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

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.