Agrogeology's Terrestrial Orders: The Geobiopolitics of Soil Mapping in the Dutch East Indies in the Early Twentieth Century

This article focusses on the rise of agrogeological soil science in the early 20th century, especially in a Dutch-imperial context, as generating a novel geobiopolitical epistemology for the governance of natural and social worlds. Specifically, this article seeks to understand the consequences of agrogeologists’ reconstitution of the nature, values, functions, and uses of soils—conceptualized as soils’ resourcefulness—as well as the fragility and liminality of soils. Highlighting agrogeology’s geobiopolitical dimensions, this article sheds light on the salience of soil science in international environmental governance, agricultural development, and geopolitical thought within and beyond the Dutch empire.

By redefining soils as natural bodies, differentiated in soil types distributed across geographies, agrogeologists connected soils to modern state authority using the epistemological and governing technology of the soil map. Moreover, this agrogeological redefinition of soils interacted with soil erosion concerns sweeping across the planet in the early 20th century, including in the Dutch East-Indies, by highlighting the temporal disjuncture between the geological timescales of soil formation and the rapidity of anthropogenic soil destruction. Thus, agrogeological science contributed to the formation of a planetary imaginary based on Malthusian fears over the Earth’s shrinking carrying capacity, framed in terms of modern societies’ war on nature. Finally, this article interrogates the geobiopolitics residing in the concrete use of agrogeological soil mapping for governmental practice and imagination. Discussing agrogeologist’s role in the transmigration of Javanese farmers within the Dutch empire between 1905–1942, this article illuminates soil science’s role in governing both colonial populations and geographies.