The history of Indonesia

Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, has been inhabited by humans for well over a million years. Austronesian seafarers settled it some four thousand years ago, and trade with India and China gave rise to Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms, among them the maritime empire of Srivijaya and Javanese Majapahit. Islam spread through the ports from the thirteenth century and became the religion of most of the population. The Dutch, arriving in search of spices, gradually conquered the whole archipelago, and the republic proclaimed in 1945 won its independence after a war of revolution. Since then Indonesia has passed through Sukarno's nationalist rule, the mass killings of 1965 and 1966, three decades of military-backed dictatorship under Suharto, and, since 1998, the building of the world's third-largest democracy.

In 1891 the Dutch surgeon Eugène Dubois found the fossil skull cap of what became known as Java Man at Trinil in eastern Java, one of the first discoveries of Homo erectus anywhere. Finds at Sangiran show that the species lived on Java from at least 1.5 million years ago. On Flores lived Homo floresiensis, a tiny human species nicknamed the hobbit.

Modern humans reached the region at least 45,000 years ago, on their way to New Guinea and Australia, when low sea levels joined the western islands to mainland Asia. Paintings of animals and hand stencils in limestone caves on Sulawesi are among the oldest known figurative art in the world.

From around 2000 BCE a new population arrived: Austronesian-speaking farmers and seafarers whose ancestors had come from Taiwan by way of the Philippines. They brought rice farming, pottery, pigs and outrigger canoes, and their languages are the ancestors of almost all the languages spoken in Indonesia today. In the last centuries BCE bronze and iron working spread from mainland Southeast Asia.

By the early centuries CE the islands were part of a trading world that linked India and China. Local rulers adopted Sanskrit, Indian scripts and the ideas of Hinduism and Buddhism to enhance their authority. The oldest inscriptions, Sanskrit texts on stone pillars recording the gifts of King Mulawarman at Kutai in eastern Borneo, date to around 400 CE, and soon afterwards King Purnawarman of Tarumanagara left inscriptions in western Java.

From the late seventh century the most powerful state in the western archipelago was Srivijaya, centred on Palembang in southern Sumatra. The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Yijing stayed there in 671 on his way to India and recommended it as a place to study Sanskrit and Buddhist texts, and the Kedukan Bukit inscription of 682 is the earliest record of the kingdom's name. A sea-based empire, it dominated the Strait of Malacca and the trade between China and the Indian Ocean and drew its wealth from ports rather than farmland. Its power was badly shaken around 1025, when a naval expedition sent by the Chola dynasty of southern India sacked its ports, and it gradually gave way to successor states in Jambi and elsewhere.

Central Java, with its fertile volcanic soils, supported a different kind of state based on wet-rice farming. In the eighth and ninth centuries the Buddhist Sailendra dynasty built Borobudur, a vast stepped monument covered with more than two thousand relief panels and the largest Buddhist temple in the world. The Hindu kings of Mataram answered with the temple complex of Prambanan, dedicated to Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma. In the tenth century the centre of Javanese power moved to eastern Java, perhaps after an eruption of Mount Merapi, and kingdoms such as Kediri and Singhasari followed one another there.

In 1292 King Kertanegara of Singhasari was killed in a revolt, shortly after he had humiliated an envoy of Kublai Khan. When a fleet of the Yuan dynasty arrived the next year to punish him, his son-in-law Raden Wijaya allied with the Mongols to defeat his rivals, then turned on them and drove them out. He founded Majapahit, with its capital near Trowulan in eastern Java.

Majapahit reached its height in the fourteenth century under Queen Tribhuwana and her son Hayam Wuruk, who reigned from 1350 to 1389, and their chief minister Gajah Mada. Gajah Mada is remembered for his Palapa oath, a vow to abstain from pleasures until he had united the archipelago, and he conquered Bali and other islands. The court poem Nagarakretagama, written by Prapanca in 1365, lists nearly a hundred tributary lands across what are now Indonesia, Malaysia and beyond, though historians debate how many were truly controlled and how many merely traded with Java.

After Hayam Wuruk's death the kingdom was weakened by a civil war, the Regreg war of 1405 and 1406, and by competition from the new port of Malacca, backed by the Ming fleets of Zheng He. By the fifteenth century Muslim port states were rising along Java's north coast, and around 1527 the sultanate of Demak conquered the last Majapahit capital. Bali remained Hindu, as it is today.

