Throughout the ages, the activities of humankind have weighed considerably upon the environment. In turn, changes in that environment have favoured the rise of certain social groups and limited the actions of others. Nevertheless, environmental history has remained a “blind spot” for many social and economic historians. This is to be regretted, as changes in ecosystems have always had quite different consequences for different social groups. Indeed, the various and unequal effects of environmental change often explain the strengths and weaknesses of certain social groups, irrespective of their being defined along lines of class, gender, or ethnicity.

This Special Issue of the International Review of Social History aims to bring together the expertise of social and environmental historians. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, expanding holes in the ozone layer, global warming, and the accelerated pace of the destruction of the tropical forests have resulted in a worldwide recognition of two closely related processes: globalization and environmental change. The contributions to this volume provide striking case studies of such connections in earlier periods, revealing a fruitful interconnection between social and environmental history. This introduction provides a historiographical context for the essays that follow, focusing on the relevant notions connected with globalization and environmental change, and stressing the existing interactions between environmental and social history. We are particularly interested in the consequences of processes induced by globalization, how transnational forces and agents changed the socio-ecological space, and how that affected relationships between different classes in history.

This book has its origins in a KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) research project entitled “Credit, Risk, and the Economy of Debt: Indonesian Trajectories” (CREDIT), in which we have been the principal participants, and in a discussion panel on “Credit and Debt in Southeast Asia, Past and Present”, which we organized at the Fourth Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Studies (EUROSEAS) in Paris in September 2004. Besides six pieces which — in most cases after much revision — became chapters included here, the Paris panel also included papers by Andi Faisal Bakti, Greg Bankoff, Pramuan Bunkanwanicha, Caleb Kwong, Martin Ramstedt, and Willem Wolters. We remain grateful to these scholars for their input and insights, some of which are indirectly reflected in the present volume. Our thanks go also to Anne Booth, Thomas Lindblad, and other members of the panel audience for their critical and constructive comments. Two of our eight chapters, those by Jan Wisseman Christie and Heather Sutherland, did not originate in Paris, but were written after the conference at our request. We are particularly grateful to these contributors, without whom the range of topics and periods covered would have been much less adequate. In addition we would like to thank Rosemary Robson, for improving the English in some of the pieces; the staff of the KITLV, for their always cheerful assistance when we were in search of publications and illustrations; and Triena Ong of ISEAS Publishing, for her help, and forbearance, during the reviewing and editing process.

It must have been fairly easy to get into debt in early modern Southeast Asia. At least, this is suggested by the fact that slavery, in the broadest sense of the term, was such a widespread phenomenon. While not all forms of slavery were related to indebtedness (war captives being the main exception), generally speaking it could be argued that debt was the main road to slavery.

It is convenient (and conventional) to distinguish between three types of bonded people: fully fledged slaves, whose status is hereditary and who can be bought and sold; serfs, who are tied to the soil and have certain (servile) obligations to a patron other than the ruler, but who cannot be bought or sold; and people in debt bondage (also called debt peonage), who likewise cannot be bought or sold. In principle, debt bondsmen and women can redeem themselves, subject to certain limitations. Alas, it is not always easy to establish what type of bondage is meant in specific cases in the historical record — or even in legal texts.

People could become (debt) slaves in any of the following ways. A debtor could become the debt bondsman of a creditor in order to work off the debt; sell himself — or herself, or relatives, into slavery (usually when faced with the threat of imminent starvation); be pawned to a creditor by someone else and not be redeemed; or be unable to pay a fine or compensation money. In all these cases indebtedness — or, more generally, poverty — was the root of slavery. Debt or poverty was sometimes also involved when a person became a glebe slave (in the Southeast Asian context, a temple or pagoda slave), dedicating him- or herself to a religious institution. However, other (religious) motives might also be involved in such a case. The golden age of glebe slavery seems to have been over by the fifteenth century. Finally, people became slaves or serfs if taken captive by a conquering army or by raiders (often pirates), or if they were born in slavery.

THEME OR VARIATIONS

Southeast Asia's great depression — the pre-war depression — was a complex phenomenon. Even to answer the apparently simple question, ‘When did it start?’, would require an extended and highly nuanced analysis. This complexity arises from three main considerations. First, the very causes of the depression in Southeast Asia were highly complex. Second, economic structures and circumstances in the different parts of the region, despite important commonalities, were greatly varied. And finally, the impact of the depression (indeed any sharp contraction on the scale experienced by Southeast Asia in the early 1930s) was different for each socio-economic group — rural-dwellers as against townsfolk, landowners as against landless, creditors as against debtors. To rework a well-worn phrase, all generalizations about the causes, course, and impact of the 1930s depression in Southeast Asia are wrong — except the present one. The immediately following paragraphs will expand on the three considerations above.

The principal cause of the depression in Southeast Asia, most scholars would argue, lay outside the region — in the sharp contraction in economic activity in the industrial countries of North America and western Europe which began towards the end of the 1920s. Perhaps the most important mechanism by which the depression was transmitted from the advanced industrial economies to Southeast Asia was through a sharp contraction in demand for many of the region's major primary commodity exports. A notable example was the heavy fall in demand for the rubber produced on plantations and smallholdings in the Malay States, Sumatra, and Cochin- China, as automobile production contracted, notably in the United States at the close of the 1920s. But there were other mechanisms of transmission, perhaps most importantly the worldwide tightening of credit that arose, first from the sharp contraction of American foreign lending from mid- 1928 as funds were drawn into the fierce speculative boom on the New York stock exchange and then as the American authorities raised rates in an attempt to dampen the boom, and subsequently from the widespread collapse of banks across the United States and western Europe as the depression took hold.