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Preface

The first time I arrived in Indonesia I went straight to the bookshop. I was an earnest young backpacker with a passion for history; I had three months of island-hopping ahead of me, and I wanted something to read on the journey.

I had spent much of the previous year travelling in India, and I had gorged myself on books about that country. There had been travelogues and reporters’ memoirs that made light work of India’s past; there were pop history accounts of the Indian independence struggle that read like airport thrillers, and any number of bright and breezy books tackling everything from the Mauryans to Mahatma Gandhi in a manner that any traveller could understand. Now I wanted to find the same sort of stuff about Indonesia.

I had touched down in Bali, at the height of the rainy season. The bookshop was on the top floor of a department store in the heart of Kuta, a bustling beach town on the west coast. I made my way between the racks of batik shirts, past wood carvings and painted scenes of rice fields, and entered the bright, book-filled space. At first glance things seemed promising: there were shelves full of books about Indonesia. But once I had skimmed the guidebooks and the language primers I found something strange: here, in a shop targeting tourists in the middle of Bali’s brashest resort, many of the books on sale were academic tomes. There was certainly plenty of history, but most of it came weighted with heavy footnotes, and much of it tackled obscure topics. There were even serious works of sociology and anthropology on offer to the sunburnt shoppers. But when it came to pithy pop history page-turners and lightweight travelogues, there was a distinct deficit. The few non-scholarly books available were mostly either memoirs of life in Bali, or reprints of things penned well over a century ago. Indonesia, it seemed, was something of a desert when it came to history books for general readers.

In the end I headed off on the ferry to Lombok with a wad of academic histories in my backpack. It did me good, for by the time I returned not only had I learnt a great deal—I had also developed a tolerance for heavy texts. Later I went back to that same bookshop, and to others in other Indonesian cities, and to libraries in London and Singapore. Light, entertaining books on Indonesia’s past might have been in short supply, but there was a vast scholarly literature, and it was all fascinating stuff. Some of the best-known professional historians and anthropologists working on Indonesia also turned out to be brilliant writers, once you got past the academic conventions. But still, I would have preferred something a little easier to start with.

This book is not a work of professional scholarship or formal academic research. It is intended to be the kind of thing I was looking for in that Bali bookshop all those years ago: an entertaining first landfall in the archipelago of Indonesian history. It takes Indonesia’s past and makes a story of it.

Dates, battles and kings have long since gone out of fashion with professional historians. They look instead to contexts and impacts, and find a deeper understanding therein. But you need a framework of facts before you can ever hope to consider the contexts, and so this book does have dates and battles and kings aplenty, as well as traders, missionaries, soldiers and revolutionaries, a few volcanoes, the odd stormy sea-crossing, and the occasional tiger. It also finds space for the views of the foreign travellers who have passed through Indonesia over the centuries—from Chinese pilgrims and Moroccan adventurers to English explorers and American tourists. Their impressions are often colourful and sometimes funny, but they also provide telling snapshots of the place at a particular point in time.

Narrative histories of this sort—not least those about a place as big as Indonesia—always simplify a good deal, and leave out a great deal more. So the Further Reading and Bibliography sections at the end of the book not only list the most important sources I have used; they also give suggestions for further reading on events passed over too quickly or bypassed altogether, as well as recommendations for books I have found entertaining and enlightening. There are endless opportunities for island-hopping in Indonesia, from shore to shore and from book to book.

Before I started this journey through Indonesia’s past, I had to tackle the thorny questions of spelling and nomenclature. The first was dealt with fairly simply. Modern Indonesian—the language known as Bahasa Indonesia—uses a refreshingly consistent and logical system of spelling. Once you know that an Indonesian C equates to ‘ch’ in English, all words are pronounced more or less exactly as they are written. And so I have used modern Indonesian spellings throughout, rather than the older Dutch-style spellings that were used until 1972. The only exception to this rule comes with the names of a few people from the early twentieth century. Some famous Indonesians born before the spelling reforms have had their names modernised in popular usage. Sukarno, for example, need not be called ‘Soekarno’ in the twenty-first century. The names of some others, however, are still usually written the old-fashioned way. In these cases I have stuck with the most common usage, but have added the modernised spelling in brackets the first time the name appears.

The question of place names was a little trickier. In some cases a place has had a formal change of name. Until World War II Jakarta was called Batavia, and so until we reach World War II in this book, that is how it will be known. The island of Sulawesi was formerly known as Celebes, but the latter is probably just a Portuguese corruption of the former, so to avoid confusion it will be known as Sulawesi throughout.

One of Indonesia’s trio of land borders cuts through Borneo. Today this huge, forest-clad island is divided between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, and the provinces of the Indonesian section are known collectively as Kalimantan. But the division is a modern one, a legacy of European colonialism, so I will use Borneo throughout this book to refer to the whole island, and Kalimantan only once we reach the second half of the twentieth century and start discussing the specifically Indonesian provinces.

At the eastern end of Indonesia lies another enormous territory, New Guinea, the second largest island in the world. Today it is split down the middle between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The western portion has been variously known as Dutch New Guinea, Irian and Papua. Each of those names has political connotations of its own, so will I use them only in the appropriate historical contexts. When discussing the place in general I will use the term ‘West New Guinea’.

The biggest conundrum of all came with the name of the wider setting of this entire book—the galaxy of islands that now makes up the Republic of Indonesia. Many history books do speak of ‘Indonesia’ when discussing events in the distant past. But the word itself, a Greek contraction meaning ‘the Indian Islands’,was only invented in the mid-nineteenth century, and only came into common political usage in the early twentieth century.

The borders of modern Indonesia are simply those of the colonial territory that preceded it, the Dutch East Indies. But these islands existed long before either Europeans or Indonesian nationalists arrived on the scene, and there are many ancient connections that span the modern frontiers. The part of Borneo that now belongs to Malaysia and Brunei has had much in common with what is now called Kalimantan throughout its history, and for Dayak tribes of the interior the idea of a formal boundary cutting through the forest would have meant nothing. The Malaysian city of Melaka, meanwhile, was for many years the most important port in the region, a placed linked by trade and by blood to Java, Sulawesi and points east. The people of the Malay Peninsula have long spoken the same language—and have sometimes shared the same rulers—as their kinsmen across the water in Sumatra. To speak of an ‘Indonesia’ in the fourth, or eighth, or fifteenth centuries is not just anachronistic; it is to suggest that these other places and their people have no part to play in the story.

But if not ‘Indonesia’, then what?

In the nineteenth century the English explorer Alfred Russel Wallace called the region ‘The Malay Archipelago’, and the Scottish scholar John Crawfurd wrote of ‘The Indian Archipelago’. These terms certainly had their appeal, and both Crawfurd and Wallace placed no political limits on their definitions of the region. However, their terms both contain inadvertent references to modern nations outside of Indonesia, and a faint whiff of imperialism to boot. But as I was pondering all this, it struck me: the problematic parts of the terms of Wallace and Crawfurd were the adjectives, not the noun. And so there it was: the Archipelago.

Throughout this book I use the term ‘the Archipelago’. It encompasses all of what is now Indonesia, but it has no exact boundary until the nineteenth century, shading off north, east and west in a blur of mixed languages, cultures and ethnicities. In the early part of the story it can include northern Borneo, Melaka and the Malay Peninsula, when those places have a role to play. The terms ‘Dutch East Indies’ and ‘Indonesia’ appear only at the appropriate points, later in the narrative.

Look at a map of the world. Look at the great mass of islands that trails from the underbelly of mainland Southeast Asia. Squint, and you won’t be able to see the red lines marking the political boundaries. This is the Archipelago, and this is its story.