Economic Change in East Malaysia
Economic Change in East Malaysia

Author: A. Kaur

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-01-12

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0230377092

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An authoritative economic history of Sabah and Sarawak since the 19th century emphasising their distinctive colonial history and the attempts to modernise them since they became part of Malaysia in 1963. They remain dependent on the production and export of a relatively small range of primary products. The considerable scrutiny from environmentalists and international and local pressure groups of timber exports in particular is examined. The book's examination of economic strategy in these states since the 1880s, demonstrates that the roots of the problems in the 1980s lay in policies formulated in the wider context of capitalist economic growth.

Anthropogenic Tropical Forests
Anthropogenic Tropical Forests

Author: Noboru Ishikawa

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-11-06

Total Pages: 660

ISBN-13: 9811375135

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The studies in this volume provide an ethnography of a plantation frontier in central Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on the expertise of both natural scientists and social scientists, the key focus is the process of commodification of nature that has turned the local landscape into anthropogenic tropical forests. Analysing the transformation of the space of mixed landscapes and multiethnic communities—driven by trade in forest products, logging and the cultivation of oil palm—the contributors explore the changing nature of the environment, multispecies interactions, and the metabolism between capitalism and nature. The project involved the collaboration of researchers specialising in anthropology, geography, Southeast Asian history, global history, area studies, political ecology, environmental economics, plant ecology, animal ecology, forest ecology, hydrology, ichthyology, geomorphology and life-cycle assessment. Collectively, the transdisciplinary research addresses a number of vital questions. How are material cycles and food webs altered as a result of large-scale land-use change? How have new commodity chains emerged while older ones have disappeared? What changes are associated with such shifts? What are the relationships among these three elements—commodity chains, material cycles and food webs? Attempts to answer these questions led the team to go beyond the dichotomy of society and nature as well as human and non-human. Rather, the research highlights complex relational entanglements of the two worlds, abruptly and forcibly connected by human-induced changes in an emergent and compelling resource frontier in maritime Southeast Asia. Chapters ‘Commodification of Nature on the Plantation Frontier’ and ‘Into a New Epoch: The Plantationocene’ are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.