Global Indonesia by Jean Gelman Taylor (review)

Jean Taylor has already given us an impressive history of Indonesia. Her Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (Yale University Press, 2003) broke new ground in its thematic chapters, historiographic emphasis and especially the dozens of inserted “capsules” which provided the colour and immediacy that a balanced and continuous narrative often fails to do. So why did she write what is essentially another, briefer, history a decade later? Read without knowledge of its predecessor, Global Indonesia may disappoint. It tends to focus on the Europeans in Indonesia to an unfashionable extent. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are dealt with in a chapter about the VOC or Dutch East India Company, and the nineteenth in one on “Colonialism: Agent of Modern Globalisation”. Only in the twentieth century do Indonesians have much to say, and non-elite figures and women seem rather less present than in the previous volume. Is this a step backwards?

I think the intention is the reverse, to make a step forward into our newly globalized world. Firstly, this volume has a more contemporary emphasis, with about a third devoted to events since 1950 (lightly treated in the other volume, with the exception of historiography) and a good deal of discussion of post 9–11 Islamism under the rubric of competing globalizations. Secondly, it perhaps senses (without spelling out) that we need to move on from national histories that are essentially Indonesia-centric and striving to give Indonesians centrality and agency in their own history. Despite Indonesia’s greater economic importance and democratic openness than twenty years ago, it is harder today to convince students that they should study it for its own sake. We need now to bring back the global dimensions of this history and show how it matters to the rest of the world with which it has always been entangled. Global Indonesia may in this sense even be seen as a corrective or complement to the previous book, giving the cosmopolitan elite of Indonesia credit for their global achievements even when they have Dutch names and faces.

A good example of this is the discussion (pp. 74–78) of the Indonesian role in the combatting of malaria, smallpox and other diseases. Scientific initiatives in understanding plant diversity are also mentioned, although not the two greatest Indonesian contributions to global understanding of evolution and diversity, Rumphius (Georg Eberhard Rumpf, 1627–1702) in Ambon and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), a rival of Darwin. We read of VOC mediation of knowledge among Japan, Indonesia, Persia and the West. Dr Taylor reminds us of the international sources of Islamic reformist movements, of the Hadhrami networks, of Ottoman reformers and of major landmarks of Muslim scholarship. She has a useful discussion (pp. 176–78) of the growing influence of cyberspace in exacerbating and globalizing conflicts such as the Muslim-Christian killings of 2000–2002.

It would have been interesting to see this theme of global contacts taken rather further. Indonesia’s volcanoes and earthquakes have had a great and ominous influence on the planet as a whole, and knowledge of at least Krakatoa and Tambora has been influential on global understanding, though much more needs to be done. Gamelan and Balinese dance have had a major role in pluralizing and enriching Western understandings of music. The Chinese of Indonesia get less space here than Europeans and Arabs, but they also had a cosmopolitan vision as mediators of knowledge both to and from the world. A greater emphasis beyond the Dutch and Javanese spheres might have revealed interesting entanglements of Aceh with Turkey, France and the United States; of Maluku and Makassar with the Portuguese; of the Bataks and Nias with the Germans; of Crawfurd and Marsden in the development of European Enlightenment thinking about the races of the world; of Bali and the orangutan with Hollywood; and so forth.

In the end, however, despite its title this remains another history of Indonesia. It is better written than many, with Dr Taylor’s engagingly light touch and nose for a telling quotation. Although...