Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck review – Indonesia’s fight for freedom

A superb history of the struggle for independence after three centuries of Dutch colonial rule

Indonesia: the world’s largest island nation, 17,000 pieces of land projecting from the waves where Indian and Pacific oceans meet, ranging in scale from the giants of Sumatra, Java and Borneo, to the tiny volcanic outcrops of the Banda Sea. With 280 million people, this is the fourth most populous nation on Earth, after India, China and the US, and the largest Muslim-majority country. It’s also one of the most overlooked, by western eyes at least. What proportion of anglophones could even place Jakarta on a map? Relating the story of this place is, then, a mammoth task, requiring a monumental research effort. This is what the Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck has achieved in his superb history, Revolusi.

To set the scene: the first humans, hunter-gatherers, reached the archipelago 75,000 years ago. A long time later, around 2000BC, a new influx arrived: the so-called Austronesians, pre-history’s greatest seafarers, who would spread across the oceans from Madagascar to Hawaii. Soon, thanks to their strategic location, the Indonesian islands were swept over by civilisations and religions from the north and west. From India came Brahminism and Hinduism; from China, Buddhism and Taoism. But it was Islam, which arrived around the 13th century, that would become the archipelago’s dominant faith.