Tragedy of the Tropics: Colonialism, Commodities and Commons in Southeast Asian Deforestation since 1850

Halting tropical deforestation is central to combat both global warming and biodiversity decline. Structural conditions inhibit the transition to more sustainable land and forest use. There is an urgent need to study how such constraints have emerged historically. We know that the rise of global colonial trade in the nineteenth century put pressure on forests throughout the “Global South”, yet why this trade accelerated deforestation in some areas, but not in others, remains poorly understood. This project investigates how trade and colonialism affected deforestation rates in insular Southeast Asia and in what ways these relationships were shaped by local land rights and socio-political inequalities since 1850.

Insular Southeast Asia offers a rich study area, because of its extensive history of deforestation, socio-economic and political diversity, and colonization by different imperial powers. This project pioneers a new approach to assess long-run changes in historical forest area using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and by combining evidence from colonial-era vegetation and topographic maps with statistical and qualitative sources. This allows us to construct a detailed picture of the spatial transformation of insular Southeast Asia.