A Brief History

Archaeological digs on Java in the 1890s turned up the fossilised remains of "Java Man", a human ancestor several hundred thousand years old. During the last ice age the archipelago now called Indonesia was joined by land to the Asian mainland, and successive waves of migration filled it: darker-skinned Melanesian peoples, whose descendants include the Mentawai of Sumatra and the Papuans, followed from around 850 BC by Austronesian arrivals moving down through what is now southern China and Indochina. Much later, Hindu and Buddhist traders from India brought their religions; the oldest evidence of Hindu worship in the archipelago survives as Sanskrit inscriptions on Borneo.

The first large state we know of was Sriwijaya, a Hindu maritime kingdom centred on Palembang in South Sumatra that dominated the sea lanes of the Malacca and Sunda straits from the 7th to the 13th centuries. It was followed, with much overlap, by Mataram and then the great Majapahit, alongside a scatter of smaller sultanates. By the time those dynasties had run their course, Islam, carried in from the 11th century onwards by Arab and Indian traders, had become the dominant faith.

Arrival of the Europeans

Marco Polo touched the archipelago in 1292. In 1512 the Portuguese reached the Moluccas, Maluku, the fabled Spice Islands, and eighty years later Dutch ships made landfall in western Java, near the mangrove swamp that would one day become Jakarta. In that era spices such as cloves, nutmeg and mace were worth their weight in gold, and Europe would kill for them.

The Portuguese found the small spice states weak and divided, and monopolised the trade. Then the Dutch arrived in force in the 17th century, stronger than either the Portuguese or the English. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) bought its first foothold on the Javanese coast in 1610, opposite the native settlement of Sunda Kalapa. In 1618 Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen built a fort there, named it Batavia, drove out the Portuguese and clamped a monopoly on the spice trade.

The first modern cities

Early in the 19th century Governor-General Daendels drove a postal road along the north coast of Java, the country's first intercity highway, and laid out a new European town south of Batavia called Weltevreden ("Well Contented"). At its heart lay the Koningsplein, the vast square now known as Monas, near the leafy avenues of Menteng and Tanah Abang. Weltevreden and old Batavia eventually merged into a single congested city, and the Dutch shifted the seat of government up to the cooler hills at Buitenzorg, today's Bogor.

The 'Queen of the East'

The Dutch shared these cities, the "Queen of the East", with those they classed as "foreign Orientals": chiefly Chinese, along with smaller communities of Arabs and Indians, who occupied the middle tier of a three-tier racial order between the Europeans on top and the local inlanders at the bottom. The Chinese clustered in Glodok, still Jakarta's Chinatown today. Out of the churn of these communities a new people emerged in Batavia, the Betawi.

By 1900 the VOC was long defunct and the Dutch crown governed most of the archipelago as the Netherlands East Indies. In 1908 medical students at the STOVIA school in Batavia, led by a young Javanese named Soetomo, founded Budi Utomo ("Noble Endeavour"), the first modern nationalist organisation. Its anniversary, 20 May, is now marked as National Awakening Day. Sarekat Islam followed within a few years and drew hundreds of thousands of members. The Dutch met these movements with a mixture of brutality and manipulation, jailing many nationalists, among them the man who would become Indonesia's first president, Soekarno (1901–1970).

Early nationalist stirrings

In 1922 Ki Hadjar Dewantara, born Raden Mas Soewardi Soerjaningrat and later independent Indonesia's first Minister of Education, founded the Taman Siswa school movement, which grew into a network of around forty independent schools teaching a generation of Indonesians outside Dutch control. The nationalist cause found its defining moment on 28 October 1928, when a youth congress in Batavia swore the Sumpah Pemuda, the Youth Pledge: one motherland, one nation, one language. That language, a trading creole of Malay leavened with Javanese, Dutch and Arabic, became Bahasa Indonesia.

Japanese occupation

In early 1942 Japanese forces swept in and threw the Dutch out. British and American troops withdrew from Java, the colonial administration fled on 8 March, and Europeans who stayed were herded into brutal internment camps. Under occupation the Japanese, preaching pan-Asian solidarity, allowed the nationalist movement to grow with Soekarno as its figurehead, an arrangement most Indonesians preferred to Dutch rule.

