To fulfill the orders of his employer, the Ministry of the Colonies, Junghuhn notably included in his exceptional representation depictions of the coal repositories recently discovered along the southern coast, as well as detailed information about the island’s other valuable mineral deposits.²³ To fully dominate this island and its subsurface riches, however, it would first need to be more thoroughly addressed.

The ambition to control a territory for the purpose of extracting wealth from its human and nonhuman inhabitants has been realized according to several characteristic maneuvers, not least of which is the assignment of an address to those elements subject to control, particularly subjects necessary for processes of capital accumulation. Historian James C. Scott and theorist Benjamin H. Bratton have described the processes associated with coercive legibility and involuntary addressability, respectively, both of which help us understand more fully the role of island cartography within the insurrectionary landscape of the Dutch East Indies during the nineteenth century.

In his account of legibility and simplification as trajectories of governance, Scott describes the difference between a European medieval city or a Middle Eastern medina and a gridded city like Daniel Burnham’s Chicago or Georges-Eugène Hausmann’s Paris. While the former “enjoys at least a small measure of insularity from outside intrusion,” for the latter, “the knowledge of local citizens is not especially privileged vis-à-vis that of outsiders.”²⁴ For Scott, these settlement patterns suggest cognitive or epistemic islands. Describing medieval Bruges, he writes: “Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.”²⁵ As authorities attempted to render territories governable, they aimed to make them and their populations legible through mechanisms including, but not limited to, surnames, cadastral maps, and traffic management. The question of how to address a subject of power is consistently answered through this visual economy of politics. Or, as Scott makes even more explicit, “modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a ‘civilizingmission’.”²⁶

Bratton has recently updated this logic for the twenty-first century in his book The Stack.²⁷ For him, the long arc of legibility––from surnames to street addresses, postal codes to TCP/IP protocols––has helped produce an “accidental megastructure.” He contends that, instead of seeing all of these elements of planetary computation as “a hodgepodge of different species of computing, spinning out on their own at different scales and tempos, we should see them as forming a coherent and interdependent whole. These technologies align, layer by layer, into something like a vast, if also incomplete, pervasive if also irregular, software and hardware Stack.”²⁸ Comprised of six autonomous yet interdependent layers—Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User—the Stack centrifugally spins out consequences in every direction and dimension. For our purpose, it is Bratton’s thinking about addressability that helps frame the stakes of Junghuhn’s colonial cartographic heroism, suggesting its relevance for a contemporary reconsideration of the concept of the island as such. Like Scott’s discussion of legibility and simplification, Bratton’s layer of address within the Stack identifies various means by which data (and their socio-spatial consequences) are measured and classified as a means for their governance. Contrary to the popular belief in a free and fluid internet, legibility-cum-addressability is even more consequential as the morphology of sovereignty increasingly exhibits kaleidoscopic dematerializations, virtualizations, physical reassertions, and material instantiations, that is, as politics are simultaneously rendered through a transformative logic of software. But, as Bratton argues, this transition is not only a matter of interfaces or parameters; the power of addressability as a modality of governance reaches back at least to the cartographic trajectory that subtends the colonial-scientific will to knowledge.²⁹

However, in order to understand the project of mapping Java, it is necessary to first recall the unstable landscape of the nineteenth-century Dutch East Indies, a site of struggle already punctuated by centuries of revolt against European occupation. The Javanese Prince Diponegoro is portrayed—famously or infamously, depending on one’s affinities for rebellion—as the arrested figurehead of the guerilla revolts that terrified Dutch rulers on Java in the 1820s.³⁰ As the colonial government repeatedly failed to prevent plague and famine across the island, which had allegedly been placed under European rule in order to improve the stifling human conditions suffered by native inhabitants, anticolonial sentiment became pervasive.

As historian Gerhardt Aust observes, the strategic importance of reliable maps for the Dutch military was given particular urgency by the events of the Java War (1825–1830), when due to insufficient geographical and topographical knowledge, the colonial army suffered significant losses against Diponegoro’sguerillas.³¹ The rebellion was the largest organized uprising against the Dutch since they had first colonized the island in the early seventeenth century. Under the leadership of the guerilla-prince from Yogyakarta, thousands of rice farmers left their fields in Central Java to fight the Dutch. Local guerilla fighters had the upper hand for the first two years of the confrontation, but the uprising was eventually suppressed by tricking Diponegoro into a treacherous cease-fire, at which point Dutch authorities shamelessly arrested him. An estimated 200,000 combatants were dead by the end of the conflict, including more than eight thousand Dutch soldiers and tens of thousands of Javanese civilians. If the colony was to be maintained as a site of Dutch prosperity, a new approach to its governance would be necessary.

