The Indonesian Revolution seemed – for a while – to be everybody's revolution. The struggle for Independence in Indonesia sent waves of hope and fear across many borders, old and new. It signalled the ending of some empires and the beginning of others, although there were many long struggles still to be undertaken.

This book explores why Indonesian Independence was so important to so many people around the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. To do so, it considers two events in detail: the Boycott of Dutch shipping in Australian waters in support of the Indonesian Republic (begun in September 1945), and the Battle of Surabaya in Indonesia (October to December 1945). Each of these events is iconic within their own national histories in India and Australia as well as Indonesia, but neither has been analysed or commemorated in relation to the other or to the region as a whole. Yet they happened simultaneously and were linked to each other through people, politics, and rapidly travelling news over the radio, in newspapers, and on film.

From a broader view, analysing these two events together allows us to see the region in a new way – to go beyond both the old borders of empire and the newly imposed borders of the decolonising nations. At the time, many people no longer saw the region as the old network of imperial colonies that it had been, nor as the patchwork of separate nations enclosed behind individual borders that it was to become. Instead, their lived experience of the region was of a series of connections along which trade, ideas, and people flowed. Although many people along these connected routes had conflicts with each other or held prejudices and fears about each other, they also held shared hopes for new worlds.

The two focal events of this book, the Boycott and the Battle, each involved people who had crossed many borders. The Boycott in Australia would not have begun or been sustained without the transnational effort of Indonesian, Indian, and Chinese seamen, and Australian maritime workers, both on ships and on the docks. While it was recorded and analysed in both the Australian and Indian press, they each presented and explained the news of the Boycott in very different ways.