History of Bintan
Due to it’s strategic location and size Bintan has a rich history. Riau has for centuries been the home of Malay and the Orang Laut people (sea nomads). Later migrants came from south China and Indochina, today people from a large region of Asia has settled here. Bintan was located aside the China-India maritime trading [...]
Walisongo, Java’s muslim saints
In the story of Islam’s spread in Indonesia, the Walisongo hold a special place. Said to have been a group of nine missionaries that lived during the 15th and 16th centuries AD, the Walisongo used combined pious acts, supernatural displays of power, political manoeuvring and outright military conquest, to extend Islam’s reach across Java and [...]
History of railways in Indonesia
In June 17, 1864, Governor-General Mr. L. A. J. W. Baron Sloet van Beele broke ground for the first railway line in Java, which was then part of Netherlands East Indies. The line belonged to the Nederlandsch-Indische Spoorweg Maatschappij (Netherlands East Indies Railway Company), and the first line in operation was between Semarang and Tanggung, [...]
History of Indonesia #11: Reformasi, 1998 till Today
A growing concern regarding nepotism and corruption, centered around the Suharto government, grew during the 1990′s until finally his fate was sealed by the economic collapse in 1997. The devaluation of the baht in Thailand triggered a region-wide economic crisis which dragged Indonesia down with it. The surfacing of social inequalities that was one result [...]
History of Indonesia #10: The New Order under Suharto
The transition from Sukarno’s Guided Democracy to Suharto’s New Order reflected a realignment of the country’s political forces. The left had been bloodied and driven from the political stage, and Suharto was determined to ensure that the PKI would never reemerge as a challenge to his authority. Powerful new intelligence bodies were established in the [...]
History of Indonesia #9: Independence: The First Phases, 1950-65
Although Indonesia was finally independent and (with the exceptions of Dutch-ruled West New Guinea and Portuguese-ruled East Timor) formally unified, the society remained deeply divided by ethnic, regional, class, and religious differences. Its unitary political system, as defined by a provisional constitution adopted by the legislature on August 14, 1950, was a parliamentary democracy: governments [...]
History of Indonesia #8: The National Revolution, 1945-50
Unlike Burma and the Philippines, Indonesia was not granted formal independence by the Japanese in 1943. No Indonesian representative was sent to the Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo in November 1943. But as the war became more desperate, Japan announced in September 1944 that not only Java but the entire archipelago would become independent. [...]
History of Indonesia #7:The Japanese Occupation
The Japanese occupied the archipelago in order, like their Portuguese and Dutch predecessors, to secure its rich natural resources. Japan’s invasion of North China, which had begun in July 1937, by the end of the decade had become bogged down in the face of stubborn Chinese resistance. To feed Japan’s war machine, large amounts of [...]
History of Indonesia #6:National consciousness
National consciousness emerged gradually in the archipelago during the first decades of the twentieth century, developed rapidly during the contentious 1930s, and flourished, both ideologically and institutionally, during the tumultuous Japanese occupation in the early 1940s, which shattered Dutch colonial authority. As in other parts of colonial Southeast Asia, nationalism was preceded by traditional-style rural [...]
History of Indonesia #5:The Netherlands Indies Empire
Nineteenth-century Indonesia experienced not only the replacement of company rule by Dutch government rule but also the complete transformation of Java into a colonial society and the successful extension of colonial rule to Sumatra and the eastern archipelago. The modern state of Indonesia is in a real sense a nineteenth-century creation. It was during this [...]
History of Indonesia #4:European Intrusions
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to come in significant numbers to the archipelago. The golden age of Portuguese exploration and conquest in Asia began with Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India in 1497-99 and continued through the first half of the sixteenth century. Faith and profit, nicely harmonized, motivated these early European explorers. The [...]
History of Indonesia #3:The coming of Islam
The Indian Ocean continued to serve as both a commercial and a cultural link between Indonesia and the countries to the west. Thus Islam, which was established on the Arabian Peninsula by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D., followed the Hindu and Buddhist religions into the archipelago. By the late twentieth century, approximately [...]
History of Indonesia #2:Early history
Beginning in the 1890s, paleontologists discovered fossil remains of creatures on the island of Java that, while probably not the direct ancestors of modern humans, were closely related to them. These Javan hominids, known by scientists as Homo erectus, lived 500,000 years ago and some possibly as long as 1.7 million years ago. Their remains [...]
History of Indonesia #1:The historical setting
Before European intrusions into the islands by Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch seeking to monopolize the lucrative trade in spices and other marketable products, the more than 13,000 islands constituting the Republic of Indonesia were home to a diverse array of cultures and civilizations that had been influenced by HinduBuddhist ideas from India and by Islam, [...]
