Knowledge uprooted: Transimperial forestry and the hiring of foreign experts in the Dutch East Indies, 1920s–1930s

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the global networks underpinning colonial forestry in the Dutch East Indies in the interwar period. In the aftermath of the First World War, a renewed surge towards the internationalisation of the forest sciences served to open up imperial knowledge systems to a wider pool of outside expertise. This provided opportunities for smaller, thus far underresearched parties like the Nordic states, as explored here through a case study of a group of international foresters employed by the Dutch colonial administration in the 1930s. The article combines transimperial and global history approaches into a multisite analysis of both the scholarly exchanges that led to their initial hiring and their subsequent on-the-ground work in the colony. It is argued that an actor-oriented interrogation of the practical networks and internal frictions of colonial knowledge work reveals the hesitant emergence of a multilateral system that anticipated the post-1945 regime of international development.