The history of Indonesia: a colonial map that became a nation

How port and rice kingdoms held the islands

People reached the archipelago long before it was an archipelago. Britannica dates the Homo erectus remains known as Java Man to roughly 1.7 million years ago, when land bridges still joined much of the western islands to the mainland; a 2007 analysis of cut marks on bovid bones from Sangiran put tool use there at 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago. About 6,000 years ago a rise in sea level drowned those bridges and left the islands. Cave paintings at Leang Karampuang on Sulawesi were dated in research published in Nature on 3 July 2024 to about 51,200 years ago. Austronesian speakers, the ancestors of most of today's population, are thought to have come from Taiwan around 2000 BCE.

How Srivijaya grew rich on the China trade

The first state that can be followed in the records grew out of the sea trade with China. The Chinese pilgrim I-ching stopped at Srivijaya, on the Musi River at Palembang in southern Sumatra, in 671 and recommended it to other pilgrims for its more than a thousand monks. Before he left the region in 695, Srivijaya controlled the Strait of Malacca. Its rulers drew their wealth from being the safe port that foreign ships needed on the way to China, and Britannica calls early Malay history "to an important extent, the history of a Sino-Malay alliance". When Chinese private ships began sailing straight to the producing islands from the 10th century, the single port lost its point, and by the end of the 11th century Srivijaya had ceased to be the leading estuary kingdom of Sumatra.

What Java's rice kingdoms built

Inland Java took a different course: rice, not shipping. On the Kedu Plain the Shailendra dynasty built Borobudur between the late 8th century and the middle of the 9th, a terraced Buddhist monument holding about 56,600 cubic metres of stone and 2,500 square metres of carved relief. Less than 80 kilometres away stands the Shaivite temple complex at Prambanan, whose founding inscription is dated 856.

Majapahit in eastern Java came out of a failed Mongol invasion. Kublai Khan sent a punitive expedition in 1292; the Javanese prince later known as Kertarajasa used the invaders against a rival and then forced them out, and moved his capital to Majapahit. The court poem Nagarakertagama, written by Prapancha in the reign of Hayam Wuruk (1350 to 1389), lists more than 80 places in the archipelago as vassal territories, 25 of them in Sumatra. Britannica reads the list with caution: the poem resembles "an act of worship rather than a chronicle", and its map is what the poet "perceived to be the limits of relevant space".

Why Islam arrived through the ports

Islam came with the same ships. A Muslim tombstone in eastern Java bears a date corresponding to 1082, but substantial evidence begins only with a royal tomb at Samudra-Pasai in northern Sumatra dated 1297 and inscribed entirely in Arabic. By the 15th century Muslim princes ruled harbour kingdoms along the north coast of Java (Demak, Japara, Gresik and Cirebon among them) and as far east as Ternate and Tidore in the Moluccas. Britannica treats the first conversions as largely commercial: the rulers of Malacca accepted Islam to draw Muslim and Javanese traders to their port, and the Javanese harbour kingdoms existed to serve trade with the Muslim world. Wikipedia's history of the country dates Islam's dominance in Java and Sumatra to the end of the 16th century.

Aceh, which replaced Samudra-Pasai as the leading port of northern Sumatra in the 16th century, became a self-consciously Muslim state and sought an alliance with the Ottoman Empire against the Portuguese, who had taken Malacca in 1511. The Portuguese came looking for the cloves, nutmeg and mace of Maluku, set up forts and missions on Ternate, Ambon and Solor, and were pushed back by the Ternateans and the Dutch until only Solor, Flores and Timor remained to them. Their lasting traces are the first Christian communities of the east, a stock of Indonesian words and the keroncong guitar ballad.

What the Dutch East India Company built

The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, was chartered in 1602 with a monopoly on Dutch trade in the region before it held any territory. In 1619 it took the Javanese port of Jayakarta and founded Batavia on the site, the city that became Jakarta. It captured Malacca from the Portuguese in 1641 and Makassar in 1667.

The company did not set out to govern, and it governed anyway. To enforce the monopoly it restricted clove growing to Ambon and nutmeg and mace to the Banda Islands, and in the 18th century it imposed forced deliveries, crops that cultivators had to grow and sell to it at a fixed price. The British scholar J.S. Furnivall called them "tribute disguised as trade". On Java the VOC arbitrated succession wars in the kingdom of Mataram and took land as its fee, starting with the Preanger districts after 1674, until by 1755 Mataram was reduced to two principalities, Yogyakarta and Surakarta, which survived to the end of Dutch rule.

