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E C O L O G Y A N D P OW E R I N T H E A G E O F E M P I R E
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/02/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/02/17, SPi

Ecology and Power in

the Age of Empire
Europe and the Transformation of
the Tropical World

C O R E Y RO S S

1
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3
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Preface

This book has been quite some time in the making. In some ways its origins reach
back over a quarter-century, when I was torn between undergraduate degrees in
Biology and History, and ended up studying both. Against the odds, it was History
that eventually gained the upper hand, though I always retained a keen interest in
environmental issues that was first kindled in my childhood and was strongly rein-
forced while I was a student. Looking back, it seems almost inevitable that these
two interests would eventually merge. Around eight years ago, when I was ponder-
ing what to do next after completing my last project, the decision to move into
environmental history was an easy one—far easier, as I found out, than the actual
work that it required. Here, at long last, is the result.
One of the best, and simultaneously worst, aspects of moving into a new sub-
field of history is the steep learning curve that goes along with it. In my case,
climbing the curve would have been far more difficult were it not for the generous
advice and encouragement of numerous colleagues and friends. A special word of
thanks goes to Frank Uekötter, who has not only read and critiqued the entire
manuscript, but who has also been an invaluable and almost frighteningly know-
ledgeable conversation partner on nearly all matters relating to environmental
history. He, Max Bolt, Francesca Carnevali, Reginald Cline-Cole, Peter Coates,
Matthew Hilton, Simon Jackson, Sabine Lee, Su Lin Lewis, and Tom McCaskie
all read parts of the manuscript in some form or other, and are likewise owed a big
favour for their help. I wish that I could repay my debt to Francesca, for this and
for many other things; it is now more than three years since she died, and her
absence is still keenly felt by all of us who had the privilege of her friendship.
There were many others who (knowingly or unknowingly) helped my thinking
along the way, among them Gareth Austin, Paul Betts, William Gervase Clarence-
Smith, Geoff Eley, Bernhard Gißibl, Hugh Gorman, Tait Keller, Miles Larmer,
Tim LeCain, John MacKenzie, Stuart McCook, John McNeill, Jean-François
Mouhot, Simon Pooley, Julia Adeney Thomas, Richard Tucker, and Kim Wagner.
My thanks to all of you, and to my colleagues in the History Department and the
College of Arts and Law at Birmingham for providing such a stimulating place to
work. Of course, historians cannot live on advice alone, so I would also like to
express my gratitude to the British Academy for its generous financial support for
the project. In addition, some of the ideas and arguments were presented at various
forums in Oxford, London, Munich, Turku, Guimarães, Geneva, Paris, and Versailles,
and I am grateful for the suggestions that I received there.
I would also like to thank the editors of the Journal of Global History for per-
mission to reproduce sections of ‘The Plantation Paradigm: Colonial Agronomy,
African Farmers and the Global Cocoa Boom, 1870s–1940s’, Journal of Global
History vol. 9, no. 1 (Mar. 2014), 49–71; the editors of Environmental History
for allowing me to reproduce parts of ‘The Tin Frontier: Mining, Empire and
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vi Preface

Environment in Southeast Asia, 1870s–1930s’, Environmental History vol. 19

(2014), 454–79; and the editors of Past & Present for permission to reproduce
sections of ‘Tropical Nature as Global Patrimoine: Imperialism and International
Nature Protection in the Early Twentieth Century’, in: Paul Betts, Corey Ross
(eds), Heritage in the Modern World: Historical Preservation in Global Perspective
(supplement of the journal Past & Present, 2015), 214–39. All of this material is
acknowledged in the chapters where it appears. Illustrations are reproduced with
the permission of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, the National
Archives Image Library, and Oxford University Press. For those illustrations
where no credit is indicated, every reasonable effort has been made to contact all
copyright holders, and any omissions will be rectified in subsequent printings if
notice is given to the publishers.
My final thanks go to my parents, Charles and Charlotte, for first instilling in
me a curiosity about the natural world and our place within it, and to Deborah,
Alex, and Tessa for cheerfully (most of the time, anyway) indulging my interest in
talking about such things.
Corey Ross
Birmingham
July 2016
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Contents
List of Illustrations ix

Introduction: Ecology, Power, and Imperialism 1

I . A WO R L D O F G O O D S : T H E E C O L O G Y O F
COLONIAL EXTRACTION
1. The Ecology of Cotton: Environment, Labour, and Empire 25
The Cotton Crisis and the Expansion of Colonial Cultivation 29
Colonial Cotton and Environmental Change in India and Egypt 34
New Frontiers: Peasants, Plantations, and the African Cotton Campaign 44

2. Bittersweet Harvest: The Colonial Cocoa Boom and the Tropical

Forest Frontier 67
The Transformation of the Global Cocoa Industry 70
The Modern Cocoa Plantation: Problems and Persistence in
Global Perspective 72
The West African Cocoa Boom 79
Science, Smallholders, and the Question of Sustainability 88

3. Colonialism, Rubber, and the Rainforest 99

From Plunder to Plantation: The Origins of the Natural Rubber Industry 101
From Forest to Rubber Farm: The Southeast Asian Planting Boom 106
The Ecology of Rubber Plantations 115
Nature, Culture, and Smallholder Rubber 120
War, Decolonization, and the World Rubber Economy 130

4. Subterranean Frontier: Tin Mining, Empire, and Environment

in Southeast Asia 136
Breaking New Ground: The Opening of the Southeast Asian
Tin Frontier 138
The Industrial Frontier: Modernization, Degradation, and Remediation 146
Race, Waste, and Efficiency in the Tin Fields 155

5. Peripheral Centres: Copper Mining and Colonized Environments

in Central Africa 164
Creating a Colonial Copper Industry 167
Environmental Transformation in the Copper Towns 176
Copper Hinterlands 186
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viii Contents

6. Oil, Empire, and Environment 199

The Early Petroleum Industry and the Colonial Oil Frontier 202
Oil-Flows and Imperial Rivalry 212
Petroleum Landscapes: Technological and Environmental Change
in Europe’s Oil Colonies 220
War and the Reshaping of Europe’s Oil Empire 231

I I . C O N S E RVAT I O N , I M P ROV E M E N T, A N D
E N V I RO N M E N TA L M A N AG E M E N T I N T H E C O LO N I E S
7. Tropical Nature in Trust: The Politics of Colonial
Nature Conservation 239
Primeval Nature and the Civilizing Mission 241
From Plunder to Protection: The Rise of Colonial Wildlife Conservation 245
Trouble in Paradise: Challenges to Conservation 257
Imperialism, Internationalism, and the Science of Nature Protection 264

8. Forests, Ecology, and Power in the Tropical Colonies 274

Forestry, Conservation, and the State in Colonial Asia 276
Colonial Forests: Conflicts and Consequences 287
Colonial Expansion and African Forests 294

9. Cultivating the Colonies: Agriculture, Development,

and Environment 307
Agricultural Expansion and Frontier Settlement in Colonial Asia 309
Intensification and Improvement 318
Colonial Agronomy and African Farmers 332
Soil Conservation and the Quest for Sustainability 341

I I I. AC C E L E R AT I O N, D E C L I N E, A N D A F T E R M AT H
10. Progress and Hubris: The Political Ecology of Late Colonial
Development 351
A Colonial Agricultural Revolution? 353
Resource Conservation and Late-Colonial Development 363

11. Beyond Colonialism: Tropical Environments and the Legacies

of Empire 380
From Agrarian Development to Green Revolution 382
Conservation and Control after Colonialism 391
Export Ecologies: From Colonialism to Consumerism 396

Conclusion 415

Bibliography 425
Index 471
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List of Illustrations
1.1. Map of cotton regions in colonial India: The Imperial Gazetteer of India,
vol. 26, Atlas edited by J. G. Bartholomew (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909),
Map 18. By permission of Oxford University Press. 31
2.1. Cocoa grove shaded by Immortel trees, Trinidad, c.1920. Source: Arthur
W. Knapp, Cocoa and Chocolate: Their History from Plantation to Consumer
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1920), p. 39. 76
2.2. Countries to the West of the Lower and Middle Niger, 1898. By permission
of The National Archives, Image Library. Source: CO 700/WESTAFRICA53. 80
2.3. Farmers harvesting cocoa pods, Gold Coast, c.1920. Source: Edith A. Browne,
Cocoa (London: A & C Black, 1920), p. 9. 84
3.1. Map of colonial Southeast Asia, covering the main rubber-producing districts. 108
3.2. Flat terraces on sloping terrain at a Hevea plantation in East Sumatra,
1921–6. By permission of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen,
coll. no. 60014052. 118
3.3. Rolling out coagulated latex sheets on a smallholding in Palembang, Sumatra,
1920–6. By permission of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen,
coll. no. 10012718. 125
4.1. Map covering the main tin-producing areas of colonial Southeast Asia. 140
4.2. Yong Phin open-cast mine near Taiping, Malaya, c.1908. Source: Arnold
Wright, H. A. Cartwright (eds), Twentieth-Century Impressions of British
Malaya: Its History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources
(London: Lloyds, 1908), p. 506. 144
4.3. Bucket dredge on a low-lying tin-field, east of Manggar, Belitung, 1937.
By permission of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, coll.
no. 10007195. 154
5.1. Map of the Copperbelt and Katanga. 166
5.2. UMHK’s Ruashi mine, 1928. Source: Union Minière
du Haut-Katanga: 1906–1956 (Brussels: Cuypers, 1956), p. 149. 172
5.3. Swampy area drained and filled with tailings below the tailings dam
at Luanshya. Source: Sir Malcolm Watson, African Highway: The Battle
for Health in Central Africa (London: Murray, 1953), Plate 29. 181
6.1. Map indicating the main oilfields of colonial Southeast Asia. 204
6.2. Map indicating the main oilfields of the Middle East in the early
twentieth century. 215
6.3. An oil-gusher on Sumatra, 1895–1915. By permission of the Nationaal
Museum van Wereldculturen, coll. no. 60037693. 226
7.1. African safari porters seated atop a trophy, early 1930s. Source: Count
Zsigmond Széchenyi, Land of Elephants: Big-Game Hunting in Kenya,
Tanganyika and Uganda (London: Putnam, 1935), p. 83. 250
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x List of Illustrations
8.1. Colonial-era map of vegetation belts in West Africa. Source: E. P. Stebbing,
The Forests of West Africa and the Sahara (London, Edinburgh:
W. & R. Chambers, 1937), p. 21. 301
9.1. Lessons at the Agricultural School at Buitenzorg, c.1908. By permission
of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, coll. no. 60041673. 329
10.1. The Groundnut Scheme at Kongwa, Tanzania, c.1950. Source: Alan Wood,
The Groundnut Affair (London: Bodley Head, 1950), p. 80. 357
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4
Subterranean Frontier
Tin Mining, Empire, and Environment
in Southeast Asia

Chapters 1–3 have focused on the role of plant commodities in reshaping the
ecosystems of the tropical world.1 Although environmental constraints clearly
influenced where certain crops were grown, for the most part their story has been
one of remarkable mobility. Throughout the colonial era, a host of different culti-
vars were transplanted via an imperial botanical diaspora as part of a concerted
attempt to modify and profit from tropical ecosystems around the globe.
The relationship between mining and imperialism was somewhat different.
Unlike plant-based industries, which could be deliberately built up in areas where
it was politically or economically advantageous to do so, mineral wealth was more
a matter of geological chance. Granted, the accessibility of coveted ore deposits was
often crucially facilitated by the application of financial might and technical cap-
ability, and was not infrequently predicated on the exertion of military power. But
the deposits themselves were nonetheless embedded in certain places. The fact that
they had to be extracted in situ meant that mining tended to shape the geography
of modern empire rather than the other way around. The quest for mineral
resources was one of the factors that helped transform the focus of European
imperialism from the control of trade to the control of territory.
The spread of industrialization in the nineteenth century created an unprece-
dented demand for metals on world markets. While miners burrowed holes across
the topography of industrial Europe, a growing number of prospectors fanned
out around the globe in search of new deposits. In many parts of the world these
entrepreneurs acted as pioneers of imperial expansion, from the goldfields of
Witwatersrand to the nickel pits of New Caledonia. Although few of the earliest
speculators enjoyed official backing, the strategic importance of mineral ores made
home governments acutely alert to questions of supply, and generally supportive of
efforts to exploit the deposits that their nationals discovered. For the European
powers, the ever-increasing demand for more metal—and for more types of metal—
far outstripped their own resources. The lure of mineral wealth thus furnished a
powerful incentive for conquest and colonization overseas.

