In 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizo was arrested for asking suspicious questions about a Dutch East India Company castle on Amboina, a remote set of islands in what is now eastern Indonesia.
The International People’s Tribunal addressed the many forms of violence during the period of the massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia. It was held in The Hague, The Netherlands, in November 2015, to c
In The Chinese Annals of Batavia Leonard Blussé and Nie Dening open up a veritable treasure trove of Chinese archival sources about the autonomous history of the Chinese community of Batavia.
The book examines the close relations that are established between land, exchange regimes, and political systems in the framework of a reflection on the challenges before present-day Timor-Leste. It p
7-year-old Innosanto spends an exciting night with his mom sleeping under the stars in the Jakarta Planetarium. Innosanto's father is a playwright and the boy memorizes lines during the actors' rehear
In Bali in the Early Nineteenth Century Helen Creese offers an account of the earliest Dutch-Balinese encounter together with an edition of the first ethnography of the island, Pierre Dubois’Legere id
The book analyzes various aspects of Javanese culture and society, including its history, customs, arts, architecture, polity, and society. This study strongly emphasizes the importance of local cultu
Large-scale disasters mobilize heritage professionals to a narrative of heritage-at-risk and a standardized set of processes to counter that risk. Trinidad Rico’s critical ethnography analyzes heritag
Maluku in eastern Indonesia is the home to Muslims, Protestants, and Catholics who had for the most part been living peaceably since the sixteenth century. In 1999, brutal conflicts broke out between
This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Indonesia contains a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 cross-referenced e
One of the most troubling but least studied features of mass political violence is why violence often recurs in the same place over long periods of time. Douglas Kammen explores this pattern in Three
Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis: The Incredible Story of the World's Largest ArchipelagoIndonesia is by far the largest nation in Southeast Asia and one of the largest countries in the world and is four
By the end of the 1960s the process of decolonization had practically run its course in Southeast Asia. One exception, however, was tiny Portuguese Timor, where notions of self-determination and indep
In this biography Nico J.G. Kaptein studies the life and times of Sayyid ?Uthman (1822-1914), the most prominent Muslim scholar of his time in the Netherlands East Indies.
Why are transitions from authoritarian rule often marked by spikes in communal violence? Through examining Indonesia's recent transition to democracy, this book develops a novel theoretical explanation for this phenomenon that also accounts for why some communities are vulnerable to violence during such transitions while others are able to maintain order. Yuhki Tajima argues that repressive intervention by security forces in Indonesia during the authoritarian period rendered some communities dependent on the state to maintain intercommunal security, whereas communities with a more tenuous exposure to the state developed their own informal institutions to maintain security. As the coercive grip of the authoritarian regime loosened, communities that were more accustomed to state intervention were more vulnerable to spikes in communal violence until they developed informal institutions that were better adapted for less state intervention. To test the theory, Tajima employs extensive field
