The Banana Tree at the Gate
About this book
The "Hikayat Banjar," a native court chronicle from Borneo, characterizes the irresistibility of natural resource wealth to outsiders as "the banana tree at the gate." Michael R. Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvement of Borneo's native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and highly successful and that processes of globalization began millennia ago. Dove's analysis replaces the image of the isolated tropical forest community that needs to be helped into the global system with the reality of communities that have been so successful and competitive that they have had to fight political elites to keep from being forced out.
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Information
Table of contents
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I. Introduction
- Chapter 1. The Study of Smallholder Commodity Producers
- Part II. The Challenges of the Colonial Trade in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
- Chapter 2. A Native Court’s Warning about Involvement in Commodity Production
- Chapter 3. The Antecedent to Cultivating Exotic Rubber
- Part III. Coping with the Contradictions of Capitalism in the Early Twentieth Century
- Chapter 4. The Construction of Rubber Knowledge in Southeast Asia
- Chapter 5. Depression-Era Responses to Smallholder Rubber Development by Tribesmen and Governments
- Part IV. The Indigenous Resolution of the Subsistence/Market Tension
- Chapter 6. The Dual Economy of Cultivating Rubber and Rice
- Chapter 7. Living Rubber, Dead Land, and Persisting Systems
- Part V. The Conundrum of Resource Wealth versus Political Power
- Chapter 8. Material Wealth and Political Powerlessness
- Chapter 9. Plantations and Representations in Indonesia
- Part VI. Conclusion
- Chapter 10. Smallholders and Globalization
- Notes
- References
- General Index
- Index of Plant Names