1 Sections of this chapter are largely based on material first published in Corey Ross, ‘The Tin
Frontier: Mining, Empire and Environment in Southeast Asia, 1870s–1930s’, Environmental History,
vol. 19 (2014), 454–79.
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Subterranean Frontier 137

The mining industry, though long a favourite stomping ground of labour and
economic historians, has generally been something of a stepchild of modern envir-
onmental history. In the early 2000s studies that focused on its broader ecological
ramifications were still conspicuously rare.2 Fortunately, this state of relative neglect
has improved over the last decade with a handful of fine studies on the environ-
mental history of mineral extraction, chiefly focused on the North American
West.3 But for much of the rest of the world, the role of mining in transforming
regional environments remains underexposed, despite the fact that it has perenni-
ally been one of the dirtiest of all industries as well as a cornerstone of empire and
global trade.4
There is no better example than tin, which played a central role in Europe’s
industrial empire in Southeast Asia. Although environmental histories of Southeast
Asia have long focused on the region’s vast forests, extensive plantation complexes,
and dynamic rice frontiers,5 tin mining was one of its largest industries during the
colonial era. Moreover, Southeast Asia’s tin fields dominated world production
from the late nineteenth century through most of the twentieth.6 Like many other
metals—gold, iron, copper—tin was in high demand from the mid-1800s onwards.
Few minerals, however, were so vital for the industrial economy yet so reliant
on supplies from tropical territories, in particular the western foothills of the
Malay Peninsula and the nearby ‘tin isles’ of the Dutch East Indies. The search for
tin not only fuelled the extension of European power in the region, it also drove a

2 See the comments in John R. McNeill, ‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental
History’, History and Theory, Theme Issue 42 (Dec. 2003), 5–43, esp. 41. An exception he noted was
Duane A. Smith, Mining America: The Industry and the Environment, 1800–1980 (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press, 1987); another exception was Kerstin Kretschmer, Braunkohle und Umwelt.
Zur Geschichte des nordwestsächsischen Kohlenreviers (1900–1945) (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1998).
3 Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining California: An
Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 23–51; Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction:
The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2009).
4 For Europe, see the recent collection by Peter Anreiter (ed.), Mining in European History and
its Impact on Environment and Human Societies (Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 2010).
Beyond Europe and North America: Matthew Evenden, ‘Aluminum, Commodity Chains, and the
Environmental History of the Second World War’, Environmental History, vol. 16 (January 2011),
69–93; Carl N. McDaniel and John M. Gowdy, Paradise for Sale: A Parable of Nature (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000); B. Daley and P. Griggs, ‘Mining the Reefs and Cays: Coral,
Guano and Rock Phosphate Extraction in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, 1844–1940’, Environment
and History, vol. 12 (2006), 395–434; Elizabeth Dore, ‘Environment and Society: Long-Term Trends
in Latin American Mining’, Environment and History, vol. 6 (2000), 1–29.
5 This literature is vast. For a useful overview and bibliography, see Peter Boomgaard, Southeast
Asia: An Environmental History (Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2007).
6 There is a sizeable literature on the economic, social, and political dimensions of the industry: see
esp. Wong Lin Ken, The Malayan Tin Industry to 1914: With Special Reference to the States of Perak,
Selangor, Negri Sembilan and Pahang (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1965); Yip Yat Hoong, The
Development of the Tin Mining Industry of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1969);
Francis Loh Kok Wah, Beyond the Tin Mines: Coolies, Squatters and New Villagers in the Kinta Valley,
Malaysia, c.1880–1980 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988); Mary F. Somers Heidhues,
Bangka Tin and Muntok Pepper: Chinese Settlement on an Indonesian Island (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 1992); Amarjit Kaur and Frits Diehl, ‘Tin Miners and Tin Mining in Indonesia,
1850–1950’, Asian Studies Review, vol. 20 no. 2 (Nov. 1996), 95–120.
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138 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

far-reaching set of social and environmental changes that profoundly transformed

the physical, ethnic, and cultural landscape. Although the impact was most acute
at the immediate sites of extraction, the mines also radiated complex ripple effects
throughout their hinterlands. Indeed, many of the connections reached far beyond
Southeast Asia itself. Like the rubber, sugar, and coffee that poured out of the
region’s plantations, tin was part of a global commodity network that was inextric-
ably woven into the web of industrialization and mass consumption in Europe and
North America.
For all these reasons, the tin boom in colonial Southeast Asia provides a useful
lens for examining the dynamic interactions between imperial power and colon-
ized environments. It highlights the intense ecological consequences of focusing
global demand for a resource onto a limited area of supply. It demonstrates the
importance of re-engineering environments to suit the needs of industry and
investment. Above all, it displays many of the classic characteristics of a ‘com-
modity frontier’, an advancing boundary of trade, political control, investment,
and (sometimes) settlement that together reshaped environments and the ways in
which people perceived and used them.7 Like commodity frontiers in general,
the tin frontier had its pioneers and latecomers, its phases of expansion and
­consolidation, and it tended to reward predation over prudence. Like mining
frontiers more specifically, its multi-dimensional expansion—both outward across
the ­surface landscape and downward into lower depths and grades of ore—gave it an
unusually fluid character, closing and reopening in any given area as technological
advances made previously unworkable deposits both physically and economically
exploitable.
Yet despite these common traits, the development of Southeast Asia’s tin mines
also demonstrates how social, cultural, and political peculiarities shape the ecol-
ogies of resource extraction in specific times and places. If the basic economic
pressures were common throughout the global mining industry, the subterranean
tin frontier was also animated by contemporary ideas about race, waste, and effi-
ciency that fundamentally structured the colonial enterprise. As this chapter will
show, the story of colonial tin mining is, at base, a story about the interactions
between technology, culture, and environmental change.

B R E A K I N G N E W G RO U N D : T H E O P E N I N G O F
T H E S O U T H E A S T A S I A N T I N F RO N T I E R

Tin is one of the oldest metals known to humankind. Used since ancient times
mainly in alloy form (bronze, pewter), by the late nineteenth century it had become
a crucial component of industrial civilization. Among its numerous applications,

7 On commodity frontiers generally: Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier (eds),
Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change (Lanham,
Md: AltaMira, 2007); Jason W. Moore, ‘Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-
Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization’, Review, vol. 23
(2000), 409–33.
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Subterranean Frontier 139

tin played an essential role in several key sectors of industry, from textiles (mordants,
dyes) to electrical and mechanical engineering (solder, bearing metal) to military
armaments (gun metal). Most tin, however, was used for tinplating, or coating
sheets of steel or iron with molten tin to prevent corrosion. And among the many
uses of tinplate, the most significant by far was the humble tin can. Although tin
cans were first widely used by the British and French armies during the Napoleonic
wars, it was mainly from around the 1860s that they became an object of everyday
life. By allowing producers to conserve rural food surpluses and transport them to
the industrial cities—whose burgeoning populations could only be sustained by
drawing vital supplies from ever-greater distances—the tin can played a mundane
but critical role in processes of urbanization and industrialization in the metropoles
of the global economy. As its use expanded, demand for tin skyrocketed. World
production rose from 36,000 tons in 1874 to 124,000 tons in 1914. But since
European reserves (mostly in Cornwall) had been largely exhausted by this time,
the bulk of supplies came from overseas, primarily from Southeast Asia, with
smaller amounts imported from Bolivia and Nigeria.8
Nearly all tin comes from its oxide ore, cassiterite (SnO2), which occurs in
two different types of deposits: underground lodes or veins (as in Cornwall and
Bolivia), and shallower alluvial deposits (the dominant type in Southeast Asia).
The main Southeast Asian deposits were formed by the weathering of the tin-
bearing granite ranges that run along the western side of the Malay Peninsula
towards the Riouw islands, which skirt the south-east coast of Sumatra. Large
parts of this region are stanniferous to varying degrees, though alluvial cassiter-
ite, like placer gold, tends to settle quickly due to its high specific gravity and is
therefore concentrated in certain spots. The biggest concentrations formed the
major tin fields of the region, most notably at Larut, the Kinta valley, and Kuala
Lumpur in Malaya, and the islands of Bangka, Belitung, and Singkep in the East
Indies (Fig. 4.1).9
Tin mining was not new to these areas in the colonial period; small amounts
had been extracted for many centuries. As early as 1513 Portuguese traders brought
tin from the Malay Peninsula back to Europe. By the mid-seventeenth century the
trade was dominated by Dutch merchants, whose hold on markets was further
strengthened by the discovery of tin deposits on Bangka in 1711. Nonetheless,
only small amounts of ‘Banka tin’ ever made it to Europe during the eighteenth
century due to the proximity of Cornish supplies.10 All of this changed in the
second half of the nineteenth century. As demand soared and inter-continental
transport costs sank, European mines could no longer keep up. Quality was also an
important factor, since tinplating firms strongly preferred alluvial ‘East tin’ over
Cornish lode tin for its superior colour and higher purity, which allowed them to

8 Ken, Malayan Tin Industry, 246–7; on Nigeria: Bill Freund, Capital and Labour in the Nigerian
Tin Mines (Harlow: Longman, 1981).
9 H. Stauffer, ‘The Geology of the Netherlands Indies’, in Honig and Verdoorn (eds), Science,
320–35; Alex L. Ter Braake, Mining in the Netherlands East Indies (Bulletins of the Netherlands and
Netherlands Indies Council, 1944).
10 Ken, Malayan Tin Industry, 3.
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140 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

Penang
Perak River

Taiping Kinta River

Ipoh

Kuala Lumpur

Singapore

Singkep

Bangka

Belitung

Fig. 4.1. Map covering the main tin-producing areas of colonial Southeast Asia.

