A history of the Indonesian Revolution, Revolusi consists of fragments of oral history compellingly integrated into a broader narrative. It is a readable account, accessible to a general reader without any background, but the oral history is unique and includes some material which may interest specialists.

Van Reybrouck's fieldwork was carried out in the 2010s, when he was interviewing people in their nineties — in many cases centenarians, and many of them in care homes — about their experiences as children or young adults. This undoubtedly produces some distortions, but one gets the feeling that these memories may be less filtered by social conventions and the influence of read history than more recent memories might be. Most of the witnesses are ordinary people, rather than leaders, and there are some unexpected ones, such as a German submariner who ended up stuck in Indonesia.

There is excellent coverage of the history leading up to the Revolution, with the colonial period and the Japanese occupation together taking up more than half the book. The three decks of a colonial steamship are used to illustrate the broader stratification of Dutch East Indies society. In contrast there is little on the aftermath of Independence, and what there is focuses on the late and superficial Dutch acknowledgement of their war crimes and on the 1955 Bandung Conference and its broader influence on decolonisation and geopolitics.

Despite taking as its title the Indonesian term for the Revolution, Revolusi has relatively little from the Indonesian perspective, though that is fairly clearly where Van Reybrouck's sympathies lie. Nationalist leaders such as Sukarno and Hatta are much less central than in most accounts — Sjahrir gets more attention than either — and there is relatively more on Dutch and international perspectives. Reybrouck is open about having to rely on interpreters for interviews in languages such as Indonesian or Javanese, and his written sources are almost all in Dutch or English.

Revolusi is not, perhaps, the ideal introduction for newcomers to the subject, but it may end up serving as that, since I don't know that there is a good introductory history of the Indonesian Revolution. And Van Reybrouck provides an excellent thirty page bibliographic essay for anyone wanting to explore anything in greater depth.

August 2025

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