This collection of essays, inspired by the work of Thomas Lindblad who researched economic connections from colonial to post-colonial Indonesia, is organized around three themes: trade, investment, entrepreneurship and changing regimes. The editors stress the importance of studying economic development in Indonesia across the colonial and post-colonial period and argue that economic decolonization did not occur in conjunction with political decolonization. To more accurately explore economic development and shifting political policy, the editors encourage economic historians of Indonesia to focus on this broader time frame and on connections between regimes. Each author in this collection discusses their primary source evidence in detail and most provide statics, in the form of graphs and charts, as quantitative data for further research.
The essays in the first section of this book not only provide context for Indonesian economic history by focusing on the development of trade and changes between colonial and postcolonial rule, but also the socio-economic development of the region. This section develops Lindblad’s theories about globalization influencing the Indonesian economy by turning it into an export based economy. Anne Booth provides a detailed, yet compact, discussion of economic changes in trade from 1830 to the present. Changes in labour, export commodities and economic relationships between the hinterlands and the urban centres all influenced the economic successes and failures of modern Indonesia. While Anne Booth focuses primarily on trade relations, Hal Hill discusses the shift from the Indonesian economy being primarily based on agriculture to being a largely industrial and service oriented. In Hill’s analysis, the unequal development of urban centres (e.g., in Java) and the hinterlands led to unequal standards of living and the development of industrial work at the expense of agriculture. Hill connects this shift to rising productivity and living standards in Southeast Asia, as a whole, between 1970 and 2010. Hill’s study is unique among the essays in this book since it tracks economic changes in Southeast Asia as they impacted and influenced Indonesia. In other words, his study is the only transnational discussion of the Indonesian economy in connection to Southeast Asian development at large.
The second section of the book discusses the role of individual indigenous groups in Indonesia to stress the roles that these local groups have in forming a national economy before and after decolonization. For example, Freek Colombijn discusses an economic relationship between colonizers and colonized, called complementarisasi, which has previously been marginalized by economic historians. Colombijn argues that complementarisasi “is an economic relationship between actors from different ethnic groups, in which each side occupies a niche and complements the other” (114). This cooperation between economic actors is evidenced by the complementary roles of construction companies and contract labourers. As a theoretical framework, the term complementarisasi moves beyond Lindblad’s analysis by focusing less on colonial resistance to Dutch culture and the development of Indonesian identity and, instead, serves as the basis for exploring symbiotic relationships across the colonial and postcolonial economic period. As Colombijn does, each author provides a micro-history within the larger theme of economic history to highlight the diversity of people engaged in global economies. In particular, Leonard Blusse provides new micro-historical source evidence to reveal the use of Chinese sailors by the VOC for journeys between Indonesia and the Netherlands. Similarly, Roger Knight discusses the development of the Java sugar industry by using the war analogy “caught in the crossfire” to represent the devastating impact of Japanese imperialism on the Indonesian sugar industry.
The book’s final section discusses the effects of changing regimes on economic ventures and focuses on modern developments (e.g., international food aid, the green revolution and rice exports). The editors and several authors of chapters propose that regional/local economies developed into a national economy that was highly contingent on globalization and global markets. Economic decolonization reveals how the rise of nationalism in the later part of the 20th century influenced political policy by nationalizing businesses previously held by American, British and Dutch companies. Thee Kian Wie argues that foreign debt inherited from the Dutch administration and the dominance of Western interests in local businesses were key economic issues facing postcolonial Indonesia. These hampered policy makers until the nationalization of the economy. Similarly, Farabi Fakih adopts Lindblad’s term Indonesianisasi to analyse the role of economists in Indonesia from 1950 to 1965. According to Fakih, “Indonesianisasi represented an effort to move away from colonial forms and relations towards Indonesian ones” (222). While all of these essays in this book focus on economic relations and exchanges in a globalized market, its authors are also interested in homogenization and exchange between the Indonesian hinterlands and urban centres through the processes of Indonesianisasi.
While the editors organize the book’s chapters to provide thematically coherent arguments and chronologies, most of the essays are very short (even though they provide extensive quantitative data in the form of charts and graphs). So, although there is much information provided, the book presents more of a collection of preliminary discussions as opposed to making overarching arguments about Indonesian economic history. Nonetheless, it is clear that this collection not only aims to honour Thomas Lindblad but also utilize his theoretical frameworks (e.g., by employing the term Indonesianisasi or, as Colombijn does, by developing the related idea complementarisasi). In the process of using and/or developing these frameworks, the book’s contributors create a group of interdisciplinary of essays that connect the collection’s themes to a wide-range of primary and secondary sources.
