Timber Capitalism: The Journey of Industrial Logging Across Tropical Forests in the Post-World War II Era

This paper investigates the rise of the global tropical timber trade in the post-World War II era, by focusing on two key actors, Japan and Malaysia, and situating their juridical and material transformations within the broader global economic order. More specifically, the paper traces the rise of global trade in tropical timber to institutionalization of corporate capitalism in post-occupation Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, and state developmentalism in post-independence Malaysia in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the creation of the International Tropical Timber Organization in the 1970s and 1980s. It then turns to the defense of tropical logging by Malaysia in the buildup to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, and concludes with a discussion on the global expansion of Malaysian timber industry from the 1990s on. The paper argues that national and international law has been crucial to both commodification of tropical forests and managing its ecological anxieties through giving certain concessions to the nature without undermining the extent and logic of industrial logging. The second argument is that the development of international norms governing tropical forests in the 1990s, and following decades of North-South conflict over the legal status of such forests, was made possible by the assimilation of both the developing states’ aspirations for economic growt,h and the industrialized world’s environmental demands into neoliberal environmentalism as underpinned by managerialism, technological fix, and a retreat from the earlier narratives of ‘limits to growth’.