Muslim merchants from Arabia, Persia, India and China had long traded in the archipelago, but the first Muslim kingdoms appear at the end of the thirteenth century on the northern tip of Sumatra. Marco Polo, who passed in 1292, noted a Muslim town at Perlak, and the gravestone of Sultan Malik al-Saleh of Samudera Pasai is dated 1297. Ibn Battuta visited Pasai in 1345. Islam then spread mainly through trade, marriage and the teaching of Sufi scholars rather than conquest, and on Java tradition credits nine saints, the Wali Songo, with converting the population.

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a number of sultanates dominated the islands. Aceh, in northern Sumatra, became a major power and a centre of Islamic scholarship, reaching its peak under Sultan Iskandar Muda between 1607 and 1636. On Java the inland sultanate of Mataram, under Sultan Agung from 1613 to 1645, conquered most of the island, while Banten in the west grew rich on pepper. In Maluku the sultans of Ternate and Tidore controlled the world's only sources of cloves.

The spices of Maluku, cloves, nutmeg and mace, drew the first Europeans. After the Portuguese Empire took Malacca in 1511, Portuguese ships reached Maluku in 1512 and built a fort on Ternate, but they were expelled in 1575 and their lasting foothold came to be limited to eastern Timor. The Dutch arrived in 1596, and in 1602 the merchants of the Dutch Republic combined their companies into the United East India Company, the VOC, with the right to make treaties and wage war. In 1619 its governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen seized the port of Jayakarta and built Batavia, now Jakarta, as the company's Asian headquarters.

The VOC used violence to win a monopoly of the spice trade. In 1621 Coen's forces conquered the Banda Islands, the only source of nutmeg; most of the Bandanese were killed, enslaved or driven out, and the islands were resettled with plantations worked by enslaved labourers. The company intervened in Mataram's succession wars until the sultanate was split in 1755 into the courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta, both Dutch dependants. But it was undermined by corruption, debt and war, and it was dissolved at the end of 1799, its territories passing to the Dutch state.

During the Napoleonic Wars Britain occupied Java from 1811 to 1816 under Thomas Stamford Raffles. After the Dutch returned, Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta led a rebellion, the Java War of 1825 to 1830, in which some 200,000 Javanese died. To make the colony pay, Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch introduced the Cultivation System in 1830, which required villages to devote part of their land or labour to export crops such as coffee, sugar and indigo. It earned vast profits for the Netherlands but caused famines in parts of Java.

The Dutch East Indies were extended across the whole archipelago only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Aceh War, begun in 1873, cost tens of thousands of lives and was not won until the early 1900s, and in Bali in 1906 and 1908 the royal courts of Badung and Klungkung chose ritual mass death, puputan, rather than surrender to Dutch troops. From 1901 the Ethical Policy promised welfare, education and irrigation for the colonised and fostered a small educated class.

Organised nationalism began with Budi Utomo, founded by Javanese students in 1908, and Sarekat Islam, a mass Muslim movement that grew rapidly after 1912. The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) led uprisings in 1926 and 1927, which were suppressed. In 1927 a young engineer, Sukarno, founded the Indonesian Nationalist Party; he was arrested in 1929 and spent much of the next decade in prison or exile. On 28 October 1928 a youth congress in Batavia adopted the Youth Pledge, proclaiming one motherland, one nation and one language, Indonesian, a form of Malay that became the national language.

In World War II the Empire of Japan invaded in January 1942 and the Dutch surrendered in March. The occupiers interned Dutch civilians and conscripted Indonesians as forced labourers, the romusha; a later UN report estimated that some four million people died in the archipelago as a result of the occupation. Yet the Japanese also released nationalist leaders, trained Indonesian militias and, as defeat neared, allowed preparations for independence.

Two days after Japan's surrender, on 17 August 1945, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia, and Sukarno became president. British and Indian troops who landed to accept the Japanese surrender fought Indonesian forces at Surabaya in November 1945. The Netherlands, recovering from its own occupation, sought to restore its rule. Two major Dutch military offensives, in July 1947 and December 1948, captured most towns, and Dutch forces committed atrocities such as the massacres in South Sulawesi and at Rawagede, which the Netherlands later acknowledged.

International pressure, particularly from the United States and the United Nations, forced the Dutch to negotiate, and at a conference in The Hague the Netherlands agreed to transfer sovereignty, which took place on 27 December 1949. Estimates of Indonesian deaths during the revolution range up to around 100,000 or more. The Dutch kept western New Guinea.

