Indonesia’s History Between the Myths - G. J. Resink

Indonesia’s History Between the Myths: Essays in Legal History and Historical Theory – G. J. Resink (1968 by W. Van Hoeve Publishers)
IDR. 15.000.000
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Genre: History
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Summary
The student of Indonesia’s rich and varied history often finds his view of facts and patterns obscured by a cloud of myths. True, some of the myths much favoured by Dutch colonial historians have faded away with Dutch colonialism itself. But several—the myth of Greater Majapahit, for instance, or that of centuries-long domination of all Indonesia by the Dutch—today loom larger than ever, while other, newer myths of a national and nationalistic kind have also gathered.

This collection of studies by the research professor of Indonesian legal history at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta, opens with five primarily theoretical essays that deal with various aspects of Indonesian historiography between the myths, tracing the shift from Europocentric to Indocentric, from colonial to national, and from unconsciously to admittedly subjective historical writing.

Following these essays are eight studies in which Professor Resink deploys an ever more impressive array of legal and other evidence demonstrating the fallaciousness of one of the major myths of Indonesian history: the myth that for three hundred and fifty years the archipelago was dominated by the Dutch. Over against this myth the author sets the more accurate picture of an archipelago containing a number of independent or semi-independent states even as late as the first decade of the twentieth century. This picture, blurred during the years of high colonialism that followed, is painstakingly restored, detail by detail.

Concluding the volume is an essay entitled “The All-but-Inverted Image”, in which Professor Resink counters the arguments that have been brought forward by his critics and gives a final summing-up of his leading theses and themes.
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