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This article proposes the concept of an extractive regime to understand Indonesia's developmental trajectory from 1966 to 1998. The concept contributes to world-systems, globalization, and commodity-based approaches to understanding peripheral development. An extractive regime is defined by its reliance on extraction of multiple natural resources in the formation of an economic and political order that is also supported by global and regional forces. After elaborating the concept of an extractive regime, the article illustrates it through examination of Indonesia's developmental trajectory from its formation in the post-World War II era to its firm establishment during Suharto's New Order. Although a comprehensive study would necessitate attention to the full panoply of commodities, the study illustrates some of the workings of the extractive regime in the timber and fisheries sectors, which share spatial extensivity and other characteristics. The article concludes by considering the future of the extractive regime in Indonesia amid democratization and continued class domination and by offering suggestions for further application, specification, and extension of the extractive regime concept.

In ad d ition to the W orld Bank and the IM F, the A ustralian econom ist H al H ill h as been[I]f human activity continues to intensify, the next major fire event will be much worse." 5In 1982-83 a series of well-known fires burned 3.2 million hectares of forest in East Kalimantan. These fires were more extensive and also more thoroughly researched than any previous fires in the region. German foresters and their Indonesian colleagues, especially, produced comprehensive studies of the event.6 Out of these and other studies came a new appreciation of the naturalness of fire in the tropics, particularly Kalimantan, and more importantly, of the growing impact of humans on the spatial extent and intensity of burning. They also point to the fact that the lessons that could have been gleaned from these previous fires were not learned; the reason for this failure, I would argue, is the political economy of resource extraction in Indonesia. The Naturalness of Fire and Anthropogenic FactorsForest ecologists have begun to recognize the natural importance of fire and the dangers of complete fire suppression. In the US, for example, fire is now understood as critical to healthy regeneration of certain ecosystems, such as prairies in the midwest. Total fire prevention, the sort of policy advocated in the old Smoky the Bear campaigns, carries with it the danger of ultimately producing more intense fires due to excessive build-up of flammable material; the disastrous fires that have visited Yellowstone National Park and southern California residential areas make this lesson clear. In the everwet (or perhumid) tropics, the situation is different since the rapid cycling of organic material means that little organic waste accumulates on the forest floor. Yet in the tropics, too, there is a "natural" fire regime, though it hardly resembles that of temperate zones.7In East Kalimantan, Goldammer and Seibert have found charcoal residue evidence of ancient wildfires that were Carbon-14 dated between circa 17,510 BP and 350 BP. These dates reveal that "wildfires occurred not only during the dry Pleistocene, but also after the present wet, rain forest climate stabilized, at about 10,000 to 7,000 BP."8 Goldammer and Seibert argue further that during the last glaciation the lowland Sunda shelf (off present-day Borneo's east coast) and today's remnant lowlands were drier and experienced "frequent droughts and fires," thereby preventing a few

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