The History of Research on Traditional Land Tenure and Tree Ownership in Borneo

Abstract

"Research on land tenure in Borneo began with the Dutch in the early decades of this century. In the Netherlands and the Netherlands East Indies there developed a field of inquiry on adat law that included the study of village land rights and individual tenure.

"While this field of inquiry arose in response to the needs of the colonial administration, it nevertheless spawned a very active scholarly discipline dealing with adat law worldwide that has made major contributions to our understanding of jurisprudence. But the results of this school were largely unknown to the rest of the academic world until the publication in 1947 of the translation of Ter Haar's summary of the extensive inquiries of many scholars on adat law in Indonesia."