The world's largest archipelago, lying athwart one of the world's major trade arteries, is an unlikely location for a single mercantilist or protec¬tionist nation-state. The much smaller Caribbean provides the closest comparison to Indonesia in terms of tropical archipelagos that are highly accessible to world trade, but it is divided among 14 sovereignties, heirs to the world's contesting powers. Even other centres of world trade without an archipelagic character, such as the Middle East and the Low Countries of Europe, have been marked by a plurality of commercial city-states or autonomous cities, morphing into a variety of competing modern states.

Throughout recorded history, the strategic location of the Malacca and Sunda Straits, and the alternation of monsoon winds carrying sailing ships between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, made the archipelago and pen-insula—Nusantara—a natural centre for mercantile city-states living by trade (Reid 2000). Its spices were the chief prize of the global maritime struggles of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, motivating explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama to discover new sea routes to this part of the world. Despite the modern nationalist imaginings of the ancestral ‘empires’ of Sriwijaya and Majapahit, the fundamental reality of the region before 1650 was of multiple port-states competing to attract the world's traders. Yet somehow the idea of a state monopoly of trade developed very deep roots in this region, despite having to contend with a very different reality.

This idea seems to have taken deepest root in Imperial China. The curious fiction that China needed no external trade meant that for lengthy periods before 1567 the only form of international exchange the Chinese court would accept as legal was that associated with the so-called tribute missions from a few ‘barbarian’ kingdoms that were able to play this game. Those that did play it successfully—from Sriwijaya in the seventh to eleventh centuries to Pasai (northern Sumatra) and Melaka in the fif¬teenth—gained a kind of theoretical monopoly over the lucrative trade with China. Indeed, Chinese court records make it appear as though the only legitimate traders were those from the tribute-sending polities.

The historical scholarship of the nationalist age in the second half of the 20th century achieved much in understanding the roots of Southeast Asian national cultures and the resilience of each of them in maintaining an autonomous dynamic despite imperial pressures. Among the models energetically rejected by that era were not only European and Japanese imperial ideas of a civilizing mission, but the “Greater India” school celebrating Indian cultural expansion in the first millennium of the Common Era, and Sino-centric notions of a Chinese world order extending its influence into Southeast Asia. The new national historians insisted on disentangling their pasts, as well as their presents, from the stories of others. Busy building new pasts to match and legitimate their new futures, they had neither time nor inclination to explore more regional themes. Comparison and connection within Asia and beyond it has only recently returned to the agenda, not before time in a globalizing world.

In the West there was also much sympathy for decolonizing history and for exploring the roots of the new nationalist and radical forces transforming society. But the single-country focus was modified from the 1970s by an area studies approach to organizing knowledge, dominant in the U.S. and to some extent English-medium scholarship more generally in this period. In the classroom, and increasingly in books that served the classroom, Southeast Asian history was often taught as a whole. To a lesser extent those studying China, Japan and Korea outside that region had to know something about Northeast Asia as a whole. But the more these area-focussed textbooks sought a particular character for Southeast (or Northeast) Asia, however, the more they emphasized its distinctiveness from each of the other conventional regions. The maritime and commercial character of Southeast Asia, open to external influences, was contrasted to the self-sufficient Confucian societies of the Northeast, ideologically inclined to exalt agriculture and scholarship in contrast with commerce. The fluid, plural and kinship-based political systems of the Southeast were contrasted with the relatively bureaucratic, bookish and “earthbound” states of the Confucian tradition.

‘GOODBYE CHINA, HELLO INDONESIA’?

Surprising as it sounds to cynical Indonesians and disillusioned Indonesianists, there are reasons for thinking that this is at last Indonesia's moment on the world stage. The world's fourth-biggest country by population has an unenviable reputation for not living up to expectations, epitomized by the subtitle of Anne Booth's economic history of Indonesia: ‘A history of missed opportunities’ (Booth 1998). She traced over almost two centuries a sequence of hopeful new beginnings followed by disappointments, leaving Indonesia one of the world's poorest and most conflicted countries in the 1960s. As other Asian tiger economies leapt ahead in the latter part of the twentieth century, Indonesia also grew, but failed to close the gap with its neighbours. In 1998 the Asian financial crisis caused a 13 per cent drop in GDP, and an IMF bullying of the Suharto government into taking the kind of stern medicine that helped precipitate its fall.

Yet now we have international pundits declaring that Indonesia is the future. The influential US journal Foreign Policy used the heading ‘The Indonesian tiger’ for a story proclaiming the country the quiet achiever of the moment (Keating 2010). Much quoted NYU Stern School economist Nouriel Roubini, known as ‘Dr Doom’ for his forecasting of global financial crisis and especially a coming crash in China, went further. In a speech reported under the heading ‘Roubini: goodbye China, hello Indonesia’, he noted that China's growth rate was falling while Indonesia's was rising (6.1 per cent in 2010, 6.3 per cent in 2011, 6.5 per cent expected in 2012). He argued moreover that Indonesia had the right model to sustain growth, with its low inflation, low debt (about 26 per cent of GDP), young demographics, and the insulation provided by two-thirds of its GDP being derived from domestic consumption. It therefore stood a better chance than China, let alone the developed world, of long-term growth even in the hard times he expected the world to face (Deutsch 2011). Indonesia's admission to the G20 club of influential states seems no more than its due in light of such predictions.

This book is the latest to appear in a long and distinguished lineage. The Australian National University's Indonesia Update began in 1983, when the late Jamie Mackie and Peter McCawley conceived and implemented the idea of an annual public conference in Canberra to assess conditions in Indonesia. From the beginning it was understood as an alliance between economic and political analysts, with numerous other disciplines playing appropriate roles. As the format congealed the conference was held annually on a weekend in late September, and began with two surveys of the past year – one economic and the other political. The remaining papers were clustered around a theme of particular topical importance.

With Hal Hill playing a lead role through the ANU's Indonesia Project, which he headed for many years, the Update books have been published regularly since 1989. They now constitute a kind of record of an evolving nation. The two survey papers were initially published in the Update books, but since 2005 they have been published quickly in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, while the papers clustered around the theme of each year's conference became the basis of a substantial book published in the following year. This book is the 23rd publication in the Indonesia Update series, and it emanates from the 29th conference. Greg Fealy (politics) and Chris Manning and Raden Purnagunawan (economics) provided the two overviews, which were published in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies of November 2011.

The theme of the Update, held on 30 September and 1 October 2011, was ‘Indonesia's place in the world’. After a series of volumes naturally focusing on Indonesia's difficult transition to a democratic and decentralized format, it was felt to be time to look at the country's international stance and standing. Admission to the G20 group of nations was one factor making this timely; the pressures of globalization on every country were another. The concept of ‘Indonesia's rise’ emerged at Don Emmerson's suggestion in the planning process as the title for one panel of the conference, very much in quotes. One paper after another, however, grappled in some way with the international perception that this might at last be Indonesia's moment, unlikely as it seemed to oft-disappointed specialists. The book has therefore cohered around this issue.