Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World

"Yes. Revolusi is an epic work, but it is a rather overdue one, because Indonesia is a hugely important country that has been very much neglected. The case that he is making is not only that we should care more about it because it’s a large country, with the world’s largest Muslim population etc. He also argues that the anti-colonial struggle in Indonesia was the first anti-colonial struggle. It triggered and set the tone for a whole series of anti-colonial struggles thereafter. The conference at Bandung in 1955 was the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement—another theme which is very much around at the moment. It’s time that we looked at the role that Indonesia played in shaping post-colonial thinking. Again, it’s very beautifully done. It’s a monumental work, and it’s an extraordinary story. Not only was the struggle against the Dutch an extraordinary story, but Indonesia was also occupied by Japan in World War Two because of its resources, which included oil. Indonesia is a massive archipelago with dozens of languages and cultures so the complexities of any struggle are going to be rather greater than for a smaller and more coherent polity. It’s a miracle that it’s a country at all but, somehow, it has worked. There’s a metaphor that he uses throughout the book. There’s a ship that sinks in the Java Sea, and he takes the shipboard metaphor of first-class, second-class and third-class passengers. Third class tends to be the Indonesians, but there are variations within all these classes. Sometimes somebody from one class ascends to the next one up, and someone from the second class might decline to the third class. It sounds like a banal metaphor, but the way it’s used through the book is very helpful, because revolutionary movements and loyalties are not necessarily simple. The whole book is shot through with the complications. There’s the mosaic of indigenous Indonesian cultures, the colonists and who they were, and then the people who are the product of relationships between the colonists and Indonesians. What are their loyalties? What role do they play? Then you have the complications of Asian colonizers versus European colonizers, and the role the Japanese play. Not just in Indonesia, but also in Burma, the Japanese claimed they were a liberating force who were driving out European colonists. They then tended to become almost as brutal as the Europeans that they had driven out, or in some cases more so. It’s a subtle and interesting book about a very important subject. Yes, it was long, complicated and brutal. Instead of the defeat of Japan and the end of the war leading to Indonesian independence, it led to an attempt by the Dutch to re-establish their colonial possession. The Dutch imagined that they would pick up where they left off and there was a lot of violence. In several of this year’s shortlisted books, you have an experience of war, very much from the ground up. In Question 7 it’s about the experience of being a slave laborer in Japanese captivity. In Revolusi, Van Reybrouck talks to a lot of people who are now very old. There are a lot of eyewitness accounts and recollections. It’s about the direct experiences of ordinary people caught up in these terrible, violent events—what it meant, the decisions they made, whose side they chose to be on, if they had the luxury of choosing. It’s about the leaders who emerge and rise in those moments, who then shape the next stage of history, which was a critical and important one. He’s arguing not just that this was an extraordinary passage of resistance to colonialism and the emergence of independence, but it then went on to shape the experience or the ambitions of countries who were going through a similar process. Funnily enough it may be partly because Indonesia was non-aligned. If you think that for a long time what we looked at was defined by the Cold War, Indonesia wasn’t a player in that sense. It is very large and very complicated. I suppose it’s also because Indonesia never tried to be a great power. We tend to pay attention to countries that challenge global power arrangements. The Bandung Conference was trying to do the opposite. It was saying, ‘We are here, we are us, and we will define our allegiances and our futures ourselves and not as a function of the confrontation between the USSR and the USA.’ We’re seeing a similar sentiment with the US-China confrontation, another reason this book is relevant. If you think of the US-China confrontation as a rerun of the Cold War, where is Indonesia in this? It’s a producer of a critical mineral: it’s one of the largest producers of nickel in the world. And China has established a very strong position in Indonesia mining nickel, which America is now worried about. Again, we’re seeing a very large and important country in the context of a confrontation between two superpowers. There are. The Story of a Heart is an outlier, but it just demanded to be there. Wild Thing also. But if you read them—as we did—in quick succession, you become aware of relationships. There’s a Zeitgeist feel to them. They’re very much about today, but each, in its own way, is drawing threads from the past."

"Also of note is the appearance, in English, of a book about Indonesia’s struggle for independence from the Netherlands after World War II: Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David van Reybrouck."