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 neighbouring islands. Their tombs are popular places of pilgrimage, drawing devotees from all over Java and indeed, Muslim South-East Asia.

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, opened in August 10, 1867.

President Sukarno of Indonesia: Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference, April 18 1955; - This twentieth century has been a period of terrific dynamism. Perhaps the last fifty years have seen more developments and more material progress than the previous five hundred years. Man has learned to control many of the scourges which once threatened him. He has learned to consume distance. He has learned to project his voice and his picture across oceans and continents.

In much of the information currently available in the popular literature dealing with the Mentawai islands, that is information published in cyberspace as well as in travelogues, the prevailing perception is that the local people (and here they are usually referring to the inhabitants of Siberut) have been isolated through the ages and have only just been "discovered" by outsiders.

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 of decades of economic growth followed.

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 wake of the coup: the Operational Command for the Restoration of Security and Order (Kopkamtib) and the State Intelligence Coordination Agency (Bakin).

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 were responsible to a unicameral House of Representatives elected directly by the people.

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. This announcement was a tremendous vindication of the seemingly collaborative policies of Sukarno and Hatta.

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 petroleum, scrap iron, and other raw materials had to be imported from foreign sources.

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 resistance.