Onder de leus ‘Merdeka!’ stortte de Republiek Indonesië zich in 1945 in een strijd om de onafhankelijkheid waarvan niemand de afloop kon voorspellen. Harry Poeze en Henk Schulte Nordholt vertellen een nieuw verhaal over de revolutie waarin naast de strijd tegen de Nederlanders de ongewisse opkomst van de Republiek centraal staat. Na de gruwelen van de Japanse bezetting moesten de republikeinse leiders een nieuwe staat zien op te bouwen. Zij kregen van Neder-landse zijde te maken met kortzichtige politici en oorlogszuchtige militairen. In eigen kring moest de Republiek het hoofd bieden aan eigenzinnige en strijdlustige jongeren, autonome militaire leiders, behoudende federalisten, revolutionaire communisten en radicale moslims. Staatsgrepen, een burgeroorlog en Nederlandse aanvallen bedreigden het voortbestaan van de Republiek. Daarom is de overwinning die de Indonesische leiders uiteindelijk behaalden het grote wonder van de revolutie.
Authors
Harry A. Poeze is a senior researcher at KITLV working on the Project ‘Dutch Military Operations in Indonesia 1945-1950’ in a general supervisory and advisory capacity, contributing his expertise on developments in Indonesian politics and the Indonesian armed forces. Harry studied Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, where he graduated in 1972. In 1976 he obtained his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the biography of the Indonesian political leader Tan Malaka. At that time Harry was an alderman in the local government of Castricum. Later he became head of the KITLV Publications Department (1981), which has since developed into the KITLV Press. Since 2010 he was senior publisher with the Press, and now, in retirement, a senior researcher at KITLV. His research interest is in the developments in the Indonesian political world since 1900, during Dutch colonial rule, the Japanese occupation, and the Indonesian Revolution in particular. He published a three-volume history of the Indonesian Left during the Indonesian Revolution, concentrating on the role of Tan Malaka, in 2007. Currently he is working on a publication about Indonesian political songs (1925-1965), the (revised) biography of Tan Malaka till 1945, and a monograph on Boven-Digoel, the Dutch colonial internment camp for political prisoners.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. Henk Schulte Nordholt (former head of research at KITLV) is Honorary Fellow at KITLV and emeritus professor of Indonesian History at Leiden University. His main fields of research include Southeast Asian history, contemporary politics in Indonesia, political violence, and the anthropology of colonialism. He has a special interest in Balinese studies. Schulte Nordholt studied history at the VU University in Amsterdam, from which he graduated in 1980 (cum laude). In 1988 he obtained his PhD degree (cum laude) in social sciences at the Free University with a thesis on the history of the political system on the island of Bali. He taught anthropology and Asian history at the University of Amsterdam from 1985 until 2005. From 1999 until 2007 he was IIAS professor of Asian History at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and from 2007 until 2014 Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the VU University in Amsterdam. He was the Head of Research at KITLV from 2002-2019. He has coordinated a large Dutch Indonesian research program ‘Governance, Markets and Citizens (2013-2017)’, which is sponsored by the Scientific Program Indonesia – Netherlands (SPIN), and is currently coordinating the research project ‘’Indonesia in Transition: From Revolution to Nation-Building, 1943-1958’ (2017-2021), which is financed by NWO. Together with Harry Poeze he will write a new overview of the Indonesian revolution which will appear in 2022.
