The Growing Maturity of Indonesian Economic History

Abstract

In recent years two high quality overviews of the economic history of Indonesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been published that testify of the growing maturity of the field. The two books – The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A History of Missed Opportunities by Anne Booth (1998), and The Emergence of a National Economy. An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000 by a team of authors (Howard Dick, Vincent Houben, Thomas Lindblad and Thee Kian Wie) (2002) – are written by distinguished experts in the field. Both books also aim to be comprehensive, but interestingly, they do this in very different ways. But let me focus on the similarities first: apart from the obvious fact that they want to present an economic history of Indonesia over the past twohundred years, they also have in common that they stress the links between economic and political history. Both try ‘to bring the state back in’, by focussing on the process of state formation – in particular in the colonial period – and, even more importantly, by analysing the consequences of government policies for economic development. The leading theme of the The Emergence (TE), as formulated in the programmatic opening chapter by Howard Dick, are the links between state-formation, the nation state, and the national economy. Similarly, The Indonesian Economy (TIE) contains a detailed analysis of government policy, and in the final analysis of the ‘missed opportunities’ of Indonesia's past, the state plays a crucial role. This also brings me to the other obvious striking similarity: both books try to explain the failure of Indonesian economic development in this period (or at least until the second half of the 1960s), and discuss the reasons why economic development was relatively slow.