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The British were once again the proxy for a defeated power of Europe. To the Dutch, the reconquest of Indonesia was vital to their credibility as a nation. In the words of the wartime Dutch prime minister, Pieter Gerbrandy: ‘The Netherlands nation is far more than a small part of the European continent. We have a stake in four continents. Our overseas interests condition our very existence.’49 The will to empire was intensified by an emotive nostalgia: the Netherlands East Indies was ‘Holland’s Atlantis’.50 Pre-war Dutch administration was admired by British colonial officials for its technocratic achievements, but known also by its unflinching authoritarianism: the Rust en Orde – tranquillity and order – that it took as its motto. But the Dutch had never fully controlled the archipelago. Their power was felt in ever-decreasing circles around core areas of control: the world’s most densely populous island, Java, the plantation belt around Medan in northern Sumatra, and the Christianized island trading posts of Maluku in the east. Most of the archipelago was governed only lightly through local authority, such as the Islamic sultanates of east Sumatra, southern Borneo and Sulawesi and other tiers of subordinate native officials or tribal chiefs. Even at the epicentre of empire on Java, the royal courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta still possessed aura and authority, and the proud priyayi aristocracy had carved out a role for themselves as a native administrative elite. It was a kaleidoscopic society, shaped by influential minorities such as the wealthy communities of Chinese and Arab traders and governed by an elaborate and legally entrenched racial hierarchy. At the apex of this world stood a large community of Dutch settlers and officials. In the villaed suburbia of cities such as Jakarta, Bandung and Surabaya they had enjoyed a privileged lifestyle that made the social excesses of pre-war Malaya and Indo-China seem modest by comparison. At its margins was the Indo-European community. For many generations it had been the custom of the Indies Dutch to take ‘temporary wives’ locally and create families that remained behind in Indonesia when a father was repatriated to the Netherlands. In 1945 the Dutch settlers and Eurasians who emerged from the Japanese internment camps were to face the most uncertain of futures.

In the years after the First World War, the façade of Rusten Orde had been crumbling. To describe this era as one of ‘national awakening’ does inadequate account to the maelstrom which confronted the British in late 1945. For Indonesians, the first decades of the century were the time of pergerakan, the age of movement: of dramatic experiment, particularly in journalism and letters in the Malay medium, which was fashioned by writers into a new Indonesian national language. It was also a ‘world-upside-down’: old hierarchies were challenged by a level of popular mobilization that was not to be found in Britain’s Southeast Asian colonies. Different streams of thought and action emerged, sometimes in synthesis, sometimes in competition.51 Global currents of Islamic resurgence swept through Indonesia, and re-energized an old tradition of religious learning at a village level. In Sumatra, from where many of the new intellectuals heralded, in Java and then beyond, arose ‘wild schools’, independent of the Dutch system, whose graduates created a series of Islamic associations that both the Dutch and the Japanese hesitated to repress. Then came the internationalism of Marxism. The Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), founded in 1920, was the first in Asia. It had emerged, in part, out of the Islamic movement, and some of its key intellectuals sought to equate the struggle for Islam with the struggle against colonialism and capitalism. The PKI was repressed savagely by the Dutch after abortive uprisings in 1926 and 1927. As many as 13,000 people were arrested, and 1,308 of them sent to a purpose-built ‘isolation colony