ABSTRACT
The Borneo story shows how powerful the animist world was a necessary and equal partner in extraction enterprises. Borneo is, in fact, so important to the story of southeast Asian trade that without it, Indianization would have taken on a significantly less dramatic profile. The scholarly literature on southeast Asian trade describes most of the things coming out of Borneo as "forest products." The river mouth, the upstream areas and the forests. Trade accounts compiled in 1829 tell us that the Borneo to Singapore trade had a value of a quarter-million Spanish dollars. Gold, dried bark, diamonds and the other goods that came out of Borneo were established parts of Indian spiritual needs and based on lore that seems to have almost been written by—or at least written to the benefit of long-distance, luxury product merchants. The ancient Borneo river cultures did not see themselves as living on an island in a vast sea.
