A brief history of Indonesia : sultans, spices, and tsunamis : the incredible story of Southeast Asia's largest nation

251 Pages·2015·4.19 MB·English

by  Hannigan

A BRIEF HISTORY OF
INDONESIA
SULTANS, SPICES, AND TSUNAMIS:
THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA’S LARGEST NATION
TIM HANNIGAN
TUTTLE
Publishing
Tokyo | Rutland, Vermont | Singapore
The Tuttle Story: “Books to Span the East and West”
Many people are surprised to learn that the world’s leading publisher of books on Asia had humble
beginnings in the tiny American state of Vermont. The company’s founder, Charles E. Tuttle, belonged to a
New England family steeped in publishing.
Immediately after WWII, Tuttle served in Tokyo under General Douglas MacArthur and was tasked
with reviving the Japanese publishing industry. He later founded the Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company,
which thrives today as one of the world’s leading independent publishers.
Though a westerner, Tuttle was hugely instrumental in bringing a knowledge of Japan and Asia to a
world hungry for information about the East. By the time of his death in 1993, Tuttle had published over
6,000 books on Asian culture, history and art—a legacy honored by the Japanese emperor with the “Order
of the Sacred Treasure,” the highest tribute Japan can bestow upon a non-Japanese.
With a backlist of 1,500 titles, Tuttle Publishing is more active today than at any time in its past—
inspired by Charles Tuttle’s core mission to publish fine books to span the East and West and provide a
greater understanding of each.
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
www.tuttlepublishing.com
Copyright© 2015 by Tim Hannigan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hannigan, Tim, author.
A brief history of Indonesia : sultans, spices, and tsunamis : the incredible story of Southeast Asia’s largest
nation / by Tim Hannigan.
-- First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8048-4476-5 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-4629-1716-7 (ebook) 1. Indonesia--History. I. Title.
DS634.H35 2015
959.8--dc23
2015011166
ISBN 978-0-8048-4476-5
Distributed by:
North America, Latin America & Europe
Tuttle Publishing
364 Innovation Drive
North Clarendon, VT 05759 9436, USA
Tel: [phone]; Fax: [phone]
[email protected]
www.tuttlepublishing.com
Asia Pacific
Berkeley Books Pte Ltd
61 Tai Seng Avenue #02-12; Singapore 534167
Tel: [phone]; Fax: [phone]
[email protected]; www.periplus.com
Indonesia
PT Java Books Indonesia
Kawasan lndustri Pulogadung
Jl. Rawa Gelam IV No.9, Jakarta 13930
Tel: [phone]; Fax: [phone]
[email protected]
Japan
Tuttle Publishing
Yaekari Building, 3rd Floor,
5-4-12 Osaki, Shinagawa-ku;
Tokyo 141 0032, Japan
Tel: [phone]; Fax: [phone]
[email protected]; www.tuttle.co.jp
First edition
18 17 16 15 4 5 3 2 1 1505CM
Printed in China

TUTTLE PUBLISHING® is a registered trademark of Tuttle Publishing, a division of Periplus Editions
(HK) Ltd.
CONTENTS
Preface
Point of Departure:
The Archipelago
CHAPTER 1 From Hobbits to Hinduism:
Prehistory to Indianisation
CHAPTER 2 Empires of Imagination:
Hindu-Buddhist Java
CHAPTER 3 Saints and Winners:
The Arrival of Islam
CHAPTER 4 Spice Invaders:
The Europeans Arrive
CHAPTER 5 The Clash of Civilisations:
From Company to Empire
CHAPTER 6 Rust en Orde:
The Dutch East Indies
CHAPTER 7 Brave New World:
The Rise of Nationalism
CHAPTER 8 Freedom or Death:
War and Revolution
CHAPTER 9 Years of Living Dangerously:
The Sukarno Era
CHAPTER 10 A New Order:
Suharto, Crisis, Reform
EPILOGUE: Indonesia, Rising
Further Reading
Bibliography
Index

Preface
T he 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.