Created in the aftermath of the Java War, Junghuhn’s map dramatically diminished the island’s insularity. Scott asserts that, “Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) had provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites.”elites.”³² In this context, Junghuhn’s island map provided both evidence of the colonized territory and an instrument for its further domination. It follows that, at the very moment Java becomes cartographically addressable, it loses its naturally insular existence within an ever-increasing imperial force field. Sternagel describes how, with the end of the Java War, Dutch rule was re-stabilized and the island population was coerced into a system of highly taxed agricultural labor, which lasted the ensuing 100 years, until the beginning of the twentieth-century Independencemovement.³³ Junghuhn anxiously awaited news about how his masterpiece was received by those who commissioned it; he, like so many other Europeans scientists, aimed to please the masters who ruled at a distance with the delivery of impressive scientific findings. No less unexceptionally, Junghuhn also appears to have wandered from his original mission, to the point of escaping the truth of its purpose altogether. The commission of the Javakaart allowed Junghuhn to retreat from the confines of colonial service; instead, he was free to traverse Java’s majestic mountain peaks. Yet, he could not have failed to recognize the value of the map for the future military occupation of the island, even if it seems that he struggled to admit the gravity of his own role in environmental and cultural destruction caused by the colonial project. In some instances, he preferred to indict “the ‘indifference of the Javanese’ along with the increase in local population and the rising demand for rice fields and firewood”³⁴ as the main cause of deforestation. On rarer occasions, however, one does find in his writing explicit criticism of colonialist expansion:

Through increasing population, and cultivation of the soil the beauty of nature is destroyed. The magnificent flowering bushes, the grasslands alternating with forests and home to so many living creatures, so attractive, so entertaining to see—they are being crowded out by the land use systems predominant in central Europe, by ugly monotonous fields, which one cannot look at without wishing to get away as quickly as possible. This is the end of the song for which Nature sacrificed herself.³⁵
Still, as he surveyed the island, the pleasure of such a pursuit—the pure act of mapping—seems to have largely obscured the commitment to universal human freedom that occasionally appears in his writings, including several essays in which he explicitly decries the colonial occupation of the island and the violence of the Dutch authorities. While such ethical sentiments indicate a potential, underlying ambiguity, even an uncertainty on his part, they did not prevent Junghuhn from completing his task. Indeed, the map was of such exceptional quality that, following its arrival in Europe, he received a letter of praise from none other than Alexander von Humboldt. In a letter dated 20 April 1857, the renowned naturalist remarked emphatically, “How can I thank you enthusiastically enough for your beautiful, truly geological, richly designed map. Following a military dinner, the King, Prince Friedrich of the Netherlands, the Minister of War, as well as several other generals all long admired it as very excellentwork.”³⁶ For decades to come, Junghuhn’s cartographic synthesis of Java would serve as a tool of colonial domination, guiding explicit military campaigns as well as resource extraction and plantation management. In his wide-ranging study of “immersive” colonial psychologies, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk summarizes the ethical paradox succinctly: “Whoever draws the map behaves as if he were culturally, historically, legally and politically in theright.”³⁷ Although Junghuhn simply could not have doubted the role his map would play in the project of colonial conquest and its attendant deforestation, his reverse hallucinations among the high peaks of Java allowed him to deny (at least, to himself) the inevitable outcome of his scientific study; of course, the map of the island is not an island.

The Climate of Deforestation

The advantage of thinking through plantations is that the patchy Anthropocene is immediately apparent.

— Anna Tsing, “Earth Stalked by Man” (2016)


In addition to subsequent cartographic surveys and a variety of measurements recorded at the request of other German scientists, Junghuhn’s research unfolded according to several additional governmental mandates he had received from the Dutch, both of which concerned trees. In 1856, he was asked to oversee the development of cinchona plantations, a South American tree species, which Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland had first described for Western medicinal science in the course of their expedition fifty years earlier (1799–1804). The healing value of cinchona bark as a fever treatment had been known to Amerindian peoples for centuries, but the cultivation of chinchona trees had since become a key aspect of colonial occupations in the Eastern hemisphere because the bark’s extractable substance quinine provided a much-needed treatment for malaria.malaria.³⁸ The second official assignment involved an investigation of the “degree, state, and extent” of deforestation on Java by comparing the state of the island to previously conducted surveys. This latter task is noteworthy as it led Junghuhn to study and then speculate on the relationship between deforestation, rainfall, and the water depth of creeks and rivers, ultimately leading to his hypothesis that climate change would be an inevitable consequence of deforestation.