Independence struggle

When Japan surrendered in August 1945, Soekarno seized the moment: on 17 August he proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia. The Dutch did not let go easily. Four years of intermittent and often savage fighting followed, with UN mediation, before the Netherlands, leaned on hard by the United States, recognised Indonesian independence on 27 December 1949. Perhaps 150,000 Indonesians and 6,000 Dutch died in the war. Soekarno was the young republic's first president.

Soekarno

By 1958 Soekarno was cutting ties with the Netherlands, seizing hundreds of Dutch firms and deporting some 35,000 ethnically Dutch residents to a homeland many had never seen. He helped found the Non-Aligned Movement in the mid-1950s and grew steadily more erratic even as his people adored him. In 1962 he declared his rule a "guided democracy", openly contemptuous of the Western sort. He leaned on the Communist Party (PKI) as a counterweight to an increasingly powerful right-wing military, without ever seeming to share its ideology, and silenced opponents, sometimes viciously.

'Konfrontasi'

Then came Konfrontasi. When the Malaysian Federation was formed in 1963 with territory in northern Borneo, Soekarno insisted the whole island, Kalimantan, was Indonesian, and fought a proxy war against the departing British. He pulled Indonesia out of the United Nations and, at a rally before thousands of followers, told the American ambassador: "Go to hell with your aid!" It was the little man's war cry against the great powers, and it made him a hero across the decolonising world. There is a street named after him in Rabat to this day: Rue Soekarno.

The coup

The great powers had less affection for the defiant little brown man than his admirers did. On the morning of 1 October 1965, the right-wing military under Major-General Soeharto purged the government of its leftist figures and placed Soekarno under effective house arrest.

The official story, still taught in Indonesian schools, is that the PKI tried to seize power by murdering six generals on the night of 30 September, and that Soeharto's "patriotic officers" foiled the plot and saved the nation from communism. It deserves scepticism. The PKI was the largest communist party outside the governing socialist states, with perhaps three million members and a wider affiliated base of twenty million or more, yet it was unarmed and wholly unprepared to overthrow a president it revered. Its leaders were killed or jailed without ever calling out their supporters. There was no civil war.

What is beyond dispute is that the army, not the PKI, ended up holding power, and that the United States helped it along. Declassified US Embassy files, some 30,000 pages released in October 2017, show that American diplomats knew the army was carrying out mass murder, welcomed it, and quietly encouraged it; in 1990 it emerged that an embassy officer had passed the army a list of around 5,000 suspected communists. That is complicity, not authorship: the killing itself was organised and driven by the Indonesian army. To cast the CIA as the dalang, the puppet-master of the whole wayang, gives Washington more credit than the record will bear and Soeharto's generals less blame than they earned.

What followed was one of the 20th century's great massacres. For months the army and allied militias moved from village to village and island to island, killing anyone denounced as a communist; old scores were settled under cover of the purge, and survivors were shipped to prison camps where many more died. Estimates of the dead range from around 500,000 to a million, and the true figure will never be known. The victims were overwhelmingly Javanese and Balinese villagers, not, as is sometimes assumed, ethnic Chinese.

The Soeharto era

Soeharto took power by degrees, acting president in 1967 and president in 1968, while Soekarno faded into house arrest and died, a diminished man, in 1970. Soeharto barred Chinese-Indonesians from the bureaucracy yet cultivated a handful of Chinese-Indonesian tycoons and gave them free rein to build the economy. He restored ties with the West and the UN and drilled into the population a demand for stability and unquestioning loyalty, backed always by the threat of death or disappearance.

The New Order economy flourishes

Soekarno had left the economy in ruins. Under Soeharto's iron-fisted "New Order", bankrolled by Western powers cashing in on the archipelago's oil, timber and minerals, it surged. Indonesians grew more prosperous and more oppressed at once through the 1970s, 80s and 90s. No one profited more than Soeharto's family and cronies, the Cendana clique, who became dollar billionaires many times over. Corruption and cronyism were the load-bearing walls of the whole structure.

