Sarawak continued, with digressions

At some point last week (it was in the context of the Sunda Shelf and basic geography of Southeast Asia) I asked what anybody knew about the way the world was 30,000 years ago... and the response was sketchy. The latest issue of Science has a not-irrelevant bit to illuminate, via a review of After the Ice A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC by Steven Mithen (soon to be published by Harvard University Press), which doesn't deal with the Sunda Shelf, but does summarize some bits we should tuck away in our minds:
At the close of the last Ice Age (around 10,000 B.C.), dramatic events worldwide set the stage for the transformation, early in the present interglacial, of most of humanity from foragers to farmers. The ice melted, sea levels rose, and floras and faunas were rearranged as they began to assume their modern compositions and zonal distributions. For the first time during a climatic transition of this nature and magnitude, the hominins (1) dealing with global change were anatomically modern people (Homo sapiens sapiens) who were living in Siberia, the Americas, and on all continents save Antarctica, sometimes at fairly high densities. Only 10,000 years earlier, humans had survived the cold and aridity crisis of the Last Glacial Maximum through a combination of strategic retreat, technological inventiveness, subsistence intensification, social flexibility, and ideological sophistication. Now, they were poised for their biggest make-over since a creature variously known as Homo ergaster or H. erectus first crossed into Sinai from Suez, sometime around 1.5 million years ago. For better or worse (only time will tell), between 8000 and 3000 B.C. humans around the globe went from a more-or-less passive dependency on what food was produced "in the wild" by the local ecology to a reliance on food they produced through the control and inexorable alteration of whole ecosystems. This cumulative change constitutes the most important revolution in the 6-million-year-long history of the hominins (as V. G. Childe so well recognized early in the 20th century). It forms the epochal tale...

As far as I know, there's very little archaeology that bears on the drowning of the Sunda Shelf --though there's a journal to which we have electronic access (Asian Perspectives) that deals with just this --though I've never had any occasion to explore its contents.

EURASIA DURING THE LAST 150,000 YEARS covers a much broader scope of time, but surely includes a lot of human activity along with the climatic stuff. There's lots of speculative stuff (the real Atlantis? "Eden of the East"?) that's not worth our time, but see Endemism in Bornean Mammals (Dr Colin P.Groves) for an animal-centric view.

Another of the subjects my life has been entangled in has to do with the Chinese (especially via the course I teach in Anthropology of East Asia), and I've long been interested in the diaspora of Chinese --their spread to areas outside of China, and the linkages that continue to bind those in the diaspora to China. I've found several interesting additions in the past week or so, including

Gangsters Into Gentlemen: The Breakup of Multiethnic Conglomerates and the Rise of a Straits Chinese Identity in Penang (Engseng Ho)

Transcultural Diaspora: The Straits Chinese in Singapore, 1819-1918 Mark Ravinder Frost

The Fall and Rise of the Study of the Chinese in Southeast Asia (Carl Trocki)

The British did not initiate the process of `bringing in the Chinese', and despite their best efforts to gain some control over the process of recruiting, despatching and employing - not to mention governing - populations of Chinese laborers, they were never as successful as they wished to be. Chinese certainly came to European settlements and indeed found it possible to live in these places with greater security than in `native' states, but very often places like the Straits Settlements were no more than staging areas for Chinese enterprises in the Malayan, Sumatran, Bornean and Siamese states. In fact, if we look at the actual chronology of events, we could argue that it was not the British who brought the Chinese to Malaya, but it was the Chinese and the Malays who brought the British.

This is my little contribution toward reinterpreting the history of the Chinese diaspora. I do not want to downplay the importance of the British and European contribution however. If the migration began as a response to Chinese affluence and market demand, it was maintained as a result of increasing poverty and declining economic and political conditions in their homeland. A principal factor in these developments was the Chinese market demand for one particular product, and that was opium. The British opium trade from India to China expanded dramatically after the foundation of Singapore. This process transformed what had been a chronic, but minor social problem, affecting only a portion of the elite, to a nationwide economic and political catastrophe. Between 1820 and 1840, the annual amount of British Indian opium exported to China increased tenfold, jumping from about 4,000 chests in 1820 to 40,000 chests (2800 Tons) in 1839, on the eve of the Opium War. During these same years China experienced a net outflow of $150,000,000 (Spanish). The economic conditions created by the opium trade were very likely one of the factors in pushing the emigration of thousands of Chinese laborers. (Trocki, 1999)