achieve a thinner coating.11 The growing scarcity of European tin deposits, along
with their military significance and the lack of easy material substitutes, made
Southeast Asian tin an important strategic resource. Guaranteeing a steady supply
was what prompted the Dutch to rule Bangka directly from Batavia, just as the risk
of disruption to the tin trade in Perak triggered the creation of the British Residency
of the Federated Malay States in 1874.
Together, Bangka and Malaya marked the world’s primary ‘tin frontier’ during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I use the term guardedly, and
in full awareness of its Turnerian associations with successive waves of American
pioneers creating a new civilization in the Western wilderness.12 But leaving aside
Turner’s social-evolutionary logic, let alone his arguments about how it shaped the
American character, the frontier concept is useful here for suggesting an interlock-
ing set of economic, social, and cultural conditions that are either absent or less
pronounced in other circumstances. As Walter Prescott Webb later formulated it, a
defining characteristic of a frontier is the availability of resource ‘windfalls’ seemingly

11 Ken, Malayan Tin Industry, 10.

12 Clyde A. Milner II (ed.), A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American West
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (eds), Under
an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: Norton, 1992).
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Subterranean Frontier 141

there for the taking.13 These windfalls—land, wood, soil fertility, minerals—generally
attract a transient population of pioneers and speculators with an instrumental
attitude towards the land and with both the means and motivation to move on,
thus allowing them to repeat the process of outward frontier expansion once the
assets of any particular locality are exhausted. In turn, this ability to escape the
consequences of one’s actions, often underpinned by a weak state presence and an
ideology of unending resources, imposes few social restraints against destructive
behaviour, and even fewer obligations to cover the costs of depreciation—a tendency
that is magnified wherever the frontier is sparsely populated or regarded as idle
‘wilderness’. If one way of seeing a frontier is as a transitory boundary of settlement,
trade, or technology, another is as a set of conditions that encourages short-term,
extractive behaviour over other forms of land use.
Much of colonial Southeast Asia was a ‘frontier’ in both senses.14 Outside the
main centres of population such as Java or Bali, land was abundant and the state’s
power precarious. Well after the turn of the century, the bustling towns and min-
ing camps of Malaya were still viewed as ‘mere patches’ in the vast expanse of forest
‘that sweeps from one Sultanate to another, and is only limited by the sea’.15 In
such a seemingly endless wilderness it was relatively easy for commodity producers
to move on once resources were depleted in any given area.
The early growth of the tin industry clearly exhibited these characteristics.
On the Malayan Peninsula and Bangka, Malay pioneers had long mined tin via
­several methods. The simplest technique was panning in streams with a dulang,
or large wooden dish. More common was the creation of a lampan, or ground-
sluice, which essentially involved clearing the area above the would-be mine,
digging a channel from a nearby stream to divert the water through a deposit,
and then processing the pay dirt (karang) in the channel. As the light sediment
washed into a tailrace, the heavy tin sand was retained by a series of small dams
where it was periodically scooped out and concentrated in a sluice box (palong).
Both methods were remarkably lucrative on unworked tin fields where the cas-
siterite particles were heavy enough not to be washed away. Neither, however,
could tap the deeper ores just above the bedrock. To reach these deposits miners
dug open pits (lombongs) several metres deep, usually upward into a hillside so
they could wash the pay dirt in a channel below. All of these techniques were
land-extensive in character; that is, miners worked the shallowest deposits and
quickly moved on. They were, however, subject to fairly tight geographical constraints.
Panning and ground-sluicing were only possible on slopes in close proximity to
streams. Open lombongs could only reach deposits at a maximum depth of
around 6 metres due to drainage problems, and were also dependent on streams
for concentrating the pay dirt. The early Malay tin frontier was therefore largely

13 Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953), esp. 180–202.
14 Karl J. Pelzer, Pioneer Settlement in the Asiatic Tropics: Studies in Land Utilization and Agricultural
Colonization in Southeastern Asia (New York: American Geographical Society, 1948); Freek Colombijn,
‘The Ecological Sustainability of Frontier Societies in Eastern Sumatra’, in Boomgaard, Colombijn,
and Henley (eds), Paper Landscapes, 309–39.
15 Sir George Maxwell, In Malay Forests (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1907), 2.
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142 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

limited to shallow deposits on the sides of foothills that benefited from both
good drainage and good water availability.16
The arrival of Chinese kongsis (commercial syndicates fuelled by ‘coolie’ labour)
marked a significant expansion of this frontier, both outward but more import-
antly downward. Appearing first on Bangka (from the late 1810s) and then in
Malaya (from the late 1840s), their key innovation was to use the Chinese chin-
chia, a traditional wooden bucket-chain mechanism driven by a water wheel,
which could remove up to 3,000 gallons (13,650 litres) of water per hour and
allowed miners to reach deposits 10 (and sometimes up to 25) metres deep. Apart
from the lower depths it could reach, the Chinese technique was broadly similar to
Malay open casting. After clearing all surface vegetation, retaining any hardwood
for charcoal, and excavating the pit down to the water table, miners would divert
a nearby stream to drive the water wheel and would pile the waste overburden
around the mine-head to keep rainfall from running into the pit. As they burrowed
into the hillside they raised the pay dirt manually, concentrated it in sluice boxes,
and generally smelted the dried ore with charcoal fuel on site or at a nearby smelt-
ing house. Most of what went through the sluices ended up as waste tailings, which
were simply washed downhill and deposited on the worked-out area below.17
In many respects the influx of Chinese miners represented a second wave of
pioneers who tapped a deeper ‘windfall’ and moved on once it was depleted.
On Bangka, their efforts made tin the third largest East Indies export by the ­middle
of the nineteenth century. By 1900 there were around 14,000 miners on the island,
the vast majority of them Chinese or peranakan (local-born Chinese speakers).18
In Malaya, the number of Chinese miners in the Larut district rose from 3,000
to 40,000 between 1848 and 1872; in the Kinta valley it increased from 1,000 to
45,000 in less than a decade (1880–1889) before soaring to around 133,000 (out
of a total population of c.185,000) by 1911, making Kinta not only the most
populous and densely inhabited district in the Malay States but also the world’s
single largest tin field.19
But the Chinese tin frontier was also shaped by several key constraints. One
was depth, for despite the effectiveness of Chinese open-cast methods, they
grew increasingly unprofitable below 3 metres and became unsound at around 9 or
10 metres.20 Water was another limiting factor, since the water-wheel-driven
chin-chias depended on fairly benign rainfall conditions. The water wheels were only
deployable near streams, were no use during droughts, and were not powerful enough
to keep the mines dry in heavy rains. On Bangka in particular, the irregularity of

16 Ken, Malayan Tin Industry, 43–7; Heidhues, Bangka Tin, 11–15.

17 Heidhues, Bangka Tin, 37–48, 175–8; Hoong, Development, 19, 69–71; Ken, Malayan Tin
Industry, 48–9.
18 By 1920 the Bankatinwinning had over 21,000 employees, mostly Chinese; on Belitung, nearly
the entire mining population was Chinese in 1920: Heidhues, Bangka Tin, 175–8.
19 Wah, Beyond the Tin Mines, 9; Hoong, Development, 58–9; Salma Nasution Khoo and Abdur
Razzaq-Lubis, Kinta Valley: Pioneering Malaysia’s Modern Development (Perak Darul Ridzuan: Perak
Academy, 2005).
20 H. Zondervan, Bangka en zijne bewoners (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1895), 111; see also
Hendrik Merkus Lange, Het eiland Banka en zijne aangelegenheden (Gebr. Muller, 1850), 95f.
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Subterranean Frontier 143

water supplies was considered the ‘main hindrance of an increased tin production’
in the late nineteenth century.21 As one contemporary remarked, ‘Bangka is rich in
rivers but poor in water’; its many small, fast streams quickly emptied in the dry
season.22 The construction of reservoirs was a crucial prerequisite for working
many sites on the island, but even the most extensive dam works could not guar-
antee adequate supplies.23 As a result, rainfall was the main factor for determining
the seasonal calendar of work. Whereas excavating was prioritized during the driest
months from May to October, the rainy season from November to February was
mainly reserved for washing. Water supplies also had a significant influence on
overall output. Years of low production corresponded not only with low tin prices
but also with years of low rainfall.24 Although this problem was less extreme on the
larger watersheds of the Malayan Peninsula, prolonged dry spells also caused mine
stoppages there.25 In short, Chinese open-cast techniques overcame only some of
the constraints that had bounded the earlier mining frontier.
All of the methods on the tin frontier were highly destructive. They worked the
most easily accessible surface deposits and quickly abandoned them, leaving
denuded, pockmarked, and severely eroded hillsides in their wake. As the industry
expanded in the late nineteenth century, some contemporaries became increasingly
sensitive to the aesthetic and material costs that it entailed. ‘Being full of large
holes, and covered with an excavated soil of gravel and sand . . . such land is a great
eyesore, and gives a bad impression of the country to the casual traveller,’ noted a
visitor to Malaya in 1904.26 Lampanning was, after all, essentially a means of focus-
ing the erosive potential of watercourses onto sloping ground that was already
prone to soil wash. Moreover, the fact that it was capable of reaching only shallow
ores exacerbated the damage by dotting the landscape with hundreds of derelict
sites. Although the deeper open-cast mines produced more tin in relation to the
surface area they destroyed, they nonetheless created gaping man-made canyons
and thousands of tons of tailings with little if any regard for the after-effects of
their activities (Fig. 4.2).
As production continued to rise, the forests near the mines were also severely
affected. The valuable Dipterocarp species in the region were ideal for making
charcoal, and consequently paid a heavy tribute to the smelting furnaces. ‘There
are certainly few mining operations that run in such cavalier fashion as the tin
mines on Bangka,’ remarked an East Indies medical officer in the 1870s. Neither
the permanent dereliction of large areas, nor the ‘ruthless devastation of the
forest’, nor any attempt to replant the affected woodlands was given serious

21 Theodor Posewitz, Die Zinninseln im Indischen Ozean II. Das Zinnerzvorkommen und die
Zinngewinnung in Bangka (Budapest: Franklin-Verein, 1886), 92.
22 Zondervan, Bangka, 50–62, quote p. 50.
23 Otto Mohnike, Banka und Palembang nebst Mittheilungen über Sumatra im Allgemeinen
(Münster: Aschendorfss’chen Buchhandlung, 1874), 37–8; Posewitz, Zinninseln, 86–90.
24 Posewitz, Zinninseln, 90–2.
25 Mohnike, Banka, 37–8; Posewitz, Zinninseln, 86–92; Ooi Jin-Bee, ‘Mining Landscapes of
Kinta’, Malayan Journal of Tropical Geography, vol. 4 (Jan. 1955), 1–58, here 19.
26 John C. Willis, A Report upon Agriculture in the Federated Malay States (Kuala Lumpur: FMS
Government Printing Press, 1904), 15.
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144 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

Fig. 4.2. Yong Phin open-cast mine near Taiping, Malaya, c.1908.
Source: Arnold Wright, H. A. Cartwright (eds), Twentieth-Century Impressions of British Malaya: Its History, People,
Commerce, Industries, and Resources (London: Lloyds, 1908), p. 506.

consideration.27 As a result, by the 1890s there were already reports of wood short-
ages and an almost complete absence of large trees in the main mining districts.
Visitors to the island noted that ‘little or nothing remains of the original forest’
beyond ‘small islands’ dispersed amidst the young secondary growth.28 Overall,
Bangka lost an estimated two-thirds of its forest between the mid-nineteenth
­century and the 1920s, much of it to mining operations.29
Similar concerns soon emerged in Malaya, first around the Larut tin mines,
which had severely depleted the forests within a 20- to 30-kilometre radius by the
end of the 1870s. Attempts to slow the damage—for instance, by banning ineffi-
cient smelting ovens or establishing forest reserves—were of limited effect.30 As the
frontier moved to the Kinta valley in the 1880s–1890s, the same pattern of radial
deforestation repeated itself. At the turn of the century it was estimated that the
Malayan mines used over half a million tons of fuel and lumber per year. Around