Some of his more prescient observations are relayed in another letter to von Humboldt, dated 8 December 1856, in which Junghuhn describes woodlands that “have been notably cleared, even here in the well-wooded western highlands of the island.” The formerly overflowing riverbeds were now “found to be almost dry, leading to the non-irrigation of a large part of the Sawahs.”³⁹ Junghuhn then explains his understanding of the relationship between forests, fluvial water levels, and the intensity of the winds, particularly the “West Monsoon” from the Indian Ocean and what he calls the “good and dry Monsoon” coming from Australia. Much in resonance the systemic correlations between deforestation and human-induced climate change Humboldt himself deduced from his observations in South America, Junghuhn’s hypothesis is that deforestation will not only cause additional droughts, but greater differences among the various types of wind, thereby transforming the regional climate. Anticipating the emergence of extreme weather conditions produced through deforestation, Junghuhn then speculates:

I believe that it won’t be easy to prove a decrease of rainfall during the West Monsoon […] as being caused by the deforestation of certain areas; as well as proving that the droughts during the so-called good and dry Monsoon […] will become intensified as a consequence of the deforestation of some areas, which will first lead to stronger contrasts between the monsoon weather conditions as well as produce extremes; one example being the good monsoon of 1855 where, in Batavia and many other areas on Java, not one raindrop fell for seven months.⁴⁰
While Junghuhn goes on to note that this claim requires a more “fully and carefully” conducted investigation of the entire island of Java, in his conclusion he nevertheless argues that new trees must be methodically planted to avoid this regional climate change; to insist on his point, he also provides a list of eligible species.⁴¹ Junghuhn’s early admonishments regarding colonial land-use transformation can still be heard—if only as an echo that continues to be ignored—in contemporary reports about drought-stricken rice fields, drinking water shortages, landslides, and severe flooding occurring as a result of deforestation and attendant terrestrial transformations, especially the expansive new oil palm plantations in Borneo, Sumatra, and West Papua.⁴² Without forests, the heavy rainfalls of the monsoon season can no longer be absorbed into the ground; this excess water regularly inundates villages and cities, while also expediting the loss of topsoil as it is washed away into the sea.

Given his role in the cartographic subjugation of Java, it might strike the contemporary reader as especially contradictory when Junghuhn articulates deep frustrations over colonial projects that necessitate further deforestation. Importantly, his conception of the forest, and of nature itself, remains grounded in a Romantic vision that is at once sublime and spiritual: “The first impression mandated silence, similar to the kind one inevitably loses oneself in upon suddenly entering, from a brightly sun-lit street, into the sanctuary of a highly vaulted, gothic church.”⁴³ At times, Junghuhn’s reveries come remarkably close to those of his fellow German, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose obsession with mountain peaks as an image for free thought would culminate, forty years later, with Zarathustra dancing in the clear air of these heights, far from the masses who could not undergo his call for a “transvaluation of values.”⁴⁴ Similarly, Junghuhn writes:

How satisfied, how light in spirit can one rest in these heights, while the wind sighs softly through the Casuarina pines and the stars twinkle through the light green vault of the shelter. No heavy roof of tiles hides from us the friendly view of the heavens, no heavy ceiling presses down on us from above, no gloomy walls confine us, one breathes freely and lightly above the heavy atmosphere of the lowlands, where—in dark caves they call houses—live people suspicious, small-minded, and confined.⁴⁵

In fact, Junghuhn’s tropical “paradise” exists exclusively among the high altitudes of Java, far away from the “suspicious, small-minded, and confined” aspects of colonial society that his cartography helped to develop. It is evident that the geographical distance separating the free, high mountains from the colonial enterprise on the plains below was, at the same time, a psychological schism that allowed Junghuhn to parse his conflicting, schizoscopicview of colonization.

The fragility of this geo-psychological division is exemplified by an episode that took place in 1839. In the spring of that year, Junghuhn explored the area around the Gunung Gedeh; at the peak, he discovered what he describes as a peaceful and fertile meadow with a freshwater creek, mushrooms, small flowers, and numerous traces of the wild rhinoceros of West Java. He was also delighted to encounter a primula which he had discovered a few weeks earlier—later named Primula imperialis Jungh.—when he climbed Mount Pangrango, a 3,000-meter-tall extinct volcano also located along the Sunda Arc. Reflecting on these experiences, Junghuhn compares the picturesque summit to a “castle built into the clouds.”⁴⁶ Towards the end of the year, he again ascended Gedeh to the summit, but the area had changed drastically. No longer a secluded haven, the area was now, so he notes, overrun by undernourished Javanese workers building colonial infrastructure. Shocked by this encounter, he begins to realize that it was his own report about the fertile land that led to its destruction. Full of nostalgia for the lost paradise (if not guilt), he remarks: “Wistfully I left this beautiful summit; wistful for seeing how many of its solitary blossoms had already been crushed, and how many a small, beautiful tree had to fall to the axe, since the short time that I had first made this place known in Buitenzorg.—A significant expanse of its lovely forest […] had already been hopelessly mowed down.”⁴⁷ While deforestation in Indonesia’s rain and peat forests continues unabated to this day, we are compelled to reflect on these statements from an earlier colonial period because they reveal a more general pattern that characterizes the will to knowledge.