The natural resources peculiar to New Guinea and nearby islands have provided attractive trade items for distant markets for thousands of years. This book describes the export histories of bird of paradise skins,1 spices, sandalwood, aromatic barks, damar (a gum used for lighting before mineral oil became available), pearls, trepang (edible sea slugs also called bêche-de-mer), and copra from prehistoric times until the 1920s. All of these products have gone through at least one, in some cases two trade cycles of boom and bust. The history of these cycles and the changing trading relationships they stimulated contribute to our understanding of the foundations of the present political economy of outer Southeast Asia.

During the various trade cycles, trading relationships provided opportunities for the exchange of new products and ideas. New Guineans, for instance, probably gave the world sugarcane. Some introductions to New Guinea were of only local consequence, whereas others such as the sweet potato led to major socioeconomic changes in the remote highlands of the interior. The varied nature of these interchanges played a role in giving each area its own history, and in part they explain the complex history behind the cultural diversity of New Guinea.

The first people to settle New Guinea some 50,000 years ago came from Southeast Asia. For much of their history these settlers and subsequent migrants remained part of outer Southeast Asia. By 4,000 years ago a chain of trading transactions, which allowed products to move from one community to the next, linked New Guinea and Asia. This was when early domesticated banana and sugarcane varieties from New Guinea were dispersed to Asia and beyond. Shortly before 2,000 years ago this trade was generating sufficient interest to support the activities of long-distance specialist traders from Asia.

Bird of paradise skins were the main product sought by the first specialist traders and as a result were the first product from New Guinea to go through a trade cycle of boom and bust. This cycle began 16just prior to 2,000 years ago and ended about 250 AD. It ended because spices and aromatic barks and woods displaced plumes as prime luxuries in Asia. After the boom, plumes continued to be traded as a subsidiary product of the spice trade.

By 300 AD the Spice Islands and Timor had overtaken New Guinea as the focus of Asian trade. As New Guinea became more isolated it was less influenced by the changes taking place in Southeast Asia. This explains why today we generally consider Southeast Asia and New Guinea to be different geographic areas with their own distinctive customs and ways of life.

By 1400 AD many aspects of Javanese culture, including sultanates, had been introduced to the Spice Islands. The world demand for cloves, nutmeg and mace was growing and began to attract increasing international interest, especially in Europe. The first cloves and nutmegs from the Spice Islands to reach Europe came via the Middle East. As their use increased, a desire arose amongst Europeans to obtain direct access to these products by finding their source. A Portuguese expedition was finally successful in locating where they were produced in 1512.

The power and wealth of the sultanates started to decline when the Dutch began to seek control over the Spice Islands. In their efforts to impose a monopoly on spice trading the Dutch disrupted established trading networks. The Dutch East India Company soon found the overheads of policing a spice monopoly and restricting production financially crippling. They tried to overcome this problem by diversifying their interests in other products and areas. For instance, they tried to participate in the massoy trade of southwestern New Guinea, but were unsuccessful. By 1650 the inability of the Dutch to maintain economic prosperity in the Moluccas had transformed the region into one characterised by raiding and retribution. Raiding continued until the Dutch began capturing the perpetrators by using steam-powered boats in the 1850s.

Having decided that New Guinea had little economic potential, the Dutch promoted the Sultan of Tidore as suzerain on their behalf. This relieved them of having to administer New Guinea and its offshore islands themselves, but still protected the eastern flanks of the Dutch East Indies from other mercantile powers. The Dutch choice of the Sultan of Tidore, rather than Ternate and Bacan was probably related to their perception that Tidore would make the best lackey.

