In the case of forestry, this means that disproportionate attention has been paid in the past to the importance of teak forests in Java to the exclusion of the forest products of the outer islands, such as rubbers, rattan, resins, gums, wax, skins and others. However, other than these statistics in forest products trade from the Outer Provinces, most of the remaining statistical tables tell us about forestry in Java only. Statistics alone, however, cannot tell the whole story. The average reader needs a good sense of both Indonesian economic history and world trade trends to make sense of some of the implications of the tables. Expanding the introduction and explanatory chapters would have greatly inflated the readership potential of this book.
Statistics also suffer from being the official count only.
There can be no doubt that significant trade in forest products occurred outside the view of the colonial statisticians. Many forest products have extremely high value to weight ratios, such as resins and bird s nests, which would encourage smuggling and undertaxation of these products. Furthermore, export and import statistics tell us nothing about local uses and in-country trade. To this end, the book can tell us little about how forests were actually being managed by local people in this period. In addition to the wealth of information on forest product trade, also of interest are the statistics on forest land cover in the archipelago.