27 Mohnike, Banka, 28–9, 45.

28 See the overview of observations in Zondervan, Bangka, 69–71.
29 Karl Helbig, ‘Die Insel Bangka. Beispiel des Landschafts- und Bedeutungswandels auf Grund
einer geographischen “Zufallsform”’, Deutsche Geographische Blätter, vol. 43 nos 3/4 (1940), 137–209,
here 160; Heidhues, Bangka Tin, 98, 108; A. M. Burn-Murdoch, ‘Forests of Malaya’, in Wright and
Cartwright (eds), Twentieth-Century Impressions, 329–30. Although swidden cultivation by the indi-
genous Orang Gunung or Orang Darat groups had long influenced vegetation on the island, it was
clear that mining accounted for most of the change: Helbig, ‘Bangka’, 195.
30 Zondervan, Bangka, 112–13; Heidhues, Bangka Tin, 68; Kathirithamby-Wells, Nature, 62–3;
Ken, Malayan Tin Industry, 160.
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Subterranean Frontier 145

5 per cent of the 213,000 Chinese ‘miners’ in the Federated Malay States were, in
fact, engaged solely in cutting timber.31 Ultimately, the most important reprieve
for the woodlands came not through early conservation measures but rather from
the construction of coal-fired smelters on Pulau Brani island near Singapore in
1890, followed by smaller works at Butterworth and Penang.32
Waterways were also acutely affected as mine tailings clogged streams and eventually
worked their way into the major riverine arteries. By 1885 the Larut River was so
badly silted that ore could no longer be brought downriver to the coast. To bypass
this problem, a new rail link was built from Port Weld (Kuala Sepetang) to Taiping,
but it was not long before Port Weld also began to silt up as the tailings load carried
by local rivers worked its way downstream.33 During the Kinta valley boom of the
1890s, uncontrolled tailings emissions threatened not only the riverine environ-
ment but also the growth of the industry itself, which continued to depend on the
ever-shallowing waterway for transport. The Kinta Valley Railway, completed in
1896 between Ipoh and Telok Anson on the Perak River, was explicitly built to
obviate the need for navigating what was increasingly written off as a doomed river.
As the 1896 Perak Annual Report unsentimentally put it, ‘the competition of the
Kinta River is still being felt, but should decrease as the higher part of the river
becomes silted up by the operations of the miners. By special arrangement, the
railway has secured the entire carriage of tin and tin-ore.’34
But despite all the environmental damage caused by the mines, the chief
­concerns for the colonial authorities were economic. Tin was a crucial source of
government revenue for the Federated Malay States, Batavia, and the Palembang
sultanate, and the basic problem they faced was in some ways similar to that of the
wild rubber industry: namely, the growing disparity between the industrial scale of
demand and primitive methods of extraction. Bangka, noted one contemporary,
‘is for Holland like a hen that still lays golden eggs but which sacrifices a bit of
itself with every egg, so that one can foresee a time when there is nothing left
but a dead skeleton. It is therefore an imperative duty to ensure that this moment
is delayed as long as possible through the most systematic, thrifty, and gentle
method of exploiting the still available ores.’35 Once it became clear that the
major tin fields of the region had all been discovered (if not yet worked), the
spectre of decline could only be banished by expanding the tin frontier in several
directions: into deeper strata, into poorly watered areas, and above all into lower
grades of ore that could not return a profit via current methods. In short, the
exploration frontier had to be replaced by a frontier of technological innovation.
And technology, as the ‘measure of men’, was to the colonial mind very much an
attribute of race and culture.36

31 Burn-Murdoch, ‘Forests of Malaya’, 329–30; Kathirithamby-Wells, Nature, 61–2.

32 K. G. Tregonning, Straits Tin: A Brief Account of the First Seventy-Five Years of The Straits Trading
Company, Limited. 1887–1962 (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 1962), 17–25.
33 Tregonning, Straits Tin, 19–20.
34 W. H. Treacher, Resident of Perak, Perak Annual Report (1896), 28, quoted in Jin-Bee, ‘Mining
Landscapes’, 22–3.
35 Mohnike, Banka, 48.   36 Adas, Machines.
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146 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

T H E I N D U S T R I A L F RO N T I E R : M O D E R N I Z AT I O N ,
D E G R A D AT I O N , A N D R E M E D I AT I O N

Calls for ‘modernizing’ Bangka’s tin industry could already be heard in the 1850s,
roughly concurrent with the start of mining operations on nearby Belitung. By the
1870s they began to mushroom amidst concerns about future production.37
European officials were outspokenly critical of the fact that Chinese miners ‘could
start mines anywhere that seemed suitable to them and then quickly abandon
them entirely at their own discretion’. As production rose, such practices were not
only deemed ‘highly disadvantageous for the ground conditions of the island’ but
also damaging for the industry over the long term.38 In 1883 the first steam pumps
were brought to Bangka in order to bring deeper deposits into reach, but they only
became more widespread after the turn of the century.39 In Malaya the shift
towards mechanized production occurred somewhat later, above all in the wake
of a new Mining Code in 1895, which was deliberately designed to encourage
European investment by granting secure tenure and distributing mineral conces-
sions in large tracts suitable only for sizeable enterprises. The aim was to make profits
where older methods could not. Contemporaries estimated that lampanning was
viable on only 2–3 per cent of a given plot. Even Chinese open-cast techniques
recovered only half the available ore. Through technological innovation, so it was
argued, miners could widen and deepen the tin frontier by tapping low-grade
deposits and even by reopening worked-out wastelands.40
The problem with this line of argument was that most early attempts to
modernize the tin industry were lessons in what not to do. Although the mines
on Bangka (owned by the East Indies government) and the famous Billiton
Maatschappij on Belitung (forerunner to the multinational BHP-Billiton) proved
that European firms could make handsome profits, their actual operations relied
almost entirely on Chinese labourers and their existing manual methods.41 By con-
trast, the first wave of European miners who flocked to Malaya in the 1870s–1880s
generally imported mechanized techniques from elsewhere, and nearly all were
failures.42 Rather naively, most of these entrepreneurs assumed that highly capital-
ized systems (with teams of surveyors, engineers, steam equipment, etc.) were
inherently superior to labour-intensive methods. But as the British Resident of
Perak remarked in 1893, ‘after possibly a series of great hardships to the staff and
disasters to the company, it is found that the tin raised is infinitesimal in value
when compared with the rate of expenditure. . . . The company is wound up and
the State gets a bad name with investors, and the only people who really enjoy

37 Heidhues, Bangka Tin, 54, 65–6; M. F. S. Heidhues, ‘Company Island: A Note on the History
of Belitung’, Indonesia, vol. 51 (Apr. 1991), 1–20.
38 Quotes from Mohnike, Banka, 29.   39 Zondervan, Bangka, 111.
40 Heidhues, Bangka Tin, 54, 65–6; Zondervan, Bangka, 111; C. G. Warnford-Lock, Mining in
Malaya for Gold and Tin (London: Crowther & Goodman, 1907), 179; Ken, Malayan Tin Industry,
54–8; Hoong, Development, 87–8.
41 On Belitung, 92% of production was still dug by hand in 1908/9: Gedenkboek Billiton 1852–1927
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1927), 198.
42 Ken, Malayan Tin Industry, 35–9, 46–8.
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Subterranean Frontier 147

themselves are the neighbouring Chinese miners who buy the mine and plant for
an old song and make several large fortunes out of working on their own ridiculous and
primitive methods.’43
It is an intriguing remark, at once denigrating non-European techniques while
conceding their commercial effectiveness. Many colonial officials found it conster-
nating, even disconcerting, that European firms should find it so difficult to prevail
over their Chinese competitors. But if this subversion of presumed civilizational hier-
archies (on which more below) was one cause for concern, the main worry was that
the prevailing methods of tin mining would inevitably render themselves obsolete by
depleting the rich, shallow deposits within their reach. Even some Chinese operators
had meanwhile reached the conclusion that ‘relying upon the small workers, the
yield must dwindle, for the easily treated deposits are nearing exhaustion’. Many
agreed that the further expansion of the tin frontier ‘depends largely upon outside
capitalists and investors, to whom we look for the money to bring the deeper deposits
to a producing stage with suitable mechanical processes’.44
But in order to attract investment it was necessary to render both the physical
and commercial environment more predictable. Creating a more stable basis for
investment soon became the central thrust of colonial mining policy. From the
1890s onwards the attempt to modernize the industry revolved around three main
elements: new laws to facilitate concessions for large firms, the re-alienation of
concessions that were left unworked, and greater control over water resources.45
The first two measures were in effect a form of commercial discrimination against
small Chinese outfits, and were followed up by ordinances against opium use,
gambling, and the so-called ‘truck system’ (in which small operators agreed to sell
ore to a creditor at a fixed price and paid their contracted labourers after the sale,
often in the form of food and opium already consumed on credit).46 The third
measure sought to lure investors by precluding private monopolies of water supply
and thereby making the business of resource extraction more certain.47 But despite
all of these interventions it remained difficult to attract investment, not least
because it remained all but impossible to compete with Chinese kongsis on labour
costs given their dominance of ‘coolie’ recruitment networks.48 This left few
options for European firms hoping to break into the industry. Ultimately, their
inability to adopt capital-intensive methods due to the lack of investment, or
labour-intensive methods due to the obstacles of recruitment, prompted them—
much as their counterparts in the American West—to implement resource-intensive
methods instead.49

43 Frank A. Swettenham, About Perak (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 1893), 34.
44 Ralph Stokes, Malay Tin-Fields: Mining Position Broadly Reviewed (Singapore: Straits Times
Press, 1906), 36, quoting Liong Fe (owner of the large open-cast Tambun Mine).
45 Report and Proceedings of the Mining Conference Held at Ipoh, Perak, Federated Malay States,
September 23rd to October 6th, 1901 (Taiping: Perak Government Printing Office, 1902).
46 On the ‘truck system’, see Wah, Beyond the Tin Mines, 16–18.
47 See Frank A. Swettenham, British Malaya: An Account of the Origins and Progress of British
Influence in Malaya (London: Allen & Unwin, 1907), 235: ‘It is impossible to over-estimate the value
of this apparently simple but probably unique regulation.’
48 Hoong, Development, 69–77.   49 See Isenberg, Mining, 51.
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148 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