Smuggling, the cost of administration and the corruption of its own servants ruined the company. The government of the Batavian Republic wound up its affairs in 1799, and from 1800 its possessions were a state colony, the Dutch East Indies. Java passed through French and then British hands during the Napoleonic Wars: Herman Willem Daendels built a post road about a thousand kilometres long across northern Java at the cost of thousands of forced labourers' lives, and from 1811 Thomas Stamford Raffles governed the island for Britain, catalogued its monuments, Borobudur among them, and published The History of Java in 1817. Java went back to the Dutch in 1816.

How the Dutch turned trade into territory

What the Cultivation System took from Java

The Dutch returned to a colony that cost more than it earned, and to two wars. Prince Diponegoro led the Java War of 1825 to 1830 until he was seized during truce talks and exiled to Sulawesi; in western Sumatra the Padri War ran from the early 1820s to 1837.

In 1830 Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch introduced the Cultivation System (cultuurstelsel). Each village was to set aside a fifth of its cultivable land for export crops, delivered to the government in place of land rent. Exports rose from 13 million guilders in 1830 to 74 million a decade later, and from 1840 to 1880 the sale of the crops brought the Dutch treasury an average of 18 million guilders a year, about a third of the Dutch budget. Java's population grew from 6 million to 9.5 million while the system was in full operation. Britannica also records what it cost the cultivators: the regents who delivered the crops added burdens of their own, which the former colonial official Eduard Douwes Dekker attacked in the novel Max Havelaar in 1860, under the pen name Multatuli.

An agrarian law of 1870 opened the colony to private estates on long leases. Over the next 60 years exports rose tenfold, from 107 million guilders to 1.16 billion, and rubber, copra, tin and oil joined coffee, sugar, tea and tobacco. The new plantation economy grew up mostly on Sumatra's east coast, and in 1901 the Dutch adopted the Ethical Policy, which put somewhat more money into education for the colonised population.

How the colony reached its present borders

Until the late 19th century Dutch authority outside Java was a matter of treaties with local rulers. That changed between 1870 and 1910. A war with Aceh ran from 1873 to 1908 and brought the northern tip of Sumatra under Dutch control. In Sulawesi, Borneo, Bali, the Lesser Sunda Islands and the Moluccas a standard instrument called the Short Declaration bound local rulers to accept Batavia's control, and footholds were set up in western New Guinea. Britannica dates the real watershed of European influence to about 1870, not to the Portuguese capture of Malacca in 1511.

The colony was also a racial order. The Dutch East Indies had two legal classes of inhabitant, European and indigenous, and in 1920 added a third for "Foreign Easterners". By 1950 the Dutch had built about 7,500 kilometres of railway and irrigation for 1.4 million hectares of rice fields, and those works became the base of the independent state's infrastructure. Portuguese Timor, on the eastern half of the island, stayed outside the colony.

Who imagined Indonesia before the state existed

Britannica dates organised nationalism to Budi Utomo, founded in 1908 by a retired Javanese doctor. Sarekat Islam, founded in 1912, claimed 2,500,000 members by 1919; later research suggests the real figure was no more than 400,000, still larger than anything else at the time. The Indies Social Democratic Association, founded in 1914 by the Dutch socialist Henk Sneevliet, took the name Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) in 1924 and led revolts in Java at the end of 1926 and in western Sumatra early in 1927. Wikipedia's account puts the arrests that followed at about 13,000, with some 4,500 sent to prison.

In July 1927 a young engineer, Sukarno, became chairman of the Indonesian Nationalist Party, built on refusing to cooperate with the colonial government. On 28 October 1928 a congress of youth organisations swore the Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda): one motherland, one people and one language, all of them Indonesian. Britannica treats it as the founding moment of the Indonesian language, which evolved from Malay. The Dutch arrested Sukarno at the end of 1929 and again in 1933, and exiled him to Flores and then Bengkulu; Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir were exiled too.

Japan took the colony in March 1942. Its military administration needed Indonesians to run offices the interned Dutch had held, and enlisted Sukarno and Hatta. It recruited labourers, the romusha, many of whom died of ill treatment and hunger, and a later United Nations report quoted on Wikipedia put deaths in Indonesia from the occupation at four million. In October 1943 it created Peta, a volunteer defence force officered by Indonesians, which became the core of the revolution's army. In March 1945 the Japanese set up the committee that drafted the 1945 Constitution, still in force in amended form.

How independence was declared and then fought for

On the morning of 17 August 1945, two days after Japan's surrender and after youth leaders had held them for a day to force the issue, Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed an independent republic. Its constitution was presidential, but the Central Indonesian National Committee became a working parliament and the first cabinets answered to it.

The Dutch came back behind British troops sent to accept the Japanese surrender. At Surabaya in November 1945 Indonesian fighters held out against British forces for three weeks. The Linggadjati Agreement, drafted on 15 November 1946 and signed on 25 March 1947, promised a federal Indonesia and collapsed over its interpretation. The Dutch then launched two offensives they called police actions, in July 1947 and December 1948, with roughly 220,000 troops deployed over the war. The republic also put down a communist rising at Madiun in September 1948.

