An obvious hiatus amidst the abundance of Pacific War studies is the story of Indonesia during that period. The Encyclopedia of Indonesia in the Pacific War, edited under the aegis of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, now fills that gap. This state of the art work reflects the different experiences and historiographic traditions of Indonesians, Japanese, and Dutch. The aim is to present the developments in the Indonesian archipelago in as much a rational and dispassionate way as possible, taking into account regional and social variations and interpreting them within the international context of pre- and post-war trends. With due acknowledgement of different perspectives, ambiguities, unresolved issues and conflicting views, it sets out to enhance mutual understanding and academic dialogue.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia. A deceitful campaign promoting Asian brotherhood recruited and coerced young Indonesian men to support the Japanese occupation with the sinister outcome that several million of them were worked to death or summarily killed as expendable slave laborers, or romusha, as they were called. While many romusha disappeared from the record, nine hundred were known victims of a brutal and immoral medical experiment perpetuated by an increasingly desperate Imperial Japan. In anticipation of a land assault, the Japanese needed a means to protect their troops from tetanus, and they used these nine hundred men as human guinea pigs to test an insufficiently vetted vaccine. Within days, all nine hundred suffered the protracted, agonizing death of acute tetanus. With the Allied forces poised for victory, the Japanese needed a scapegoat for this well-documented incident if they were to avoid war-crimes prosecution. They brutally tortured Achmad Mochtar, a native Indonesian and renowned scientist, along with his colleagues at the Eijkman Institute in Batavia (now Jakarta), until Mochtar signed a confession to the murders in exchange for the liberty of his fellow scientists. The Japanese beheaded Mochtar weeks before the war ended. War Crimes in Japan-Occupied Indonesia unravels the deceit of the Japanese Army, the reasons for the mass murder of the romusha, and Mochtar's heroic role in these tragic events. The end result finds justice for Mochtar and reveals the true extent of one of the least recognized war crimes of World War II.

Imagined Racial Laboratories reveals the watermarks of science in the dynamics of racialisation in Southeast Asia, during and after the colonial period. Bringing together a set of critical histories of race sciences, it illuminates the racialised dimensions of colony and nation in the region. It demonstrates that racialisation took — and continues to take — mutable and multiple forms that often connect, perhaps more than differentiate, colonial and national periods across a variety of Southeast Asian settings. Thus, imagined races have contributed as much to the invention of modern Southeast Asia as have other fabled imagined communities.

**Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024** A story of staggering scope and drama, Revolusi is the masterful and definitive account of the epic revolution that sparked the decolonisation of the modern world. 'Astounding . . . history at its best' Yuval Noah Harari 'Utterly compelling . . . masterful' Financial Times *Summer Reads 2024* 'Superb' Guardian *SHORTLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2024* On a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a handful of tired people raised a homemade cotton flag and on behalf of 68 million compatriots announced the birth of a new nation: Indonesia. Four million civilians had died during the Japanese wartime occupation that ousted its Dutch colonial regime. Another 200,000 people would lose their lives in the astonishingly brutal conflict that ensued - as the Dutch used savage violence to reassert their control, and as Britain and America became embroiled in pacifying Indonesia's guerrilla war of resistance: the 'Revolusi'. It was not until December 1949 that the newly created United Nations finally brought the conflict an end - and with it, 350 years of colonial rule - setting a precedent that would reshape the world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and eye-witness testimonies, David Van Reybrouck turns this vast and complex story into an utterly gripping narrative that is alive with human detail at every turn. A landmark publication, Revolusi shows Indonesia's struggle for independence to be one of the defining dramas of the twentieth century. 'A magnificent fusion of oral history, sparkling analysis, and historical wisdom. Revolusi has it all: a masterpiece' SEBASTIAN MALLABY 'One of the most unlikely and astonishing sagas ... a towering achievement' THOMAS MEANEY 'A magisterial but gripping account of events of urgent importance to us now' JASON BURKE 'At once vast and intimate, a history in colour' LAKSMI PAMUNTJAK 'A masterly display of the historian’s craft' J M COETZEE 'A wonderful and important book' PETER FRANKOPAN

