Tulipmania: devastation or exaggeration?

Financial History Review

Framing tulipmania in terms of sequestered capital – capital whose quantities, usages and future yields are hidden from market participants – offers a richer and more straightforward explanation for this famous financial bubble than extant alternatives. Simply put, the underground planting of the tulip bulbs in 1636 blindfolded seventeenth-century Dutch speculators regarding the planted quantities and their development and future yields. The price boom began in mid November 1636, coinciding with the time of planting. The price collapse occurred in the first week of February 1637, coinciding with the time of bulb sprouting – signaling bulb quantities, development and future yields. Also consistent with our explanation is the initial price collapse location, in the Dutch city of Haarlem, where temperature and geography favored early sprouting and sprout visibility.

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2011

Paramita: Historical Studies Journal, 2018

The extreme salient of Java has often been described as ‘malarious land’ and ‘unheathy region’. Although it had a great consequences on the people’s conditions of health and socio-economy, the problem of malaria has rarely been well-understood and fairly-treated in the existing historical studies. This paper is expected to fill in the existing gap in our knowledge on the issues. By using the available historical sources, the paper seeks to elaborate the problem of malaria and its eradication efforts in the extreme salient of Java during the Dutch colonial era. The major objectives of the paper are to examine the seriousness of malaria problem existing in the region and its causes, and to elaborate the ways in which the problem of malaria was contained by the colonial authorities. It is argued that there was a significant progress in the fight against malaria and the understanding of the malaria causes and the chosen methods of eradication reflected both scientific advances and econ...

Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 1987

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2011

If I were to recommend one general history of Southeast Asia to an interested nonspecialist, it would be Craig Lockard's Southeast Asia in World History. Lockard has capped a long career as a Southeast Asian and World historian with a magnificently accessible, superbly written and remarkably concise regional history. He ably manages to cover more than 2000 years of history in the space of just over 200 pages. Lockard's attention to the varied, historical popular cultures of the region is particularly evident, making for a lively engaging read which is about as far from dry history as one can get. Lockard's first four chapters cover overlapping periods of historical development: from earliest times, before the second century BCE in Chapter 1, developing trade connections around 200 BCE to 800 CE in Chapter 2, the 'golden age' of early classical kingdoms from around 800 to 1400 in Chapter 3, and new cultural influences, particularly the spread of Islam and Theravada Buddhism from 1300 to 1750 in Chapter 4. Lockard makes the wise choice of overlapping periods rather than trying to definitively mark extensive changes in a broad region. Chapters 5 (1500-1750), 6 (1750-1914) and 7 (1800-1941) focus on successive waves of European colonialism across the region. The last three chapters cover the twentieth century, anticolonial struggles, nation building and, since 1970, the region's fast developing economies and generally authoritarian politics. Lockard does not make any novel arguments about historical interpretation. Nevertheless, several themes stand out. First, Lockard manages to present a strong regional history rather than cobbling together multiple national histories. More than any other general account of Southeast Asian regional history to date, Lockard manages to eschew the powerful, even stifling modern national frames of historiography that dominate most attempts to write about Southeast Asia. Only in his penultimate chapter, covering 'Changing Politics since the 1970s', does Lockard's regional focus largely break down into a country-by-country account of political and economic histories. Another theme running throughout Lockard's Southeast Asia is the emphasis on the role of women in Southeast Asian society, culture and history. Overall, the book is more of an economic and political history than a social history or a history of ideas and cultural development, though social and cultural themes are by no means absent. In part through his emphasis on women-individually and in general-as well as references to the lives of commoners, Lockard manages to avoid a historical account consisting of nothing more than warfare, states and the political manoeuvres of men of renown. Lockard also spices up the narrative with a wide assortment of proverbs, lyrics, poetry, prose and other materials drawn from popular and courtly traditions from around the region and across the centuries. Previously, Lockard (1998) has written an important and expansive volume on contemporary popular music in Southeast Asia, Dance of Life. In the present book, he draws on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the region's expressive arts to add a great deal of flavour for the reader, though the substance of the text remains the historical narrative rather than the cultural and literary references. Experts, including myself, will undoubtedly nitpick some of the details. Lockard has also left aside most of the debates over historical facts and interpretation in favour of a

The Historian, 2011

It takes a brave and learned scholar to undertake a "global history of malaria." It is a history that antedates the written word and extends into the twenty-ªrst century. It is a narrative of nature and culture, of center and periphery, of microclimates and immune mechanisms. It is a complicated history indeed and by its nature interdisciplinary. This book is part of an environmental history series, but it demonstrates the ultimate elusiveness of that category. It is, by necessity, an economic history, a cultural history, a history of social policy-as well as a micro-history of the human immune system in its changing ecological circumstances. It is a history of yams and fava beans, of irrigation and war, of quinine and Paris green, of slavery and population movements, of public-health debates that have for more than a century turned on the most effective means for reshaping the relationship among human beings, mosquitoes, and the plasmodia that inhabit both. It is no accident that historians have begun to pay attention to such questions. Anyone who has taught college students during the past decade is well aware of how widely felt such concerns are among undergraduates. There is a still-growing interest in global health, global warming, postcolonial realities, and related economic and environmental issues. Humanity's Burden also reºects what is now two generations of increasing scholarly attention paid to what might be called historical epidemiology. One thinks of, the path-breaking syntheses of Crosby, McNeill, and their many successors. 1 The strength of Webb's history of malaria-especially for general readers and most historians-is, in fact, its synthesis of the published literature from a variety of disciplines and sub-disciplines, ranging from parasitology and entomology to African studies and environmental history. The book is also, by its very nature, a contribution to the canonical history of medicine with its emphasis on ideas and innovations. The history of disease as history of a growing insight into the mechanisms of sickness and health has always been a key aspect of medical history-and thus of public health and public policy. Malaria provides a particularly illuminating instance. Elucidation of the role of parasite and vector did not, and does not, automatically translate into public-health practice. Responses to malaria, like the incidence of the disease itself, are a function of time, place, and resource. At times, Webb is too facile in applying the conclusions of contemporary scientiªc knowledge, but he more than compensates for his

2015

The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic was waning by the end of the seventeenth century. The dramatic economic growth and cultural efflorescence that had defined this era was stagnant. The catastrophic "disaster year" of 1672 was a watershed event that revealed the Republic's increasing fragility. It also signaled the beginning of an era of nature-induced disaster. Between 1672 and 1764, environmental catastrophes repeatedly tested Dutch cultural, technological, and economic resiliency. The four most dramatic nature-induced disasters included a massive coastal flood in 1717 that devastated communities across the North Sea coastal region, an infestation of invasive mollusks (shipworms) into the wooden components of sea dikes in the 1730s, and two outbreaks of cattle plague (1713-20; 1744-1764) that decimated herds in the Netherlands and across Europe. Dutch religious figures, government officials, technocrats, and the public wrestled with the meaning and consequences of t...

Essay in Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie (eds), The Routledge History of Western Empires (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 382-96.

Maintaining the health of forests and commercially productive land became a priority for colonial scientists, agriculturalists and administrators, but conservation remained a minority concern confined to a technocratic elite whose perspective on the environment rarely intersected with the images that dominated high and popular culture in the Indies. Conventional environmental histories are therefore limited in their capacity to reveal how landscape figured in Dutch imperial thought and culture, or in other words, in the colonial imagination. Visual sources provide a window into colonial modes of seeing the Indies environment that remain obscure in studies of policy alone. Indeed, landscape was one of the most pervasive genres of European painting and photography from the Indies. Both media reached a wide audience in the Indies and Europe from the late nineteenth century onwards.