The solution was hydraulic mining, a technique that targeted low-grade deposits
in which the Chinese and Malay competition was uninterested. The basic method
is simple. Water is collected in a reservoir at altitude and piped to the mine face
where high-pressure monitors wash entire hillsides down sluices, sometimes with
the aid of water- or steam-powered gravel pumps to elevate the wash-dirt onto
raised chutes. Though ancient in conception, it had been perfected in the gold
rushes of California and Victoria during the 1850s–1860s.50 Despite being banned
in California in 1884 due to the excessive damage it caused to local river systems,
hydraulic mining was first introduced near Ipoh in 1892 and spread more widely
around the turn of the century. Its crucial advantage was minimal labour input per
ton of earth moved. To take one example, at the pioneering Gopeng Mine just
south-east of Ipoh, water was diverted from a nearby river along a 4-km water-
course and 8 km of pipe to a 2-inch (c.5 cm) monitor nozzle. Ten to twelve Chinese
labourers broke up the mine face with the water-jet and washed the pay dirt into a
nearby ditch, where some forty Malay and Tamil women panned for ore while ten
more workers washed the accumulated tin sand in sluice boxes.51 The basic tech-
nique was similar on Bangka and Belitung. Huge monitors capable of removing
50 cubic metres of earth per hour washed entire hillsides into tailraces where suction
dredges (spuitbaggers) pumped the slurry onto raised chutes.52 This combination of
hydraulic cutting and gravel pumping made earthmoving far cheaper than ever
before, costing only 13 cents per cubic yard (c.1.25 tons, or 0.77 cubic metres)
compared to at least 61 cents by traditional open-cast techniques. Human hands
could not compete. By 1916/17 hydraulicking accounted for around half of all
earth moved in Belitung’s mines (c.1.25 million cubic metres in total). In Malaya
the proportion of miners in hand-dug pits fell from three-quarters in 1911–15 to
only one-third by 1921–5.53
Hydraulicking and gravel pumping thus drove a twofold expansion of the tin
frontier, first into areas located further from watercourses, and secondly into lower
grades of ore. In the process, the very definition of a ‘deposit’ became as much a
question of technological application as geological serendipity. Whereas hand-dug
pits in the 1890s required a minimum of 3 lb of ore per cubic yard (c.1.8 kg per m3)
in order to be profitable, hydraulic mines worked deposits only one-sixth as rich,
especially as prices gradually rose after 1900.54 By 1908, it was generally agreed
that ‘the day when the Federated Malay States might be regarded as the happy
hunting-ground for the small miner seems to have passed, and the future of the tin
mining industry in the States will depend upon the economical development on a
large scale of low-grade propositions’.55

50 For a comparative account of these industries: David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California
in the 1850s (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994).
51 L. Wray, ‘Some Account of the Tin Mines and the Mining Industries of Perak’, Perak Museum
Notes, vol. 2 part 2 (1898), 83–4.
52 J. C. Mollema, De Ontwikkeling van het Eiland Billiton en van de Billiton-Maatschappij (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1918), 85–9.
53 Figures from Mollema, Ontwikkeling, 89; Hoong, Development, 131, 384.
54 Hoong, Development, 133.
55 Wright and Cartwright (eds), Twentieth-Century Impressions, 510.
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Subterranean Frontier 149

The advent of hydraulic mining thus carried considerable social costs for small
operators, and its ecological costs were similarly steep. In many ways it represented
what Tim LeCain has called a ‘mass destruction’ technique, whereby miners
worked ever-lower grades of ore by shifting ever-greater burdens onto the environ-
ment.56 As was also the case with the copper mines LeCain has studied, the key
characteristic of this system was not the reduction of labour costs per se (which it
also achieved), but rather a dramatic increase in throughput by means of a highly
indiscriminate method of resource collection that chewed up and spat out much
more than what it targeted. Contemporaries noticed the shift: ‘the whole mass of
the hill, rich and poor, hard and soft, is served alike; all is removed and passed
through sluice boxes.’57 As lower-grade deposits came into production, the ratio of
ore to tailings shifted accordingly. For every kilogram of tin produced, five to six
times more waste soil was washed away.
And where did all these tailings go? They ended up in vast ‘dead zones’ and
ultimately in the rivers, just as in California.58 Although local waterways had long
suffered from lampanning and open-cast effluents, the advent of hydraulic mining
greatly exacerbated the problem. As the discharge of tailings rose, especially in
Perak, streams that had been ‘clear as crystal’ in the 1870s turned into muddy,
meandering watercourses ‘the colour and consistency of tomato soup’.59 Numerous
river beds were raised by several feet, some by several metres, increasing the fre-
quency of floods and covering downstream agricultural land with sterile tailings.
Among the worst affected was the Sungei Raia, a tributary of the Kinta River.
Despite repeated attempts to dredge its channel and stabilize its banks, the con-
tinued deposition of sand and silt on the river plain gradually transformed a large
rubber estate into a marsh of lagoons and swamp grass.60 Large sections of the
Kinta River itself (the ‘River of Silt’) were likewise severely affected. Whereas in
1895 it averaged between 12 and 15 feet deep (3.7–4.6 metres), by the mid-1920s
the river at normal flow ‘was so shallow that a matchbox could scarcely float down
it’, and by the 1930s the stretch near the mouths of the Sanglop and Teja Rivers
presented ‘as woeful a picture as any of endless swamp’.61
One of the most worrying upshots for colonial authorities was the increasing
frequency and severity of flooding in the urban centres, especially after the ‘great
flood’ of 1926, which inundated much of Ipoh (jokingly nicknamed the ‘Malayan
Venice’ in the mid-1920s) and Kuala Lumpur, and which triggered major canaliza-
tion and flood retention works.62 There were even cases of mine tailings killing off

56 LeCain, Mass Destruction, esp. 7–11.

57 Warnford-Lock, Mining, 133.   58 Isenberg, Mining, 30–47.
59 Swettenham, British Malaya, 117; Report by the Right Honourable W. G. A. Ormsby Gore, 157.
60 Annual Report of the Drainage and Irrigation Department of the Malay States and the Straits
Settlements for the Year 1937, 86–7; Jin-Bee, ‘Mining Landscapes’, 35, 37.
61 Quotes from Annual Report of the Drainage and Irrigation Department of the Malay States and the
Straits Settlements for the Year 1938, 80; Ho Tak Ming, Ipoh: When Tin was King (Ipoh: Perak Academy,
2009), 461, 472.
62 Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report upon Certain Matters Regarding the
Rivers in the Federated Malay States (Kuala Lumpur: Government Printing Office, 1928); Ming, Ipoh,
466–72.
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150 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

entire settlements. Balun Bidai, a village of 2,000 paddy farmers near the mouth of
the Tumboh River, gradually became a swamp in the 1900s as the river silted up.
In Pahang state, the town of Bentong was threatened by mines that loaded the
gorges above the Bentong River with up to 9 metres of silt and that gradually
spread tailings across the entire valley below.63 Even more dramatic was the fate of
Kuala Kubu, a market town that was eventually relocated after being buried under
5 metres of tailings washed down the Selangor River from mining operations in
the Peretak Hills.64 There is also evidence that tailings damaged shad fisheries
along the west coast of Malaya. Amidst declining catches around 1920, one official
repeatedly ‘picked up these fish by hand in a dying condition apparently choked by
silt in their attempt to ascend the rivers’.65
Simply put, the costs of mining were passed on to others downstream. And what
made the siltation problem so intractable was the difficulty of repairing the damage
once it was done. Many of the worked-out sites—devoid of all topsoil and vegetation,
often nothing more than exposed rock and regolith—were virtually impossible to
stabilize and continued to erode at a rapid pace. On Bangka, the hundreds of washing
sluices left vast flats of sterile sand where vegetation could scarcely take hold even
after decades.66 In Malaya, it was estimated in 1939 that the mines were still annually
depositing 16 million tons of silt into the rivers of Perak and Selangor, much of it
from abandoned sites.67 Even after watersheds were stabilized, the silt still took
decades to clear from the rivers. As a 1928 report on Malaya’s rivers noted, ‘today
the country is faced with the problem of dealing by curative measures with a dis-
order, which in the nature of things is peculiarly amenable to preventive measures,
and which, had adequate preventive measures been taken in the past, need never
have attained very serious proportions’.68
By the time a new Malayan Drainage and Irrigation Department was founded
in 1932 it could do little more than remedial work: dredging, channelling, and
straightening watercourses into classic ‘organic machines’ that bore little resem-
blance to their previous riverine ecosystems.69 Huge flood relief works were built
for the Kinta River at Ipoh, which effectively turned a sizeable stretch of the water-
way into a drainage canal. At the former site of Kuala Kubu, engineers retrained
the Selangor River into a 5-km long, 30-metre wide channel that emptied into the
original river bed below the abandoned old town. And while dredges on the most
stricken sections of the Kinta and Larut Rivers slowly cleared the main channels,

63 Annual Report of the Drainage and Irrigation Department of the Malay States and the Straits
Settlements for the Year 1937 (Kuala Lumpur: FMS, 1938), 94.
64 Federated Malay States, Report on the Administration of the Mines Department and on the Mining
Industry: 1914, 1920; Annual Report of the Drainage and Irrigation Department of the Malay States and
the Straits Settlements for the Year 1938, 83; Jin-Bee, ‘Mining Landscapes’, 37.
65 John G. Butcher, ‘The Marine Animals of Southeast Asia: Towards a Demographic History,
1850–2000’, in Peter Boomgaard, David Henley, and Manon Osseweijer (eds), Muddied Waters:
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Management of Forests and Fisheries in Island Southeast Asia
(Leiden: KITLV, 2005), 63–96, here 75.
66 Helbig, ‘Bangka’, 195.    67 Fermor, Report, 154.
68 Report of the Commission (1928), 7–8.
69 Annual Report of the Drainage and Irrigation Department, 1932, 1937, 1938; Richard White, The
Organic Machine: The Re-Making of the Columbia River (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995).
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Subterranean Frontier 151

a Sisyphean two-year dredging effort on the Sungei Raia only managed to lower
the riverbed by less than 30 cm.70

These degraded mining landscapes were situated at one end of a long chain linking
the kitchens and factories of the industrialized world to the forests of Southeast
Asia. For many years their remote location and their indispensability for colonial
coffers allowed miners to work them with scant regard for the damage they caused.
On Bangka and Belitung, the quasi-official status of the industry essentially gave it
a free hand. In Malaya, where early attempts to retain effluents led to ‘serious
friction between the Mines Department and the miners’, the creation of a Tailings
Commission in 1904 ultimately resulted in weak self-regulation and a lack of
enforcement.71 ‘As a consequence’, the Chamber of Mines later complained, ‘the
situation regarding the silting of rivers and water-courses which was acute in 1904
had become critical in 1914’.72 All the same, during the First World War even
these lax controls were loosened to maintain production.73
Yet over time, the dire effects on the region’s rivers placed a new set of ­constraints
on the industry. One limit came in the form of tighter regulation. By the 1920s
and 1930s colonial governments were far more aware of such problems than they
had been a generation earlier. In part this reflected the more general spread of
­conservationist thinking among officials, who increasingly understood their task to
include both the ‘development’ and ‘stewardship’ of colonial resources. In part it
also reflected hard economic interests, especially the growing power of the rubber
lobby, which supported stricter mine pollution controls. In Malaya, a 1922 Control
of Silt Enactment—by far the oldest such provision in the British Empire—was
soon followed by a ban on hillside mining above the 250-foot contour.74 In 1928,
two years after the ‘great flood’ in Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur, a further enactment
required explicit permission to dispose of all overburden and tailings on any given
site.75 A more fundamental constraint was the growing scarcity of exploitable
deposits. By the mid-1920s engineers agreed that the hydraulic frontier had closed.
There were few suitable areas left for building new reservoirs to feed the monitors,
and miners had already cut down most of the workable hill sites in any event.76
But while the soils and streams of the foothills were showing clear signs of
­exhaustion, world c­ onsumption of tin—and the prices it fetched—continued to

