Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy.

>9.The British Colonial System and the Forests of the Western Himalayas, 1815-1914 Richard P. Tucker 146 10.The Precolonial Woodstock in Sahalien West Africa: The Example of Central x Global Deforestation the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.Their insights, and those of several members of the Board of Directors of the Forest History Society who joined us more briefly, are reflected in the revised texts of our papers at more points than the authors can possibly acknowledge explicitly.the forty-year process of commercial lumbering of the white pine forests of northern Michigan, based on the technology and economy of an industrial age, which lies behind the paper presented by Michael Williams, a geographer.His work reminds us, however, that in other regions the elimination of forests was caused far less by lumbering for profit than to make way for food and other marketable products.Williams describes the small-farmer world of the oak-hickory forests in southern Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.There, on the frontier of a rapidly xiv Global DeforestationThailand, and the Mekong River in Vietnam.Between 1860 and 1914 export rice soared from a regional average of nearly 700,000 tons per year to 4.2 million tons per year.British conquests in Burma, French victories in Indochina, and British diplomatic pressure on Thailand swept away existing constraints on international trade imposed by the indigenous regimes.At the same time the world price of rice reflected the combined impact of a European consumption market and reexport market to the West Indies.Sugar planters depended upon a newly-perfected method of parboiling, gelatinizing, and shipping rice to feed their indentured Indian and Chinese laborers.The colonial and Thai governors invested public monies in railways, river control projects, ports, and fiscal incentives for producers.Indian and Chinese middlemen provided capital for peasants anxious to respond to these incentives.Adas' essay in this volume reveals with what speed and energy the peasantry of upper Burma moved into the virgin lands of the Lower Delta to clear new rice lands at the expense of primary forest.In spite of a long catalogue of pioneer hardships, including tigers, malaria, and swamps, the Burmese peasants created a new landscape in Lower Burma ina few short decades.Inland, the evergreen rain forests, which were estimated to be about four million hectares in 1852, fell to the axe and flooding techniques of the Burmese pioneers.By 1914 even the mangrove swamps on the coasts had succumbed to the drive for new rice lands.The expansion of agriculture in western India shows a similar pattern of peasant energy and capital put into land clearing.In their joint paper J. F. Richards and Michelle McAlpin analyze the effect of rising international raw cotton demand, colonial enabling measures, and construction of cartable roads, railways, and Bombay port facilities upon the peasants of the Bombay Deccan.In the districts covered by this study the total arable area rose from 6.3 million hectares in the period 1856-60 (annual average) to 10.1 million hectares in the period 1916-1920.The figures for cotton, the leading cash crop, show a jump from annual averages of 322,000 hectares in 1856-60 to 1.3 million hectares under cotton in 1916-20, an enhancement much in excess of that of the increase in total arable land in this period.By 1920 one result was the clearing of virtually all accessible scrub, woodland, and jungle from the wetlands, village woods, and uncleared lands of the region.The dry deciduous monsoon forest survived only in isolated stands or in the government's reserved forests.These and other chapters give us insights into different stages of the ecological impact of Western colonialism or neo-colonialism.The intricate penetration of British institutions in western India and the transformation of Lower Burma also at British hands were only two examples.Dennis Roth shows the impact of the transition of the Philippines from Spanish to American control at the turn of the twentieth century; Warren Dean describes southern Brazil in the turbulent aftermath of Portuguese rule; while James Thomson outlines the open woodlands in the Sahelian savannah before French colonial control took hold.In Ohio and southeastern Brazil we see uncontrolled deforestation on the frontiers of white penetration into regions whose small earlier populations had made only limited changes in the forest cover.Thomas Cox's survey of timber atmosphere.The general impression is that this depletion of the tropical forests has accelerated massively in the past thirty years or so.But we may simply be thinking of commercial timber harvesting, which may not have been the only, or even the major source of forest clearance in the tropics until recently.In other words, our sense of the rate of change of the tropical forest cover is as yet only guesswork for the years until the 1950s.This conference, centering as it did on the dynamics more than the statistics of nineteenth-century forest use, did not provide definitive data on quantitative 1. Ohio: Agricultural Clearing 5 Table 1.1.Ohio: improved land (in acres: 100,000 acres = 40,468 ha) Improved land Inter-censal as percentage Number of Improved land Improved increment of state holdings per holding 1850 9,851,493 40.