The second offensive cost the Netherlands American support, and the United States threatened its Marshall Plan aid. At a round-table conference in The Hague in August 1949 the Netherlands agreed to transfer sovereignty over everything except western New Guinea to the federal United States of Indonesia, which it did on 27 December 1949. On 17 August 1950 the federal states were dissolved into a unitary republic. Estimates of Indonesian deaths in the fighting run from 97,421 to 100,000; more than 4,000 Dutch soldiers died, and seven million people were displaced on Java and Sumatra. On 17 February 2022 a Dutch historical review concluded that the Netherlands had used systematic and excessive violence, and the Dutch prime minister apologised the same day.

Why parliamentary rule gave way to Guided Democracy

A provisional constitution of 1950 made the republic parliamentary, with a figurehead president. The country's first general election in 1955 made four parties the main forces: the Muslim Masyumi and Nahdlatul Ulama, the Nationalist Party (PNI) and the PKI. Seven cabinets came and went between December 1949 and March 1957. Regional commanders in Sumatra and northern Sulawesi backed revolts from December 1956, and in 1958 a rival Revolutionary Government of the Republic was proclaimed in western Sumatra and defeated.

Sukarno's answer was Guided Democracy, decision by deliberation (musyawarah) and consensus (mufakat), which he presented as the village's own procedure. When the Constituent Assembly elected in 1955 would not restore the 1945 Constitution, he did it by decree on 5 July 1959. Dutch enterprises had been seized at the end of 1957; the army took over estates and became an economic actor. Abroad, Indonesia hosted the Asian-African Conference at Bandung in 1955, won western New Guinea through the New York Agreement of August 1962, opposed the formation of Malaysia with a policy of "confrontation" from September 1963, and left the United Nations in January 1965. At home Sukarno balanced the army against the PKI.

What followed the coup attempt and the purge

In the early hours of 1 October 1965 a group calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and murdered six army generals. General Suharto, commander of the army's strategic reserve, had taken back control by that evening. The army blamed the PKI; the party said the affair was internal to the army, and the authorship of the attempt is still argued over. In the purge that followed, communists and people accused of being communists were killed across Java and Bali. Britannica gives estimates ranging from 80,000 to more than 1,000,000 dead; Wikipedia's history of Indonesia gives 500,000 to 1 million as the most widely accepted range. From 1969 to 1980 about 10,000 people were held without trial on Buru Island.

Sukarno was forced to delegate power to Suharto in March 1966, and the assembly made Suharto acting president in March 1967 and president in March 1968. The New Order rejoined the United Nations, helped found ASEAN in 1967, passed a foreign investment law the same year and merged the parties: in 1973 four Muslim parties became the United Development Party and five others the Indonesian Democratic Party, while the government-sponsored Golkar won more than three-fifths of the lower-house seats in 1971 and held its dominance through the elections that followed. Pancasila was imposed as the national ideology.

The edges of the map were settled by force. In western New Guinea, the 1969 Act of Free Choice was cast by 1,025 representatives selected by the Indonesian authorities, who voted unanimously for integration; Britannica says the act "evidently confirmed" a wish to remain in Indonesia, and Wikipedia's account says the representatives were warned to vote for it. On 7 December 1975 Indonesia invaded Portuguese Timor, a territory of about 680,000 people at the time, and made it a province; tens of thousands of East Timorese who resisted died, according to Britannica.

How the New Order ended and what replaced it

The Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998 sent the rupiah down sharply, and price rises under an IMF austerity programme turned confidence in the regime into protest. The assembly re-elected Suharto for a seventh term in March 1998, riots and protests spread, and on 21 May 1998 he resigned in favour of his vice-president, B.J. Habibie. The period that followed is called Reformasi.

Habibie released political prisoners and loosened press controls, and elections were held on 7 June 1999. East Timor voted on 30 August 1999 in a UN-run referendum in which about 99% of the electorate took part and more than three-quarters chose independence; militias and elements of the army killed about 2,000 people after the result, and the territory became sovereign in May 2002. Between 1998 and 2004 the country had four presidents and none served a full term. The third amendment to the constitution, enacted in 2001, made the presidency directly elective, and the first direct election was held in 2004.

On 26 December 2004 an earthquake off northern Sumatra sent a tsunami into Aceh, and the recovery revived peace talks with the Free Aceh Movement, ending in accords signed in Helsinki that gave the province local parties and further autonomy. Papua received special autonomy, was divided in 2003, and was divided again in 2022. North Kalimantan became the 34th province in October 2012. In 2022 a law confirmed Nusantara in East Kalimantan as the site of a new capital, the subject of the politics article, and in January 2025 Indonesia joined BRICS.