70 Annual Report of the Drainage and Irrigation Department, 1937, 86–8.

71 Report on the Administration of the Mines Department and on the Mining Industry for the Year 1904, 7.
72 Report of the Commission (1928), 13–14.
73 Imperial Mineral Resources Bureau, The Mineral Industry of the British Empire and Foreign
Countries: War Period. Tin (1913–1919) (London: HMSO, 1922), 53; Fermor, Report, 165; see also
‘Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into various matters affecting the tin mining indus-
try in the FMS’, in Proceedings of the Federal Council of the FMS, 1919, c63–c71.
74 Sir Harold A. Tempany, The Practice of Soil Conservation in the British Colonial Empire (Harpenden:
Commonwealth Bureau of Soil Science, 1949), 74; Jin-Bee, ‘Mining Landscapes’, 35–6; H. G. Harris
and E. S. Willbourn, Mining in Malaya (London: Malayan Information Agency, 1940), 46.
75 Report of the Commission (1928), 13–17.
76 L. G. Attenborough, ‘Tin Mining in Malaya’, in Empire Mining and Metallurgical Congress,
Proceedings: Part II. Mining (London: Congress, 1925), 490–514.
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152 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

rise, surpassing pre-war levels by 1920 before peaking at 193,000 tons by the end
of the decade.77
Everything pointed towards a new frontier in the lowlands, especially in swampy
areas like the lower Kinta valley or Bangka’s estuaries, which were known to possess
tin but were unworkable via existing mining techniques. The solution, once again,
was technological innovation: namely the introduction of the bucket dredge.
Having already chewed up river bottoms from the Antipodes to California, the
first dredges arrived in Malaya just before the First World War and systematically
began eating their way across the river valleys of Perak and Bangka during the
1920s. By 1930, the hundred or so dredges operating in Malaya accounted for
30 per cent of its tin output, rising to over half by 1940.78 They essentially combined
three operations in one. A chain of buckets excavated and lifted the pay dirt, a ser-
ies of jigs separated the ore from the waste, and the tailings were finally deposited
at the rear, often into bunded paddocks on previously worked land.
Fuelled by copious amounts of inanimate energy, the tin dredges devoured vast
swathes of low-lying alluvial land in search of the tiny (and ever-decreasing) frac-
tion of resource that they valued. Even the early 300-horsepower dredges could lift
and treat up to around 75,000 cubic metres per month, equivalent to the output
of around 2,000 labourers. In the mid-1920s new models the size of apartment
blocks could process up to 230,000 cubic metres per month to depths of over
30 metres. Their low operating costs—similar to the cheapest hydraulic mines—
meant that ore grades as meagre as 0.4 kg per cubic metre were profitable. Like
hydraulicking and gravel pumping, dredges thus extended the tin frontier in two
senses. They not only opened up whole new landscapes for exploitation; they also
allowed miners to work lower ore grades including even long-abandoned tailings
dumps (e.g. at Larut).79
By utilizing a different set of land and energy resources, tin dredging opened the
‘final frontier’ on the wet valley floors. In addition, the different waste footprint of
dredging operations took some of the pressure off erosion-prone foothills and
damaged rivers. Although it would be exaggerated to claim that this was as import-
ant as economic and political considerations for inducing colonial governments to
promote dredging over other methods, mitigating environmental damage did play
a part, especially as the rubber industry expanded in Malaya. Dredging was, by and
large, less detrimental to local hydrology. Contemporaries estimated that no more
than 5 per cent of the excavated ground escaped in the form of fine slimes.
Furthermore, it was centred on swampy terrain unsuited to agricultural produc-
tion, and in some areas it could even ease existing drainage problems caused by
mining and siltation upstream.80
But as is often the case, the solution for one set of problems brought new ones.
Although some historians have suggested that dredging markedly reduced the

77 Minerals Yearbook 1932–3 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933), 295.
78 Hoong, Development, 126, 400.    79 Hoong, Development, 133.
80 Report of the Commission (1928), 139; Fermor, Report, 156–7; Jin-Bee, ‘Mining Landscapes’, 43.
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Subterranean Frontier 153

e­ cological costs of tin mining in the region,81 it is more accurate to say that it displaced
them from the hillsides and rivers to the lowlands and coasts. For one thing, the
sites themselves were demolished in the process, which mixed the ground from
approximately 7 to 45 metres deep and thereby spoiled the topsoil with large
amounts of infertile subsoil. Moreover, even when the finer slimes (which con-
tained nearly all the organic matter) and coarser material were separated, the latter
was often deposited on top of the former, leaving the surface effectively dead.
As the dredges worked their way across valley floors, they left behind a landscape
of sterile sand hummocks and miniature dunes that contemporaries regarded as
‘permanently damaged’.82 They also extended the mining footprint from terrestrial
to marine environments. Bangka and Belitung soon became the world’s largest
­offshore tin producers as dredges tore up the former alluvial river bottoms that had
been inundated by rising ocean levels after the last Ice Age. Although we have no
records of the damage it caused, given the indiscriminate nature of this method
there can be little doubt that it devastated large areas of the sea beds around the
islands, above all in the productive shallows less than 50 metres deep. Along the
coasts, too, dredges slowly excavated whole new waterways that changed river and
tidal flows as they chewed their way inland (Fig. 4.3).83
Despite repeated calls for the mandatory deposition of slimes on top of sterile
sands and for stockpiling topsoil in preparation for subsequent redistribution, the
failure to enact such preventive measures meant that the restoration of former min-
ing lands, much like the repair of damaged rivers, was limited and remedial.84 In
Malaya, where rapid population growth and the expansion of rubber planting
intensified the pressure for land, the Agricultural Department conducted rice
growing trials on dredged sites in the 1930s, and later experimented with a variety
of green dressings—especially woody shrubs of the Mimosa and Crotalaria
­genera—as a means of kick-starting plant succession (by contrast, former open-
cast or hydraulic sites were generally deemed irretrievable).85 But despite some
successes, the lack of binding regulation meant that worked-out sites were usually
left infertile and derelict.86 Once the tin frontier had encompassed a particular

81 e.g. Headrick, Tentacles, 267; Ken, Malayan Tin Industry, 202; Donald H. McLaughlin, ‘Man’s
Selective Attack on Ores and Minerals’, in William L. Thomas (ed.), Man’s Role in Changing the Face
of the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 851–61, here 859.
82 Fermor, Report, 150; Helbig, ‘Bangka’, 194. Malaria was also a problem given the creation of a
landscape of small artificial ponds: Mary Somers Heidhues, ‘Poor Little Rich Islands: Metals in
Bangka-Belitung and West Kalimantan’, in Greg Bankoff and Peter Boomgaard (eds), A History of
Natural Resources in Asia: The Wealth of Nature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 61–79, here 71.
83 William Robertson, Tin: Its Production and Marketing (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 17–18,
59, 174; Helbig, ‘Bangka’, 194–5.
84 Fermor, Report, 157–8.
85 F. Birkinshaw, ‘Reclaiming Old Mining Land for Agriculture’, Malayan Agricultural Journal,
vol. 19 (1931), 470–6; B. A. Mitchell, ‘Malayan Tin Tailings: Prospects of Rehabilitation’, Malayan
Forester, vol. 20 (1957), 181–6; see also H. N. Ridley, ‘Reclaiming Abandoned Mining Lands’,
Agricultural Bulletin of the Straits and Federated Malay States, Second Series, no. 2 (1903), 63–4.
86 Report by Sir Frank Stockdale, 62–3; V. M. Palaniappan, ‘Ecology of Tin Tailings Areas: Plant
Communities and their Succession’, Journal of Applied Ecology, vol. 11 no. 1 (Apr. 1974), 133–50;
L. H. Ang and W. M. Ho, ‘Afforestation of Tin Tailings in Malaysia’, Forest Research Institute Malaysia,
2002: <http://www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/isco/isco12/VolumeIII/AfforestationofTinTailings.pdf>.
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154 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

Fig. 4.3. Bucket dredge on a low-lying tin-field, east of Manggar, Belitung, 1937. By
permission of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, coll. no. 10007195.

site, it rarely reverted to anything resembling its former character, and in many
cases the damage was too severe even to merit the label of an anthropogenic
‘second nature’.87
Dredging was, then, another form of ‘mass destruction’.88 Like hydraulicking
and gravel pumping, it expanded the tin frontier primarily at the expense of the
biophysical environment. But just as with these earlier innovations, it was crucial
for meeting the rising demand for tin. World production peaked in 1929 (193,000
tons) and once again between 1937 and 1941 (211,000–42,000 tons), principally
thanks to output from Southeast Asia.89 Although wartime disruption made tin
one of the scarcest of the vital war materials, it remained a crucial element in
numerous manufacturing processes ranging from chemicals to armaments.90 By
the Second World War dredging already accounted for around half of tin produc-
tion in Southeast Asia, and after the war it became the mainstay of the industry.

87 The term comes from William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York:
Norton, 1991).
88 LeCain, Mass Destruction.
89 Minerals Yearbook 1932–3, 295; Minerals Yearbook 1941 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1943), 720. On inter-war production agreements: Hoong, Development, 189–263.
90 John B. DeMille, Strategic Minerals: A Summary of Uses, World Output, Stockpiles, Procurement
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), 483.
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Subterranean Frontier 155

As real energy costs fell and electrolytic techniques for thinner plating pushed tin
prices downward, dredges enabled miners to process ever more minuscule percent-
ages of ore through the ever-greater substitution of inanimate power for human
energy.

R A C E , WA S T E , A N D E F F I C I E N C Y I N T H E T I N F I E L D S

The history of tin offers a particularly vivid illustration of the link between ‘mass
destruction’ and mass consumption in the modern world. One of the basic fun-
daments of modern consumerism is an unprecedented ability to escape local
resource limits by drawing on distant raw materials. For the industrial societies
of Europe and North America, the growth of the global tin economy helped
expand their ecological footprint in two ways. Directly, of course, the metal itself
constituted an important material subsidy from halfway around the world,
underpinning a range of vital industries and ending up in countless consumer
goods. But indirectly too, it facilitated a multitude of other subsidy flows linking
the industrial metropoles to their increasingly far-flung areas of supply. As one of
the principal means for conserving and transporting the perishable goods that
they required, the tin can quite literally fed the rise of modern consumer societies.
By the late 1950s, world production of canned food reached 18 million tons. In
1962, the United States alone produced over 48 billion cans, which corresponded
to around 257 per person annually.91 Though few consumers knew it, their well-
stocked cupboards were closely tied to the man-made badlands and silted rivers
of Southeast Asia.
Tin was therefore a doubly important element in the globalization of consump-
tion and imperial networks of extraction. The connections between the households
of the industrial world and the subsoils of Southeast Asia typified the expanding
resource frontiers and the thickening web of commodity chains during this period.
This is why the tin frontier showed so many social and environmental parallels to
extractive frontiers elsewhere in the world.
But if the common themes are clear enough, it is the variations that enable us to
situate particular goods and industries more firmly within their historical contexts,
and therefore to understand more clearly how they related to wider processes of
social, cultural, and environmental change. For the specific case of tin, one such
variation had to do with the nature of industrial-era mining, and in particular with
the role of technological innovation as a key driver of mineral frontiers. By the
early twentieth century, the mining industry at large relied progressively less on the
discovery of new reserves and ever more on the ability to tap known but previously
inaccessible or unprofitable deposits. In Southeast Asia as elsewhere, the progres-
sive depletion of the richest deposits prompted miners to work declining ore grades

