/ Publications

2025

Colonizing Space and Decolonizing Nature: Environmental Transformation, Plantation Economies, and the Colonial Legacy of Botany

In this article, I examine how botanical science helped transform Indonesia’s landscapes into spaces of colonial extraction and plantation production. Focusing on the Buitenzorg Botanic Gardens and its networks of experimental gardens, laboratories, and plantations, I trace how plants, scientific knowledge, and technologies enabled the expansion of commodities such as oil palm, rubber, coffee, and cinchona. I also ask whose knowledge and labor made this transformation possible, highlighting the often-erased contributions of Sundanese communities, plant experts, and workers. The article argues that decolonizing environmental history requires recovering these relationships while connecting colonial histories of science and extraction to Indonesia’s contemporary environmental challenges.

Adam, Luthfi. “Colonizing Space and Decolonizing Nature: Environmental Transformation, Plantation Economies, and the Colonial Legacy of Botany.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 181 (2025): 92–95.

2027

Cultivating Power: Botany and Empire in the Dutch East Indies, 1745–1942

Why did Buitenzorg, a small colonial town in Java, become one of the world's leading centres of tropical botany, and what does its rise reveal about the making of Dutch colonial rule?