A history of regionalism in Indonesia.

Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, is a vast archipelago with a relatively short history of unified rule. The devolution of power to the provinces after 1998 has meant that regional social traditions and historical legacies are powerful forces in contemporary politics. South Sulawesi (Southwest Celebes), a crucial and understudied region of Indonesia, is no exception.

Starting in 1669, tensions between the Dutch East India Company’s cosmopolitan port town of Makassar and the aggressive, competitive dynasties of the interior began to shape peninsula politics. A strong ethnic Chinese community embodied the town’s wide horizons, while in the countryside, the nobility’s engagement with Islam ranged from symbiotic co-optation to hostility. Religion, rather than politics, framed the main challenges to authority. Finally integrated in 1965, the city and province remain among the most clientelist in the country, their politics personalized and transactional. Nevertheless, the large city of Makassar is booming. Dutch indirect rule and neocolonial strategies entrenched the power of local elites, who resisted changes imposed by Batavia or, after 1950, by Jakarta. 

In this history, Heather Sutherland’s long-term perspective avoids dichotomies like continuity and change or autonomy and dependence, recognizing that trade-offs have always been fundamental to interaction within and between town and country and between the province and distant capitals.

The eastern archipelagos of Southeast Asia stretch from Mindanao and Sulu in the north to Bali in the southwest and New Guinea in the southeast. Many of the inhabitants of this area are often described as “people without history,” in part because colonial borders long ago cut across shared underlying patterns of relations. Yet many of these societies were linked to transoceanic trading systems for millennia. Indeed, some of the world’s most prized commodities once came from territories which were either “stateless” or under the tenuous control of loosely structured polities in this region.
 
In this book, trade provides the integrating framework for local and regional histories that cover more than three hundred years, from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, when new technologies and changing markets helped lead to Western dominance. This book presents theories from the social sciences and economics that can help liberate scholars from dependence on states as narrative frameworks. It will also appeal to those working on wider themes such as global history, state formation, the evolution of markets, and anthropology.