Challenging changes: Current themes in the economic history of Indonesia

In the 1970s the perception was widely shared that much of Indonesia's economic past was a case of perpetual doom and gloom, from which the country had only managed to escape since the late-1960s. In part, this perception was caused by the demise of the study of Indonesian history in the Netherlands since the 1950s. In part, it was due to the fact that studies refuting this interpretation, such as that of Burger, were only available in Dutch at a time when academic interest in Indonesia's past was budding in the English-speaking world, in particular in the United States and Australia. Consequently, perceptions of Indonesia's sustained underdevelopment were dominated by the concise explanations which a few monographs in English seemed to provide, in particular by the works of Geertz and his precursor Boeke.

Indonesia's rapid economic transformation during recent decades has discredited interpretations that economic stagnation was inherent to the country's economy and society. It has attracted the attention of academics willing to study the past in order to understand the present and predict the future. Old issues in Indonesia's rich economic historiography have been debated at greater length and new ones have been broached. Five compilations of conference papers suggest that the economic history of Indonesia has indeed entered a state of flux. This article takes stock of some of the changes in the recent historiography of Indonesia's economy during the 19th and 20th centuries. It clusters research published since the 1970s by major themes, roughly in chronological order.