91 Ernest S. Hedges, Tin in Social and Economic History (London: Arnold, 1964), 151–8; Simon
Naylor, ‘Spacing the Can: Empire, Modernity, and the Globalisation of Food’, Environment and
Planning A, vol. 32 (2000), 1625–39.
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156 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

through greater mechanization and economies of scale.92 Admittedly, a mineral

‘reserve’ is always a moving target, ever shifting in accordance with prices and
methods of extraction. By this time, however, most mines had ceased to be treas-
ure troves stumbled across by prospectors, and instead had become essentially
anthropogenic sites, products of a particular constellation of closely interrelated
factors: technological innovations that made mines profitable at current prices, a
political system that privileged large enterprises and allowed many of the costs to
be passed to the environment, and a culture broadly willing to countenance these
costs in the name of ‘progress’. In this sense, the mining industry epitomized
frontiers of technology and investment.
­

Other variations were rooted mainly in socio-cultural phenomena, an under-

standing of which helps reduce the risk of economic tunnel vision that can
sometimes plague commodity analyses.93 The tin frontier was, like any other space,
not merely a physical stage for human activity but was itself constituted by ideas
and experiences, by ‘mental geographies’.94 Just as the rhetoric of ‘idle lands’ and
profligate aborigines animated the colonization of the American West or Australian
interior, perceptions of the ‘waste’ or ‘inefficient plunder’ of resources in Europe’s
tropical colonies both promoted and served to legitimize European dominance.95
Viewed in this light, efforts to mechanize the tin industry reflected more than just
commercial imperatives and the lure of profit (though, to be sure, there was no
shortage of European-owned firms eager to work the tin sands of the region). They
also mirrored the colonial ideology of the right, even duty, of Europeans to spread
their mastery of nature to benighted parts of the world. Wedded to this outlook
was a quasi-moral objection against permitting a resource to lie idle if it could serve
human purposes. According to the sociologist Benjamin Kidd, it was imperative to
avoid ‘the inexpediency of allowing a great extent of territory in the richest region
of the globe—that comprised within the tropics—to remain undeveloped’.96 This
same distinction between what might be called ‘resource globalism’ and ‘resource
primitivism’ was equally manifest in a 1939 Malayan mining report, which asserted
that anyone in control of ore deposits was ‘under an onus to permit the exploit-
ation of that mineral’.97 As elsewhere in the tropical world, imposing industrial
technology in Southeast Asia’s tin fields was both a sign of European power and a
means of exerting it.
Exploring these relationships between technology, culture, and power has been
one of the foremost preoccupations of colonial and post-colonial historiography

92 Robertson, Tin, 39–43.

93 Steven Topik, ‘Historicizing Commodity Chains: Five Hundred Years of the Global Coffee
Commodity Chain’, in Jennifer Bair (ed.), Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research (Palo Alto, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 37–62.
94 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber, 1987).
95 Settler complaints about the use of buffalo by Native Americans are strikingly similar to
European criticisms of mining in Southeast Asia: Krech, Ecological Indian, 133–45.
96 Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1894), 316.
97 Fermor, Report, 20; on resource ‘globalism’ and ‘primitivism’, see Megan Black, ‘Interior’s
Exterior: The State, Mining Companies, and Resource Ideologies in the Point Four Program’,
Diplomatic History, vol. 40 (2016), 81–110.
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Subterranean Frontier 157

in recent years. A central leitmotif has been the concept of ‘technopolitics’, which
has influenced work on topics ranging from colonial medicine to agricultural devel-
opment. Among the many merits of this conceptual approach is its emphasis on the
inextricable links—often obscured by an ideology of scientific autonomy—between
control over the material and social world. As Timothy Mitchell has formulated it,
technopolitics is ‘a particular form of manufacturing, a certain way of organizing
the amalgam of the human and nonhuman, things and ideas, so that the human,
the intellectual, the realm of intentions and ideas seems to come first and to control
and organize the nonhuman’.98 Since the 1990s a vast literature has shown how the
application of supposedly apolitical expertise, usually in the name of ‘modernization’
or ‘development’, carries fundamental political and social implications, even if
scholars disagree on the extent of its quiet hegemonic power.99
Seen through this lens, the modernization of Southeast Asia’s tin industry was
one of many examples where the application of technical expertise, and assertions
of its necessity and universal validity, served to underpin imperial power. But per-
haps more than most cases, it illustrates the ways in which such expertise, far from
merely parading in an ‘apolitical’ guise, was also overtly politicized, whether in the
form of incessant complaints about superficial ‘Asian’ production methods or the
celebration of Western miners as saviours of the industry. At one level, such evidence
confirms the well-established argument that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
imperialism was animated by ideologies that measured human societies by their
technical achievements.100 But to take this argument a step further, the evolution
of the tin industry also suggests that it was not just ‘machines’ and technical ration-
ality per se that were regarded as the ‘measure of men’, but more generally the
degree to which human communities were able to control the physical environment
and extract wealth from it.
What was ultimately being judged in evaluations of different mining processes
was not so much their level of mechanization as their level of ‘efficiency’. We can
get a broad sense of what this concept meant from Kidd’s 1898 treatise on The
Control of the Tropics, which declared that ‘the last thing our civilisation is likely to
permanently tolerate is the wasting of the resources of the richest regions of the
earth through the lack of the elementary qualities of social efficiency in the races
possessing them’.101 Efficiency, in this scenario, denoted not only a superior organ-
izational and technical aptitude but also a deeper knowledge of the natural world
that permitted an appreciation of the full bounty it offered for human design—
provided that design be good enough.
Such ideas were deeply engrained in the imperial project, and what made them
so compelling was that they linked colonial authority not only with technological
prowess but also with contemporary notions of race and environment. In the
particular context of Southeast Asia’s tin fields, Malays were seen to lack both of

98 Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 42–3.

99 Seminal works besides Mitchell include: Ferguson, Anti-Politics Machine; Bruno Latour, We
Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1993); Escobar, Encountering Development; Cooper and Packard (eds), International Development.
100 Adas, Machines.   101 Kidd, Control of the Tropics, 96–7.
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158 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

the above elements of ‘efficiency’. Regarded by colonial observers as ‘an indolent,

contented, thriftless, unambitious, polite and peaceful race’, they supposedly pos-
sessed neither the urge nor the know-how to capitalize fully on the assets that lay
under their feet.102 By comparison, Chinese miners were seen to have the former
trait but not the latter: though industrious and commercially astute, their technical
capabilities confined them to rich, shallow deposits.103 Only the colonizers purport-
edly had both the motivation and ability to maximize the extraction of available
resources, and this tendency to associate race and technology was magnified by
the close structural correspondence between the ethnic ownership of a mine and
the techniques it deployed. By the turn of the century colonial administrations
made no bones about deliberately promoting Western mining enterprise, though
it was unclear whether the various mining codes, prohibitions on the ‘truck system’,
and increasing size of concessionary plots merely amounted to or were specifically
intended as a form of racial discrimination.104
These ideological hierarchies of efficiency and waste clearly framed contemporary
perceptions of Southeast Asia’s tin fields. As we have seen above, in certain ways
they also helped to promote the specific policy of modernization via Western min-
ing techniques, particularly as European entrepreneurs turned to hydraulicking
and gravel pumping in order to break into the hitherto Chinese-dominated indus-
try. When European hydraulic miners faced the prospect of tighter environmental
regulations, they repeatedly cited the ‘thoroughness’ and ‘economy’ of these methods
in order to counter what they saw as ‘a persistent prejudice against monitor work-
ings on the assumption that they cause immense damage’.105 The real damage,
they contended, resulted from Asian methods that did not exhaust the ground
before moving elsewhere. As one hydraulic mine manager boasted in 1905, ‘the
most striking feature of mining affairs at present is the losing of ground by the
wasteful Chinese miner, who has practically picked the eyes out of the country, and
the advance of the White miner, who is making excellent profits out of ground the
Chinese could not touch’.106 The fact that Chinese miners were not slow to adopt
the hydraulic monitor and gravel pump did little to undermine these racialized
claims to superiority, and if anything was taken as confirmation of Europe’s techno-
logical trailblazing and the benefits it brought to subject peoples. Indeed, many of
the same assumptions framed the subsequent advent of dredging, which was cele-
brated for performing a kind of racial role reversal in the working of low-grade
ores. ‘It had always been the case in alluvial working, whether in California or
Australia, that the patient Chinaman could come after the hasty European and
obtain a living from what the European had left,’ noted one engineer in the mid-
1920s. The fact that ‘dredging now took place in considerable part upon areas
already worked and left by the Chinaman’ provided ‘a comfort more grateful than
cocoa, and a stimulation greater than that of wine’.107

102 Notes on Perak, With a Sketch of its Vegetable, Animal and Mineral Products (London: William
Clowes, 1886), 10.
103 Zondervan, Bangka, 111.   104 Hoong, Development, 151.
105 Report and Proceedings of the Mining Conference Held at Ipoh, 19.
106 Stokes, Malay Tin-Fields, 36.   107 Empire Mining and Metallurgical Congress, 523–4.
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Subterranean Frontier 159

These examples illustrate an important point: despite the vast amounts of waste
material they produced, hydraulicking and dredging were not considered wasteful.
On the contrary, they represented the pinnacle of ‘efficiency’ by coaxing profits
from even marginal grades of ore. What counted as profligate in the economic
­culture of colonialism was not the systematic destruction of entire hills, rivers, and
valley floors for low-grade ore, but rather the inability to make meagre deposits
pay—to allow them to run ‘largely to waste under the management of races of low
social efficiency’.108 If waste therefore denoted a failure to convert a potential
resource into cash, then efficiency represented a maximization of output regard-
less of the collateral effects. A survey of the Malayan industry summed up the
matter as follows: ‘efficiency of mining really means the degree of completeness
attained by the miner in recovering the mineral from the ground that has been
leased to him’.109 The only thing that truly counted was profitability in relation
to current world prices, including transport, fuel, and all other costs. The ‘mass
destruction’ technologies that European firms introduced in the region worked
because the costs were shifted to the environment, which did not have a column
on the balance sheet.
Obvious though it may seem, it is worth emphasizing that these definitions of
waste and efficiency were markedly different from—even diametrically opposed
to—those that have informed more recent critiques of pioneer profligacy and
‘frontier economics’. The core issue at the time was not whether natural resources
were used sparingly but whether they were exploited thoroughly. This meant that,
ironically, the ‘waste’ of untouched ore in the ground represented a greater trans-
gression than laying waste to an entire mountain or watershed in the pursuit of
low-grade ore. And what permitted the maximal extraction of the targeted resource
was of course the active utilization of other natural resources—above all fossil fuels
and hydrological power—that could be harnessed to this endeavour. Tapping
nature’s energy flows to capitalize fully on the other gifts of nature thus gave this
particular brand of efficiency a double environmental dimension, though neither
entered its cost calculation.
As some contemporaries noted, this narrow method of accounting was hardly
unique to tin mining, or even mining at large, but increasingly characterized eco-
nomic thinking in general during this period.110 ‘We have lived so long in what we
have regarded as an expanding world, that we reject in our contemporary theories
of economics and of population the realities which contradict such views,’ remarked
Carl Sauer in 1938. ‘Economics unfortunately has become restricted increasingly to
money economics, instead of embracing the study of Wirtschaften, and largely has
missed this ominous fact.’111 John Maynard Keynes likewise criticized the obsession
with ‘the financial results’ for turning the entire conduct of life ‘into a sort of parody
of an accountant’s nightmare. . . . We destroy the beauty of the countryside because