'Krismon'

The Asian financial crisis of 1997, krismon or "monetary crisis", brought it down. As the economy collapsed, huge demonstrations under the banner of reformasi swept the country through 1998, met with the shooting of student protesters and army-orchestrated rioting that targeted Chinese-Indonesians. Soeharto resigned on 21 May 1998. His deputy, the technocrat B. J. Habibie, took over and opened an astonishing burst of reform, including a referendum on independence for East Timor, which Indonesia had invaded in 1975 and occupied harshly for a quarter of a century.

On 30 August 1999 the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly, nearly 79 per cent, to leave. Indonesian troops and militias laid waste to the territory as they withdrew, but the vote held: after a period of UN administration, Timor-Leste restored its independence on 20 May 2002, the first new nation of the 21st century. The occupation's death toll is disputed; the Timorese truth commission put the minimum at around 100,000, with higher estimates near 180,000.

Gus Dur

After the rushed elections of 1999, parliament handed the presidency not to the front-runner Megawati Soekarnoputri, Soekarno's daughter, but to the near-blind Muslim scholar Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid. Gus Dur reached out to a restive Aceh and to the Papuans, incorporated into the republic against their will in the 1960s. The military, wounded by the fall of Soeharto, closed ranks against him and was widely blamed for stoking bloody communal conflicts in Maluku and Kalimantan to make him look weak. He was impeached and removed mid-term, and Megawati stepped up.

Mega

Megawati's three years were largely a disappointment. For all that the military had humiliated her father and, in 1996, stormed her party headquarters and killed her supporters, she presided over the army's rehabilitation. In 2003, after a ceasefire collapsed, she launched Indonesia's largest military operation since Konfrontasi, not against a foreign enemy but against the people of Aceh, the province that had sheltered her father during the independence war.

Terrorism hits Indonesia

It was on Megawati's watch that jihadist terror arrived. In October 2002 bombs tore through a Bali nightclub, killing over 200 people, most of them foreign holidaymakers. A string of suicide bombings by homegrown Islamists followed over the next three years.

SBY

In 2004, with the Aceh war stalled and corruption rampant, voters turned from Megawati to the "smiling general", Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. SBY, Indonesia's sixth president, served two terms from 2004 to 2014. He was a stabiliser: an educated man with a genuine doctorate, he steadied the economy and eased the military back from politics as direct elections took root. His signal achievement came early. The Boxing Day tsunami of December 2004 devastated Aceh and shocked both sides into talks; on 15 August 2005 the government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) signed the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding, brokered by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari. GAM gave up independence for broad autonomy, codified in the 2006 Law on the Governing of Aceh. Two decades on, the peace has held.

Jokowi

In 2014 Indonesia elected its first president from outside the old military and political elite: Joko Widodo, universally known as Jokowi, a furniture businessman who had risen from mayor of Solo to governor of Jakarta. He served two terms, to 2024, defeating the same rival, the former general Prabowo Subianto, in both 2014 and 2019. His most ambitious project was Nusantara, a new capital city being carved out of the forests of East Kalimantan to relieve a sinking, overcrowded Jakarta.

Prabowo

Having lost twice to Jokowi and then served as his defence minister, Prabowo Subianto won at the third attempt. He took nearly 59 per cent of the vote in February 2024 (running alongside Jokowi's eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as vice-president) and was inaugurated as Indonesia's eighth president on 20 October 2024. At 73 he is the oldest person to take the office. Prabowo is a divisive figure: a former son-in-law of Soeharto, discharged from the army in 1998 over the abduction of pro-democracy activists, and founder of the Gerindra party. At the time of writing, in mid-2026, he governs an Indonesia that is stable, populous and increasingly assertive on the world stage.

Summary

This is the briefest of brief histories, and dozens of consequential events have been left out for want of space. If Indonesia has caught your interest, and after three decades here I would argue it should, pick up one of the books below and read further.

Notes

• Abeyasekere, S., Jakarta: A History (Singapore, 1987)
• Raffles, T. S., The History of Java (London, 1817)
• Wright and Breakspear, Twentieth Century Impressions of Netherlands India (London, 1909)
• travelmarker.nl

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