The picture is full of ironies. Once they arrived in Southeast Asia, Chinese laborers found that they were expected to be the major consumers of opium. Since they were now able to earn cash for their efforts, both local Chinese capitalists and colonial governments saw them as the most likely source of a tax revenue. Elsewhere I have argued that the major revenue resources for Southeast Asian colonial states, including Siam, Johor and other `semi-colonized' regions, were the opium revenue farms. Thus, opium pushed them out of China and pulled them into Southeast Asia, often trapping them there for good, or ill, as the case may be.

I spent a good deal of time in the last week exploring sin-taxing "revenue farms", specifically those having to do with opium, alcohol, and gambling, which provided a large part of the revenues of several European possessions in Southeast Asia, Brooke Sarawak among them. A distressing tale, as interesting for how little is said in many of the standard sources. Trocki's "Opium and the beginnings of Chinese capitalism in Southeast Asia" (Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 33:297-314 [2002]) is a good basic introduction; James Warren's "Capitalism and addiction: the Chinese, revenue farming, and opium in colonial Singapore and Java, 1800-1910" (Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 27:59-72 [1995]) reviews Trocki's Opium and Empire (1991) and Rush's Opium to Java (1990).

Robert Payne The White Rajahs of Sarawak (1987) quotes Vyner Brooke:

The state revenues were mainly derived from opium, gambling, pawn, and spirit farms, head and exemption taxes. The mineral wealth of the state was monopolized. And the small rubber holdings were established at the cost of extinguishing thousands of acres of rice lands... with the result that poverty was rife whenever the price of rubber fell..."

There's a lot to the story of the Chinese in Sarawak, and in the Nanyang (literally 'South Seas') in general --including questions of where the migrants came from in China (overwhelmingly Fujian province, and secondarily Kwangtung), and how they came to dominate commercial activities in many Southeast Asian localities. I continue to gather materials in those realms, though just why I'm not really sure...

So... back to the general case. We might do worse than to begin with a look at Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition (1911) articles:

Encyc Brit 1911 'Sarawak' and 'Borneo'

Twentieth (and now 21st) century developments in Sarawak include the sagas of rubber, oil, timber, oil palm... and most recently hydroelectricity. The last 40 years (since Sarawak's inclusion in Malaysia) have seen acceleration in the penetration of the outside world into the lives of the peoples of Sarawak. There is a degree of inevitability in these processes, seen pretty much anywhere one cares to look in the world: the lives of peoples are altered by globalization, and generally it's in the direction of more necessary participation in the external world, and decline of local autonomy. It's easy enough to find examples of injustice and inequality, in plentiful episodes of enrichment of a few at great cost to the lives and freedom of many.

There's also a danger of adopting a romantic view of the past as a golden age, a time before what seem to be the intractable 'modern' problems (greed, imperialism, etc.) spoiled everything... but the fact is, people have (as far as we can see) pretty much always been beastly to one another, usually in service to their own interests, and sometimes with great brutality. Personally, I mourn worlds I remember, and worlds I've encountered in books and photographs... but I also have to recognize that my memories are selective, and that all books and photographs are selections of (and constructions of) more complex realities.

We can look at some bits of the past in Sarawak in detail, before sailing on into the present and future. Consider Simanggang, the town (now a city) near which I lived for a year... and longhouses ...and for sheer romance, body art (an inadequate label, perhaps too post-modern to be appropriate --see also Traditional Dayak Tattoo in Borneo). I've found two articles that are especially poignant:

Pirates, squatters and poachers: the political ecology of dispossession of the native peoples of Sarawak (Marcus Colchester) Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters 3:158-179 (1993)
and
Development Policy and Human Mobility in a Developing Country : Voting Strategy of the Iban in Sarawak, Malaysia (Ryoji Soda) Southeast Asian Studies 40:4 (2003) [original at http://www.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/seas/40/4/soda.pdf]
These are just heartbreaking to somebody of my sensibilities and personal history. They detail just how the thievery was/is being perpetrated (see extract from Colchester 1993)