The area put under the Sultan of Tidore’s control was extended as the Dutch perceived a growing interest by other powers in the Pacific. In 1704 the Dutch proclaimed that the Sultan of Tidore controlled the Western Papuan Islands off the western tip of New Guinea; by 1848 17the borders of his putative rule had been extended to the proximity of the current international border between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

Bird of paradise skins were unknown in Europe before the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century increasing numbers were reaching Europe. European milliners soon appreciated their beauty and began to use them and the feathers of other wild birds to decorate hats. Fashionable women in the Western world developed a passion for wearing such hats. By the turn of the century contemporary commentators were comparing the increased hunting of wild birds to a ‘gold-rush’ and it was feared at the time that many birds would become extinct. Never before had so many species and such large numbers of birds been slaughtered for plumage. By the time the European plume boom ended in the 1920s. the search for bird of paradise skins over the millennia had probably brought more New Guineans into contact with foreigners than any other product. As a result these plumes have adorned heads in Asia and the Middle East, including China, India, Nepal, Persia and Turkey, as well as Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

The European plume industry and conservationists were soon locked in debate with both sides claiming the high moral ground. As with the current biodiversity debate, conservationists were outraged over the likely extinction of species in the name of development, just as the prohibition of their activities was unacceptable to those whose livelihood was dependent on the plume trade.

Very different policies were adopted to deal with this problem by the colonial powers in New Guinea. Although London was one of the main world feather markets, Australia prohibited plume hunting in Papua in 1908. The Germans did their best to protect the birds, as well as reap the economic benefits of the plume boom since it funded economic development on mainland New Guinea. They introduced protective measures such as hunting permits, closed seasons and conservation areas. The plume trade also provided much needed revenue for Dutch New Guinea. In 1909 the Dutch introduced hunting licences and imposed a hunting season. They believed that the birds would survive as only fully plumed males were shot for the plume trade. This meant that males with immature plumage were able to breed and thus ensure the survival of the birds. The outcome of these policies subsequently influenced the conservation measures adopted for protecting birds of paradise in West Papua and Papua New Guinea.

The isolation New Guinea experienced after 300 AD explains how it became the last unknown and the ‘land of the unexpected.’ There was 18of course in western New Guinea some indirect contact with world trade systems through Bacan in the Moluccas, and later contact through Chinese, Seram Laut and Bugis traders. In what is now Papua New Guinea the resumption of contact with world trade systems was gradual. It can be seen to have begun with the proposed Seram Laut damar traders on the Trans Fly coast from 1645–1790; trepang fishing in the 1830s and later pearling in Torres Strait in the 1860s; copra in the New Guinea Islands in the 1870s and Ternate plume and shell traders on the north coast in the 1880s. Dutch, German and British colonial interests led to the division of New Guinea amongst these colonial powers in the 1880s. In 1884 colonial rule in German New Guinea (later the Mandated Territory of New Guinea) and British New Guinea began to lay the foundations for the modern independent state of Papua New Guinea.

It is only in recent times that New Guinea has begun once again to be orientated towards Asia. Dutch New Guinea, now West Papua, became part of Indonesia in 1969. Since independence new trade and social links have begun to reintegrate Papua New Guinea with Asia.

The organisation of this book

Both geographical and chronological considerations have influenced the chapter organisation of this book. Chapters 2 to 5 cover the history of spice and plume trading. Spices are presented first. The following three chapters (3–5) are concerned with plume acquisition by Asians, Europeans and New Guineans as well as the growth of the conservation movement.

Chapters 6 to 13 examine specific regions of New Guinea and nearby islands. They are organised geographically with an eastwards progression. The final chapter integrates the contents of all the chapters into a chronological framework. It starts with the foundation period of inter-island trade. This is followed by a series of trade cycles which are driven by changing world markets and their related trade contacts.

The first trade cycle is concerned with specialist Asian traders seeking plumes, the second with Asians and subsequently Europeans after spices, the third with Asians and Europeans supplying marine products to China, and the fourth with Europeans acquiring copra, plumes, pearls and minerals. These trade cycles are not discrete entities in time, but changes in emphasis with some products continuing and others discontinuing from one cycle to the next.

The contributions by Roy Wagner, from the University of Virginia in the United States, and Billai Laba, of the Department of Environment 19and Conservation in Port Moresby, present new information on the distribution, character and nature of likely Indonesian trade with the Trans Fly coast of Papua New Guinea. Their contributions supplement material presented in Chapter 9 and bring a new dimension to Torres Strait studies.