When a reluctant President Sukarno gave Lt Gen Soeharto full executive authority in March 1966, Indonesia was a deeply divided nation, fractured along ideological, class, religious and ethnic lines. Soeharto took a country in chaos, the largest in Southeast Asia, and transformed it into one of the “Asian miracle” economies—only to leave it back on the brink of ruin when he was forced from office thirty-two years later. Drawing on his astonishing range of interviews with leading Indonesian generals, former Imperial Japanese Army officers and men who served in the Dutch colonial army, as well as years of patient research in Dutch, Japanese, British, Indonesian and US archives, David Jenkins brings vividly to life the story of how a socially reticent but exceptionally determined young man from rural Java began his rise to power—an ascent which would be capped by thirty years (1968–98) as President of Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation on earth. Soeharto was one of Asia’s most brutal, most durable, most avaricious and most successful dictators. In the course of examining those aspects of his character, this book provides an accessible, highly readable introduction to the complex, but dramatic and utterly absorbing, social, political, religious, economic and military factors that have shaped, and which continue to shape, Indonesia.

A wide-flung archipelago lying between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Indonesia is the world's most populous Islamic country. For over two thousand years it was a crossroads on the major trading route between China and India, but it was not brought together into a single entity until the Dutch extended their rule throughout the Netherlands East Indies in the early part of the 20th century. Declaring its independence from the Dutch in 1945, the Republic of Indonesia was ruled by only two regimes over the next half century Throughout the years the country has continued to be dogged by an inefficient bureaucracy and by perpetual problems of corruption. However, since 2004 Indonesia has successfully carried out four direct elections for president, together with an equal number of elections for legislative bodies at all levels of government, and has finally in 2014 elected a president with no ties to either the military or to the previous authoritarian power structure. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Indonesia contains a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Indonesia.

By taking regime change as its main theme this book offers a new perspective on the multiple roles that Chinese Indonesians played in terms of shaping, moderating, and stimulating social change in Indonesia.

This book explains the dynamics behind the economic transformation from the colonial era to the post-independence period in Indonesia and Vietnam. It analyses the different Vietnamese and Indonesian government approaches to the economic legacies of colonialism remaining in these countries after independence. It also demonstrates that despite critical differences between the two nation-states, the Vietnamese and Indonesian leaderships were pursuing similar long-term goals: to create a truly independent national economy. The book discusses the way in which the Indonesian government established complete economic control, resembling the socialist transformation of North Vietnam in the 1950s, and the various means by which the government of South Vietnam concentrated economic power in its own hands during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It also explores how the Indonesian government was determined remove the economic legacy of Dutch colonialism by placing the entire economy under strong state control and ownership in accordance with the spirit of Guided Democracy and Guided Economy in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. This book is a point of reference for students, researchers and academics interested in a comparative analysis of the economic systems implemented by the colonial and fascist powers in Indonesia and Vietnam.

“Children see and hear what is there; adults see and hear what they are expected to and mainly remember what they think they ought to remember,” David Lowenthal wrote in The Past Is a Foreign Country. It is on this fraught foundation that Fred Lanzing builds this memoir of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp for Dutch colonialists in the East Indies during the World War II. When published in the Netherlands in 2007, the book triggered controversy, if not vitriol, for Lanzing’s assertion that his time in the camp was not the compendium of horrors commonly associated with the Dutch internment experience. Despite the angry reception, Lanzing’s account corresponds more closely with the scant historical record than do most camp memoirs. In this way, Lanzing’s work is a substantial addition to ongoing discussions of the politics of memory and the powerful—if contentious—contributions that subjective accounts make to historiography and to the legacies of the past. Lanzing relates an aspect of the war in the Pacific seldom discussed outside the Netherlands and, by focusing on the experiences of ordinary people, expands our understanding of World War II in general. His compact, beautifully detailed account will be accessible to undergraduate students and a general readership and, together with the introduction by William H. Frederick, is a significant contribution to literature on World War II, the Dutch colonial experience, the history of childhood, and Southeast Asian history.