Plumes of Paradise: Trade Cycles in Outer Southeast Asia and Their Impact on New Guinea and Nearby Islands until 1920

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Overview

This wide-ranging study adds an important and exciting new dimension to the story of the outside world's long involvement with the terrestrial and marine products of outer Southeast Asia - spices, aromatic woods and barks, resins, plumes, sea slugs, shells and pearls - and of the economic, political, social and cultural consequences for the region's inhabitants. The new dimension is New Guinea, which contributed modestly to the region's resources overall but dominated in respect of birds of paradise. The plumes provide the connecting thread as the complex economic and political processes of the past 400 years are described which brought outsiders more widely and intensively into the orbit of the people inhabiting the
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Overview

This wide-ranging study adds an important and exciting new dimension to the story of the outside world's long involvement with the terrestrial and marine products of outer Southeast Asia - spices, aromatic woods and barks, resins, plumes, sea slugs, shells and pearls - and of the economic, political, social and cultural consequences for the region's inhabitants. The new dimension is New Guinea, which contributed modestly to the region's resources overall but dominated in respect of birds of paradise. The plumes provide the connecting thread as the complex economic and political processes of the past 400 years are described which brought outsiders more widely and intensively into the orbit of the people inhabiting the island's coasts and hinterlands, until the high point of the plume boom of the early part of this century. The text teems with the variety of people involved - New Guineans, Indonesians, Chinese, Europeans, hunters, traders, natural historians and their collectors, officials, missionaries, planters, miners, adventurers of every kind. In the wings were the conservationists, whose efforts brought the slaughter of the plume boom to an end and ushered in an era of comparative isolation for the island that lasted until World War II.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9789980851031
  • Publisher: Papua New Guinea National Museum
  • Publication date: 1/6/1998
  • Pages: 352

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 15
2 The rise and decline of the Spice Islands 21
3 The plume trade: the demands of Asian traders and the first birds of paradise to reach Europe 49
4 The plume trade: the demands of natural historians 73
5 The plume trade: the demands of fashion-conscious European women and the growth of the conservation movement 83
6 Sultans, suzerains and the colonial division of New Guinea 109
7 Collecting and trading in the Raja Empat Islands, the Bird's Head and Cendrawasih Bay 121
8 The massoy, trepang and plume trade of Onin, Kowiai and Mimika (Southwest New Guinea) 133
9 Trade with the Aru Islands and Trans Fly coast of New Guinea 153
10 Copra, birds and profits in the Merauke region 175
11 Bronzes and plume hunting in the Jayapura (Hollandia) region 205
12 Plumes fund economic development in Kaiser Wilhelmsland 219
13 Conservationists protect Papua's birds 263
14 Trade cycles in outer Southeast Asia and their impact on New Guinea until 1920 269
Mysteries of Origin: Early traders and heroes in the Trans Fly 285
Oral traditions about early trade by Indonesians in southwest Papua New Guinea 299
Bibliography 308
Index 334

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