Environmental history is a relatively new discipline that has emerged over the past few decades. Most of the research in environmental history has been concentrated in the West, with American scholars such as Alfred Crosby and Donald Worster playing a leading role in its development. Despite the enormous influence that the natural landscape has played in the history of Southeast Asia, little work has been done on this topic in the context of the region. One of the few scholars to focus on environmental history in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, has been Peter Boomgaard, who, while acting as the director of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, the Netherlands, oversaw the EDEN (Ecology, Demography and Economics in Nusantara) project, which produced a number of monographs and edited works on the Indonesian environment and history. Boomgaard continues this work with this Southeast Asia: An environmental history, a textbook that is part of an ABC-CLIO series on Nature and Human Societies.

This textbook provides a broad survey of the history of how humans and economics have affected the Southeast Asian environment over time. The focus and analysis are clearly on demographics and economics. Boomgaard traces how as human populations have grown, so has their impact on the environment. This has been compounded through the rise of technology, trade and foreign communities, particularly after 1500, which have altered the landscape of the region.

The book is divided into six sections, each containing several chapters, with an introduction and conclusion bookending the work. The introduction attempts to introduce the reader to some of the leading theorists of environmental history – such as J.R. McNeill and Donald Worster – before segueing into the main arguments of the book. The first section, ‘Origins’, focuses on the era prior to the fifth century CE. The first chapter in this section provides an overview of the geography and biology of the natural environment, before focusing on the arrival of humans in Southeast Asia. The next chapter deals with the development of agriculture and metal. Agriculture appeared between 4000 and 1000 BCE in the region, and as is true throughout the world, allowed for more settled communities from which populations could expand. The ability to develop ‘agro-ecosystems’ (p. 51) led to changes in the landscape, with the most spectacular being wet-rice systems that could produce surpluses that could sustain larger populations. As populations grew, and specialisation occurred, societies began to trade and collect prestige goods, and long-distance trade – albeit modest at the time – began to occur, a theme that is carried over to the next section.

The rise of settled communities is the focus of the second section of the book, ‘The era of state formation’. This section contains only one chapter, which details the development of polities in Southeast Asia between the fifth and fifteenth centuries. As states became more centralised, they were able to have a greater influence over the natural environment, which ranged from the development of large irrigation networks to the construction of religious complexes. In this chapter Boomgaard brings particular attention to demographics – he estimates that there were between 5 and 10 million inhabitants in the region at the beginning of the Common Era (p. 80) – and the role that these populations had on timber resources – used for construction and fires – around settled communities. This section then transitions into a 20-page chapter that focuses on climatic conditions in Southeast Asia, in which Boomgaard discusses a variety of phenomena such as the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century, El Niño and global warming. While this chapter provides a nice summary of these issues, it is a bit jarring in its placement within the book.

Boomgaard then turns his consideration to the Early Modern Period, and the influence of foreign traders and technologies on Southeast Asia. In the first chapter of this section he provides detailed summaries of much of the recent work of Victor Lieberman and Anthony Reid on the era, particularly with regard to the increase in the human population between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, which Boomgaard attributes to a rise in fertility and a drop in mortality. Amidst this analysis is a considerable amount of focus given to various factors that influenced demography in Southeast Asia, ranging from disease and volcanic eruptions to celibate monks and localised versions of birth control. This section then transitions to a chapter that provides a standard discussion of the state and economy, and finally a chapter on the environmental causes and effects of this increase in population and trade. In this final chapter of the section – the seventh chapter in the book – the author argues that forest cover had gone from 90 per cent to between 70 and 75 per cent by 1850, although the percentage of forest cover could vary from place to place (with, for example, Java having a much lower percentage than Borneo). He then proceeds to discuss a variety of issues, ranging from mining to livestock to animal exports, making this chapter, and the final chapter in each section, the true gems of this work as they summarise much of the environmental material that would be expected in such a textbook.

The next section, titled ‘The late colonial period and the early years of independence’, focuses on the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Much like the previous sections, it is divided into a chapter on political, agricultural and demographic developments, which is followed by an account of the exploitation and management of natural resources. The next section reviews developments related to post-independence economic growth after 1970 and its influence on the environment. Population growth and developments in technology during this era, it is argued, have put such increasing stresses on the Southeast Asian environment that they have resulted in an ‘environmental debacle’ (a phrase that he uses in the title of the sixth section of the book). In this chapter Boomgaard summarises the role that a variety of factors – ranging from logging to tourism – have played in this ‘debacle’.

The ‘Conclusion’ argues that population growth and economic change (trade) were the primary engines of environmental change in Southeast Asia. This is not a revolutionary conclusion, but it does summarise the massive detail and argument that the author has put into the book. In this conclusion Boomgaard adopts a modified Wallersteinian World Systems approach – incorporating the role of Asian societies – to Southeast Asian environmental history. He argues that the integration of the region into larger trade and demographic patterns, particularly being incorporated into larger economic systems, has been the primary factor in understanding changes to the Southeast Asian environment as cores and peripheries, and their needs, have fuelled changes in the environment and how Southeast Asians interact with it.

How then should one approach Southeast Asia: An environmental history? It is a textbook, and thus has the traditional limitations of such a work that must bring together material from a maddeningly diverse region. The author certainly had to follow guidelines the series editor has established. For example, at the end of each chapter there is a short, perfunctory, bibliographical essay that is limited in its usefulness. A bibliography at the end of the book would have been helpful. In addition, a glossary and timeline are provided in the appendixes. The timeline, however, provides little insight and is so heavily focused on Indonesia that it does not enlighten the reader further as to any developments that Boomgaard has emphasised in the book. In addition, Boomgaard, with his previous focus on demography and economics in Indonesian society, does emphasise these factors throughout the work, while little attention is given to cultural understandings of the environment. Despite these criticisms, this is an excellent and informative textbook that weaves many of the traditional historical approaches to the Southeast Asian past with a consideration of how the environment influenced, and was influenced by, humans. This work is an excellent starting point for gaining a better understanding of the Southeast Asian environment and its history.