Research/Dissertation
By the early twentieth century, private enterprises and
state authorities had transformed East Sumatra, a coastal district in the
Netherlands Indies, into a primary site for testing and producing global cash
crops, such as tobacco, rubber, and oil palm. “Building Commodities:
Environments of Colonial Plantations in the East Coast of Sumatra,
1869-1942” traces the conversion of native land into plantation fields and
the creation of an extensive network of buildings sustaining commodity
production in this region. Central to this intermingling of world commerce and
colonial pursuit was how architecture mediated extractive practices by
reconfiguring soils, plants, peoples, and microbes across space and time.
Examining processing facilities built by Dutch and American manufacturers,
labor recruitment offices in Java and Hong Kong, and botanical research
stations in the region’s center, this research argues that the plantation system,
the main source of capital in the colony, constituted spaces in which
environmental techniques and imaginaries altered the living milieu in most
profound ways.