108 Kidd, Social Evolution, 316.

109 Fermor, Report, 115.   110 LeCain, Mass Destruction, 212–16.
111 Carl Sauer, ‘Destructive Exploitation in Modern Colonial Expansion’, in Comptes rendus
du Congrès International de Géographie Amsterdam 1938, vol. 2, IIIc (Leiden: Brill, 1938), 494–9,
here 494.
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160 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

the unappropriated splendors of nature have no economic value. We are capable of

shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend.’112
The expansion of the tin frontier in Southeast Asia clearly exemplified central
elements of this broader economic culture. It also reflected distinctively imperialist
ideas about race, technology, and efficiency that served to justify colonial power. If
the main drivers of change were economic and material pressures common across
much of the global mining industry—above all declining ore percentages and a
corresponding need for economies of scale—the attitudes and values that framed
these processes nonetheless provided an important ideological support. The colo-
nial claim of bringing Europe’s mastery of nature to the ‘underused’ resources of
the tropical world not only abetted the entry of mechanized Western firms into the
industry, it also condoned, even encouraged, the deployment of techniques more
wasteful, by other criteria, than what they replaced.

The imperial tin frontier left a broad and enduring imprint on the lands it touched.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it played a central role in the
construction of modern infrastructure across large parts of the region, from railways
and roads to dams and waterworks. The hunger for goods, services, and energy to fuel
the mining industry spurred a range of supporting activities, from logging and smelt-
ing to electrification—including Malaya’s first hydroelectric plant, a 27-megawatt
installation on the Perak River, which was the biggest civil engineering project in all of
Southeast Asia in the late 1920s. As a leading source of export revenue for Malaysia
and Indonesia, the tin mines also underwrote the rise of new secondary industries and
served as an engine of economic growth long after independence. The social, eco-
nomic, and ecological consequences of colonial tin production reached far beyond the
mines themselves, and they lasted long after decolonization.
The most acute effects were felt in the tin fields and their nearby surroundings,
especially those located downstream. From the 1860s onward the relentless quest
for cassiterite denuded foothills, eroded soils, clogged rivers, and finally churned
terrain across the wet lowlands. On the islands of Bangka and Belitung, it was
noted by 1940 that ‘not a single landscape has remained unchanged by the tin
economy’. No other part of the Indonesian archipelago had witnessed such radical
change, ‘neither the coal finds on Sumatra, Borneo and Pulau, asphalt on
Buton, . . . not even petroleum on Sumatra, Java, Borneo and Tarakan have caused
the same degree of equilibrium disruption through transformation of the
landscape’.113 Even in the twenty-first century the islands still serve as symbols of
resource imperialism and industrial-scale devastation in the tropics.114
In Malaysia too, the eerie moonscapes fringing the Kinta and Klang valleys still
bear witness to the destruction caused by the tin mines. Many of these sites remain

112 John Maynard Keynes, ‘National Self-Sufficiency’, The Yale Review, vol. 22 no. 4 (June 1933),
755–69.
113 Quotes from Helbig, ‘Bangka’, 192–3, 204.
114 See e.g. the Friends of the Earth campaign to mitigate the effects of tin mining on Bangka:
<http://www.foe.co.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/tin_mining.pdf> (accessed July 2016).
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Subterranean Frontier 161

completely devoid of vegetation and continue to afflict nearby rivers. Studies in the
1990s still confirmed rapid erosion rates from abandoned mining lands. Sediment
loads on tributaries of the Klang River increased almost fivefold as they ran through
former mining sites, whose sediment yields were over eighteen times higher than
disturbed forest catchments.115 Even at the start of the twenty-first century it was
estimated that only 9.7 per cent of ex-mining land had been reclaimed, and most
of this area was earmarked for housing and industry rather than agriculture or
forestry.116 Although the handful of underground lode mines on the Malay
Peninsula left fewer surface traces than the alluvial tin fields, they too bequeathed
a troublesome inheritance. Tailings wastes from the British-run Sungei Lembing
mine in Pahang—for many decades the world’s largest and longest underground
tin mine, comprising 322 kilometres of tunnels—still contaminate surrounding
waterways with arsenic, lead, and acid drainage some forty years after operations
were wound down.117
But the colonial tin boom left other legacies as well, for it also spurred a range
of efforts—effluent regulations, forest reservation, river conservancy, agricultural
reclamation—to limit or reverse the damage it caused. In part these initiatives
were motivated by mounting conservationist concern about ‘the cost of a scarred
countryside’.118 To some extent they also emerged within the mining industry
itself, at least insofar as the danger of resource depletion and externally imposed
pollution regulations threatened profits and production. Together, these partly
overlapping, partly conflicting impulses gave rise to a body of environmental
legislation that long outlived colonial rule, especially with regard to river protection.
Over the long term the resulting legal provisions significantly reduced tailings
discharge from mining operations, which once again showed that many of the
worst environmental consequences of tin mining could have been avoided in
the first place through tighter regulation. But as beneficial as such conservationist
measures were, they were still vastly outweighed by the desire to exploit Southeast
Asia’s mineral resources. Profits generally came before prudence, and for the
most part conservationist regulation could only make substantial headway
once the costs of environmental degradation threatened the prospects for the
industry itself or the interests of other powerful groups downstream, not least
the plantation lobby.
Ultimately, the wealth generated by the tin industry, and the convenience it
offered food shoppers in the industrial world, were an exercise in spatial and temporal
displacement. Like so many industries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

115 G. Balamurugan, ‘Tin Mining and Sediment Supply in Peninsular Malaysia with Special
Reference to the Kelang River Basin’, The Environmentalist, vol. 11 no. 4 (1991), 281–91; C. P. Lee
and E. B. Yeap, ‘Reclamation after Tin Mining in Malaysia’, in Ming H. Wong and Anthony
D. Bradshaw (eds), The Restoration and Management of Derelict Land: Modern Approaches (Singapore:
World Scientific Publishing, 2002), 211–22.
116 Ang and Ho, ‘Afforestation of Tin Tailings in Malaysia’.
117 Fares Yahya Alshaebi, ‘Risk Assessment at Abandoned Tin Mine In Sungai Lembing, Pahang,
Malaysia’, The Electronic Journal of Geotechnical Engineering, vol. 14 (2009), bundle E:9, 2–3.
118 ‘Rationing the Ever-hungry Dredges’, Straits Times, 15 Nov. 1937, cited in Kathirithamby-Wells,
Nature, 154.
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162 Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

it not only depleted nature’s capital by exploiting a subsidy from afar, it also spread
the costs far into the future. A whole host of factors encouraged this process of
transposition. One was the ‘distancing’ effect of long commodity chains, which
insulates end-users from the consequences of extraction and makes the costs largely
invisible. Consumers at the end of the chain had little if any inkling of where the
tin in their cans originated, let alone what was sacrificed in the process. Another
factor was the semi-transient character of the mining population itself, most of
them Chinese or Europeans who were there to make money and then leave, and
who tended to treat the land as a disposable resource. Still another reason was the
importance of mining for the regional economy. In Malaysia and Indonesia alike,
the problems of erosion, river pollution, and deforestation were broadly regarded
as the acceptable costs of revenue generation for the state, of profits for investors,
and of jobs and income creation (at least until the opening of low-cost Brazilian
mines sent world tin prices tumbling in the mid-1980s).119 From this perspective,
the transformation of vast swathes of rainforest into anthropogenic badlands was
not just the product of short-sighted plunder, but was rather quite systematic and
deliberate. It was all part of the modern urge to make nature more legible and to
regularize the flow of resources and profits that it generated.
The story of the colonial tin industry thus displayed many attributes that were
common to resource frontiers in other times and places. In the beginning, the
availability of a lucrative windfall attracted successive groups of entrepreneurs who
serially depleted the most easily accessible resources. Before long, production could
only be sustained through greater investment and new technologies of extraction:
in Webb’s terminology the ‘secondary windfalls’ of the frontier.120 As the boom
continued—driven, as so often, by an alliance of private and government interests
keen to collect the resource rent of the territories they controlled—it radically
transformed the landscape. Eventually the despoliation of what had previously
been regarded as pristine wilderness prompted a significant conservationist
response, though it nearly always lagged far behind the pace of exploitation. In all
of these respects the story of Southeast Asian tin shows remarkable parallels to pro-
cesses of environmental change on other resource frontiers.
Yet as this chapter has shown, the particular constellation of social, political, and
technological factors that shaped the tin industry also gave it a distinctive dynamic.
Compared to the growth of Southeast Asia’s cash-crop industries—such as pepper,
gambier, and eventually rubber—the mining frontier was peculiarly mutable and
provisional. Long after the region’s mineral wealth had been explored and sur-
veyed, the frontier of production continued to advance in a series of steps as new
technologies opened up ever-deeper deposits, ever-lower grades of ore, and whole
new types of terrain to commercial exploitation. Of course, all resource frontiers
are moulded by the technologies that enable human extraction, but the deployment
of new techniques and new sources of energy loomed larger for the tin industry

119 See esp. Khoo and Razzaq-Lubis, Kinta Valley.

120 Webb, Great Frontier, 182–91.
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Subterranean Frontier 163

than for the leading agricultural commodities of the region, even those, such as
sugar and rubber, which were objects of extensive research.121
Such frontiers of technology were critical to the growth of mineral production
in many parts of the world, but they possessed a special symbolic importance in
colonial settings. Throughout much of the tropical world, technological innov-
ation was more than just a means of extracting resources from colonized territory
(though it certainly was this). It also served to reinforce the racial and cultural
hierarchies that furnished the very scaffolding of the colonial project. In territories
where large-scale European settlement was never on the agenda, the assertion of
superior knowledge and technical ability was the chief justification for the European
presence. And in an ideological context in which a people’s level of ‘civilization’
and ‘social evolution’ was largely defined by its mastery of the biophysical environ-
ment, there was every incentive to view the methods of ‘less advanced races’ as
wasteful and improvident, just as there was every reason to contrast them with the
supposed efficiency of privileged European technologies that were, at least by some
measures, even more profligate and indiscriminate in their collateral effects.
The expansion of the subterranean tin frontier thus highlights the fundamental
interaction of the cultural and the material, of ideas and economics, in processes of
environmental change. If the technical evolution of the colonial tin industry was
driven primarily by commercial expediency, the broader ecology of the tin frontier
was also shaped by an asserted cultural and racial superiority that powered and
legitimized the colonial enterprise.

121 For research on rubber, see Chapter 3. On sugar: Wim Van der Schoor, ‘Pure Science and
Colonial Agriculture: The Case of the Private Java Sugar Experimental Stations (1885–1940)’, in:
Chatelin and Bonneuil (eds), Nature, 13–20; Headrick, Tentacles, 237–48.