Acknowledgements

In the past decade there has been increased attention on Indonesia’s colonial history, both in the country itself and in the Netherlands, Indonesia’s former colonial power, from scholars, activists and artists. These engagements reflect the overall state of ambiguity regarding colonial history in both countries. In Indonesia, a challenge is how to write new histories of the period of Dutch colonial rule, including how to address firmly nationalist views of history, especially when dealing with violence, and how to include different historical subjects in writing, including women and Chinese Indonesians. Similarly, in the Netherlands, there has been criticism of that country’s focus on the 1945–49 period, thereby overlooking the longer history of colonialism and how to deal with some of its darkest aspects, such as economic exploitation and violence. It is evident that the process of addressing histories of colonialism remains highly contested in both countries and requires sustained critical attention.

This volume is the first to comprehensively attend to these contestations and seeks to foreground Indonesian voices and perspectives. The project arose out of discussions with leading historians Eveline Buchheim, Bambang Purwanto and Remco Raben, who suggested that we critically examine processes of and sensitivities around writing colonial history. They also provided generous feedback on an early concept note for this volume.

The contributions to this volume are based on a series of workshops that were held in July 2021 and January 2022. These workshops were made possible through the support of the Indonesia Democracy Hallmark Research Initiative (IDeHaRI) at the University of Melbourne. We wish to acknowledge Bronwyn Beech Jones, who provided invaluable assistance in preparing and organising the workshops. We also thank the external discussants who shared their valuable insights and feedback on draft chapters at the January 2022 workshops: Eveline Buchheim, Vannessa Hearman, Wayne Modest, Bambang Purwanto and Alicia Schrikker.

Most of all, we are grateful to our contributors, who worked closely with us to develop their chapters during these workshops and beyond. It is important to mention that we started this project during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many of our contributors were facing extraordinary challenges. We thank them for generously offering their time and energy to this project.

Last, we thank those who supported us with the finalisation of the manuscript. We are grateful for the financial support provided by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne and for Ratna Erika Suwarno’s research assistance. We thank Jan Borrie for editing support. Finally, we would like to express our sincere appreciation to James Fox and ANU Press, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their support in publishing this volume.