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Lin Hongxuan, Revolusi: Indonesia and the birth of the modern world, International Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 4, July 2024, Pages 1808–1810, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae148
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David Van Reybrouck's Revolusi is an enthralling read even for seasoned historians. The prose is clear and the supporting evidence is judiciously selected. The title is somewhat misleading: only the second half of the book concerns the Indonesian revolution (1945–9), while the first half is taken up by a long preamble on the colonial period and the Japanese occupation. That said, its length is a strength rather than a weakness. At over 600 pages, the book's length allows readers to trace the trajectory of the Indonesian anti-colonial movement from beginning to end, something that is rarely possible in university press monographs. It also allows for plenty of anecdotes, which illustrate the extremes of experience in ways that statistics cannot.
The book synthesizes existing scholarship aptly. It relies heavily on Dutch scholarship (an asset for an English edition, since much of this work has not been translated), but it also does a good job of incorporating English and Indonesian literature. This is especially evident in Van Reybrouck's ‘bibliographical essay’, which graduate students will find useful (p. 529). The synthetic function is supplemented by copious deployment of oral history: interviews painstakingly carried out with a wide range of informants and collected over five years. These interviews, mostly with octogenarians or older people who have since passed on, inhibit the imposition of seamless nationalist teleology. Many of the interviewees are identifiably subaltern, with limited education or from geographically remote areas, and their contributions enrich history in unique ways.
