southeast Asia. He was the coordinator of the EDEN (Ecology, Demography and Economy in Nusantara) research programme of KITLV, which dealt with the environmental history of Indonesia between 1600 and 2000. Recently, Peter Boomgaard was featured in a Discovery Channel documentary on man-eating tigers, a spin-off of his environmental history research.     Boomgaard is Professor of Environmental and Economic History of Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, at the University of Amsterdam, and Senior Researcher at KITLV. He held positions at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Free University, Amsterdam, and the Royal Institute for the Tropics (KIT), also in Amsterdam. He was several times invited to spend (part of) a sabbatical year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Wassenaar, the Netherlands. He is Professorial Research Associate in the Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS).

Peter Boomgaard was the director of KITLV from 1991 to 2000. Between 1982 and 1996, he was the editor of the series of statistical source material, entitled 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 various international scholarly journals.

    Boomgaard has been the recipient of awards from various institutions, among which recently a grant from NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) for a project on the History of Leprosy in Indonesia and Suriname, 1800-1950, to be carried out during the period 2012-4, and a fellowship for the academic year 2012-3 by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany, in order to enable him to write a book on Humans, Animals, and Landscapes in History; A Systems Approach.

    Peter Boomgaard published 120 chapters in edited volumes and articles in peer-reviewed journals, in addition to 25 books, including edited volumes, and numerous reviews. Most of his work was published in English, but some of it appeared in print in Dutch, Indonesian, French, Spanish, and Chinese).


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A full list of KITLV publications and their authors can be obtained from our archive of annual reports.
 
 

Selected Publications

(With Marjolein ’t Hart), Globalization, Environmental Change, and Social History, 233 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Also in Special Issue 18, International Review of Social History 55. http://journals.cambridge.org/repo_A79eoIke

‘Droefenis en Duurzaamheid: Beheer en Exploitatie van de Bossen op Java onder Daendels (1808-1810)’, Jaarboek voor Ecologische Geschiedenis 2009, pp. 59-84, 2010.

‘Tigers and People in the Malay World: Four Centuries of Confrontation and Co-existence in Comparative Asian Perspective’, in: Ronald Tilson and Philip J. Nyhus (eds), Tigers of the World: The Science, Politics and Conservation of Panthera tigris, pp. 349-56. London: Academic Press, 2010.

(With David Henley), Credit and Debt in Southeast Asia, 860-1930: From Peonage to Pawnshop, from Kongsi to Cooperative (eds.), 195 pp. Singapore: ISEAS, 2009.

‘Labour, Land, and Capital Markets in Early Modern Southeast Asia from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century’, Continuity and Change 24-1:55-78, 2009.

‘Technologies of a Trading Empire: Dutch Introduction of Water- and Windmills in Early-modern Asia, 1650s-1800’, History and Technology 24-1:41-59, 2008.

(With Dick Kooiman and Henk Schulte Nordholt), Linking destinies; Trade, towns and kin in Asian history (eds), 277 pp.. Leiden: KITLV, 2008.

Southeast Asia; An Environmental History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007.

(With Greg Bankoff), A History of Natural Resources in Asia: The Wealth of Nature (eds.), 288 pp. New York/Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 .

‘The making and unmaking of tropical science; Dutch research in Indonesia, 1600-2000’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 162-2/3:191-217, 2006.

‘Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Leprosy and Yaws in the Indonesian Archipelago, 1500-1950’, Manusya, Journal of Humanities, Special Issue14: 20-41, 2007.

(With David Henley), Smallholders and stockbreeders; Histories of foodcrop and livestock farming in Southeast Asia (eds.). Leiden: KITLV Press, 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 24-2:83-96, 2003. 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 159-4:590-617, 2003

‘Bridewealth and birth control; Low fertility in the Indonesian Archipelago, 1500-1900’, Population and Development Review 29-2:197-214, 2003.

‘In the shadow of rice; Roots and tubers in Indonesian history, 1500-1950’, Agricultural History 77-4:582-610, 2003.

‘From subsistence crises to business cycle depressions, Indonesia 1800-1940’, Itinerario 26-3/4:35-49, 2002.

Frontiers of fear; Tigers and people in the Malay world, 1600-1950. New Haven/London: Yale 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 5:257-292, 1999.

(With F. Colombijn and D. Henley), Paper landscapes; Explorations in the environmental history of Indonesia (eds). 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]