The 1950s brought parliamentary democracy, short-lived coalition cabinets and the country's first general election in 1955. The same year Sukarno hosted the Bandung Conference of Asian and African states, a founding moment of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War. Regional rebellions in Sumatra and Sulawesi in 1958 deepened the army's role. In 1959 Sukarno restored the 1945 constitution and ruled through what he called Guided Democracy, balancing the army against the PKI, then the largest communist party outside the communist states.

Sukarno pursued an assertive foreign policy. After armed pressure, a UN-brokered agreement in 1962 transferred western New Guinea to Indonesia in 1963, and its incorporation was confirmed in 1969 by an Act of Free Choice in which just over a thousand selected representatives voted, a process widely criticised; a Papuan separatist movement has continued ever since. From 1963 Sukarno waged a low-level conflict, the Confrontation, against the new federation of Malaysia, and in 1965 Indonesia left the United Nations. At home inflation soared and the economy collapsed.

On the night of 30 September 1965 a group of junior officers calling themselves the 30 September Movement kidnapped and killed six army generals in Jakarta. Major General Suharto took command of the army, crushed the movement within a day and blamed it on the PKI. The extent of the party's involvement is still debated.

What followed was one of the worst mass killings of the twentieth century. From October 1965 to early 1966 the army, together with civilian militias, religious youth groups and local gangs, killed people accused of being communists across Java, Bali, Sumatra and other islands. The most widely cited estimates of the dead range from about 500,000 to a million, and some are higher. Hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned without trial, many for over a decade. Declassified documents show that the United States knew of the killings and supported the army, including by supplying lists of suspected communists. In March 1966 Sukarno was forced to transfer authority to Suharto, who became acting president in 1967 and president in 1968.

Suharto's New Order, which lasted for thirty-two years, rested on the army, the government party Golkar and a tightly controlled political system. Backed by Western governments and aid, it brought high economic growth from oil, timber and manufacturing and greatly reduced poverty. It was also marked by repression, censorship and pervasive corruption centred on the president's family and associates.

In December 1975 Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, which had just declared independence, and annexed it in 1976. A truth commission later estimated that between about 90,000 and 200,000 people died from killings, famine and disease during the occupation, out of a population of some 600,000, and the massacre of protesters at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili in 1991 drew international condemnation.

The Asian financial crisis of 1997 caused the rupiah to collapse and the economy to shrink by more than a tenth. Students led mass protests, and in May 1998 riots in Jakarta and other cities killed more than a thousand people, with Chinese Indonesians targeted in attacks that included widespread sexual violence. Suharto resigned on 21 May 1998. His vice-president, B. J. Habibie, began the reform era, reformasi: political parties and the press were freed, the army's role in politics was reduced and power was devolved to the regions. In 1999 East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence in a UN-run referendum, after which militias backed by the Indonesian military laid waste to the territory; it became the independent state of Timor-Leste in 2002.

Abdurrahman Wahid and then Megawati Sukarnoputri, Sukarno's daughter, governed during a turbulent period of religious and ethnic violence in Maluku and Kalimantan and terrorist attacks, including the Bali bombings of 2002, which killed 202 people. In 2004 Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won the first direct presidential election. Months later, on 26 December 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami killed well over 100,000 people in Aceh, and in its aftermath the government and the Free Aceh Movement signed a peace agreement in Helsinki in 2005, ending nearly three decades of conflict.

Joko Widodo was elected in 2014 and re-elected in 2019, the first president from outside the political and military elite. In 2022 parliament passed a law to move the capital from Jakarta to a new city, Nusantara, in eastern Borneo, though the move has been slow. Prabowo Subianto, a former general and Suharto's one-time son-in-law who had lost to Widodo twice, won the presidential election of February 2024 with Widodo's son Gibran Rakabuming Raka as his running mate, and took office on 20 October 2024.

In 2025 Indonesia joined the BRICS group of emerging economies, and parliament revised the military law to allow more serving officers to hold civilian posts, a change critics saw as a step back from the reforms of 1998. From late August to early September 2025, protests against a housing allowance for members of parliament and the rising cost of living spread across the country after a police armoured vehicle killed a young motorcycle-taxi driver in Jakarta; the government cut the lawmakers' allowances and reshuffled the cabinet. With about 290 million people, Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world and has the largest Muslim population of any nation.