Look at what Sarawak's government says about itself: Why Invest in Sarawak

If we adopt a primarily economic perspective and look at resource rents, we can note that Sarawak's single greatest money earner is petroleum ...but revenue for oil and gas is entirely (well, 95%) in the hands of the NATIONAL government, and not the state government (evidently since the Petroleum Development Act of 1974 --see RESOURCE EXPORTS AND RESOURCE PROCESSING FOR EXPORT IN SOUTHEAST ASIA (Jomo K. Sundaram and Michael Rock), and search for 'sarawak'). The state government of Sarawak is in complete control of forestry, however, and logging has been the primary revenue source for many years.

Timber rents have mainly been captured by powerful politicians, royalty and others who secure logging concessions, as well as their mainly ethnic Chinese logging operator partners and, frequently, Japanese sogososha financiers. It should not be forgotten that rent-seeking occurs in essentially oligopolistic environments, ensuring that rents are not all dissipated in the process due to political ‘entry barriers’ and that net gains are handsome enough to be very attractive. Such rents have not been restructured to reward productive and productivity enhancing investments until recently, when bans on log exports have encouraged investments in wood processing, with generally inefficient outcomes owing to the manner in which the incentives have been structured (Vincent and Hadi 1992).

The authorities do not tax either the timber concessionaires or the logging companies very much, certainly not even enough to cover the real costs of reforestation and for strict enforcement of logging and other related regulation. Timber companies hardly pay income tax, while the state governments collect a small royalty on the logs extracted, amounting to barely one percent of the timber price. Loggers minimize their tax liabilities by undervaluing both the type, nature and quality of the timber extracted, as well as their quantity, volumes or weights. Under-declaration of wood extracted and exported is common, while accounts are ‘fiddled’ or officials bribed to reduce tax and royalty liabilities and to maximize retained earnings. As the federal and state governments realize that timber revenues have been well below what they should be, tax rates have been raised, but often only to lead to further tax evasion.

With few taxes to pay, and poor enforcement by the authorities, the loggers seek to maximize short-term, rather than long-term returns, especially with the political uncertainties which threaten policy change and the security of their concessions. Having no stake in the forest's regeneration owing to the generally short-term nature of the logging concessions and the sub-contracting arrangements to the loggers by the concessionaires, the logging industry has been short-termist, and largely oblivious of the requirements of sustainable forestry practices. Much illegal logging — outside concession areas, of immature trees, etc. — occurs, while logging companies often disregard restrictions for selective felling in order to maximize profits in the short-term.

Logging’s contribution to Malaysian capital accumulation, investment and growth has been limited in other ways too. Under-declaration of timber production and exports has not only facilitated tax evasion, but also capital flight. Many of the beneficiaries have not even re-invested within the country, let alone in the areas from which the timber has been extracted. Not surprisingly, then, Malaysian logging companies have been among the most prominent of Malaysian companies investing abroad in the Southwest Pacific, Indochina, West Africa and northern South America. Thus, logging has exacerbated resource outflows, not only for the communities directly affected, but also for the national economy. Despite the considerable money made from logging, both state and federal governments get relatively little while they are obliged to bear some of the environmental and other costs of deforestation.

(Sundaram and Rock)

Rubber, always primarily a smallholder (i.e., not 'estate') crop in Sarawak, is in decline; palm oil is touted as the crop of the future, and deserves a closer look.

While we're at it, let's look at a couple of other problems:

A 21st century take on another type of "piracy": BIO-PIRATES RAID TREES IN THE SWAMPS OF BORNEO By Richard Lloyd Parry --see Google calanolide search

The making of Sarawak's new land laws Criminalising community mapping and gathering of forest products

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Other stuff:

malaria and an earlier collection

The Pre-Modern East Asian Maritime Realm: An Overview of European-Language Studies Geoff Wade (90 pages, half of it bibliography --but a good brief introduction to the research that's been published in English especially)

29 Dec gatheration on Sarawak --with stuff on Bakun, among other things