Indonesia. To nation by revolution: Indonesia in the twentieth century. By Anthony Reid. Singapore: NUS Press, 2011. Pp. 348. Maps, Plates, Glossary, Index.

Abstract

To nation by revolution: Indonesia in the twentieth century By ANTHONY REID Singapore: NUS Press, 2011. Pp. 348. Maps, Plates, Glossary, Index. Any book from noted historian Anthony Reid is to be welcomed as making a significant contribution to the literature on Indonesia. A collection of Reid's essays from over four decades is a particularly special event, capturing the best of his work, allowing reflections on the perspectives of the times and reminding us that the insights of a good historian can have a timeless quality. Of the 12 chapters here, all are based on previously published papers that have been revised and updated, but for one, chapter 9, on the bloody events of 1965-66. The book's blurb says this chapter has been left unchanged to allow an insight into early understandings of those events. More appropriately, though, this chapter should remain unchanged because its insights have stood the test of time. The first chapter argues that, while it was not a Communist revolution, Indonesia's independence process could find closer parallels with the French Revolution. Setting aside the political meaning of 'revolution', this chapter offers a rich and clear explanation for Indonesia's independence process; why it happened the way it did. The chapter on slavery is also interesting, arguing for an alternative 'mild' (p. 46) understanding of the idea to that found in Europe. 'It is,' Reid notes, 'difficult to use the term [slavery] without appearing to denigrate Southeast Asian cultural traditions which still have force and value' (p. 45). While denigration is not a useful explanatory method, Reid's perspective here tends to allow for the kind of cultural relativism that has characterised much scholarship on the region. It is relevant that, in the early twenty-first century, a form of 'mild' slavery continued in Indonesia. If this was not through formal ownership of humans then it did reflect an economic contract in which non-stop labour was provided without payment beyond food and lodging, which owned slaves also enjoyed. Chapter 3 discusses Indonesia's process of modernisation, employing the motif of replacing betel with tobacco as the medium of social leisure. Chapter 4 is more pointed in its acknowledgement of a relatively arbitrary state being imposed on a fragmented geography and disparate peoples. Chapter 5 explains the idealism behind this imposition, through a study of merdeka (freedom / liberation), with chapter 6 analysing the history that was to varying degrees invented to provide a supposed continuity for the peoples so included. …