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The Revolution in Regional Perspective 169 169 CHAPTER 8 The Revolution in Regional Perspective It is frequently complained that an excessive focus on the national level has distorted our understanding of the Indonesian revolution, as of most things Indonesian.1 Yet a brief survey of the academic research completed reveals that regional studies have been the dominant theme. As against the detailed studies of South Sulawesi by Harvey,2 Aceh by Nazaruddin,3 North Sumatra by Van Langenberg,4 East Java by Anderson,5 Surabaya by Frederick,6 West Sumatra by Kahin,7 East Sumatra and Aceh by myself,8 Pekalongan by Lucas,9 Surakarta by Soejatno,10 Jakarta by Cribb,11 and Ambon by Chauvel,12 it is difficult to point to a single thesis which takes a thematic approach to the revolution in national terms. Anderson’s Java13 is the closest, though he obviously had a special affection for and knowledge of Surakarta. My own Indonesian National Revolution14 was a by-product of the regional study on which I had originally embarked. Since then, the only national-level works of real research I can think of are biographies of figures such as Sukarno, Nasution, Tan Malaka and Amir Sjarifuddin, and a growing number of scholarly studies concerned more with the Dutch or Diplomatic story than the Indonesian one.15 In short, there seems no doubt when we look at the historiography of the revolution, particularly in the 1980s, that the major advance in understanding its nature has been in the form of regional studies — typically at the Residency/Province level. This provides a marked contrast with the historiography of the classic revolutions, notably the French and Russian, on which hundreds of scholarly volumes have been written without even asking the question whether Paris and Petrograd really represented the whole story. As recently as 1975, an embattled student of revolutionary Bordeaux complained that “historians of Revolutionary 170 To Nation by Revolution France … have concentrated their attention almost exclusively on national politics”, so that the study of anything else had only just begun to seem respectable.16 Western studies of the Russian revolution have been equally focused on the capital, though the difficulty of access to lowerlevel sources may make that more explicable.17 Rather than rending our garments because we have not done enough local history, we should perhaps be asking why we have taken this direction so much sooner than our European colleagues. I believe the answer to this question is that we are driven to the local level by our subject. The great European revolutions were (like most others) essentially urban phenomena, and they were made possible in large degree because the urban population was heavily concentrated in a single national centre of power. 30 per cent of France’s urban population was in Paris in 178918 and a still higher proportion of Russia’s in Petrograd in 1917.19 Only 22 per cent of the Indonesian urban population was in Jakarta.20 Moreover, Jakarta was seen as a particularly Dutch-dominated city, so that very little of the revolutionary action took place there. What we speak of as the “national” politics of the revolution constantly shifts its venue, from Jakarta to Surabaya, to Bandung, to Yogyakarta, to Surakarta, to Madiun, to Aceh and Makasar (and of course The Hague). During the “gerilya” period, the diffusion is almost complete, while the internal dynamics of the federal states cannot be ignored even by someone who is trying to tell the “national” story. Anti-colonial revolutions (notably those of the Western Hemisphere and Algeria, as well as Indonesia ), have a readymade common enemy in the centralised colonial state. Anti-colonial revolutionaries of very different cultural, regional and class backgrounds had some basis for agreement about their goals, whereas there was none at all between Parisian sans-culottes and the peasants of the Vendée, or between Petrograd workers and Cossacks. To some extent, the same revolutionary story can be told in each region. I will go further, and argue that the dichotomy between “national” and “regional” revolutions is a false one. There was but one revolution, which took place in many regions. That is not to discount the analytical distinction between diplomasi and perjuangan, between the contest to obtain independence from the Dutch and the internal processes which were transforming Indonesian society. It is the latter, however, which made this a revolution, and if we are to discuss it as revolution, we must look beyond “the executive...

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