The Madurese are one of the great maritime and trading peoples of the Indonesian Archipelago. This study takes readers into the trading villages of Madura, with their remarkable traditional vessels (perahu) that were powered by sail until the late twentieth century, and examines their informal-sector economic niches, notably the cattle, salt, and timber trades and the carriage of people. The book argues that the nature of village society, the physical characteristics of the island’s coast, cultural traditions of frugality and self-reliance, and an appetite for risk all contributed to the enduring success of Madurese traders. During Suharto’s New Order, Madurese seafarers prospered through their central role in the booming timber trade between Kalimantan and Java, using great ingenuity and quasi-legal means to negotiate state laws and regulations. Based on data collected during visits to remote ports and unlicensed sawmills in Kalimantan, perahu harbors in Java, and “wild” beach ports in Madura, the book explores the inner workings of Madurese maritime trade during a critical period that brought this village-based transport industry into a modern and increasingly regulated economic environment.

‘Becoming – An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’ is an ethnographic monograph that examines the ways in which the peoples of a peri-urban locality in East Java, Indonesia conceive of the person, by looking at how their everyday practices relate to understandings of ethnicity, kinship, Islam and gender. The volume is also a thought experiment that aims to make a theoretical contribution to the discipline of anthropology by proposing the concept of the ‘diaphoron’ person and re-deploying the method of ‘total ethnography’.

This revealing portrait of the oceanic Dutch Empire exposes the maritime world as a catalyst for the downfall of European imperialism.

In Forgotten People Gerben Nooteboom describes and analyses the livelihoods and social security of peasants and migrant Madurese. It offers a new way to categorise and analyse livelihood security of marginal people in Indonesia by using the concept of style.

The anti-communist violence that swept across Indonesia in 1965–66 produced a particularly high death toll in East Java. It also transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of survivors, who faced decades of persecution, imprisonment and violence. In this book, Vannessa Hearman examines the human cost and community impact of the violence on people from different sides of the political divide. Her major contribution is an examination of the experiences of people on the political Left. Drawing on interviews, archival records, and government and military reports, she traces the lives of a number of individuals, following their efforts to build a base for resistance in the South Blitar area of East Java, and their subsequent journeys into prisons and detention centres, or into hiding and a shadowy underground existence. She also provides a new understanding of relations between the army and its civilian supporters, many of whom belonged to Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama. In recent times, the Indonesian killings have received increased attention, but researchers have struggled to overcome a dearth of available records and the stigma associated with communist party membership. By studying events in a single province and focusing on the experiences of individuals, Hearman has taken a large step toward a better understanding of a fraught period in Indonesia’s recent past.

Southeast Asia, located on the Europe-Far East trade route, is one of the busiest shipping region of the world and a major source of seafarers for the international shipping industry. In the context of the growing maritime aspirations of the region and the depressed state of world shipping, a study of the current situation facing seafarers in the region seemed timely.

Mangkunagara I (1726-95) was one of the most flamboyant figures of 18th-century Java. A charismatic rebel from 1740 to 1757 and one of the foremost military commanders of his age, he won the loyalty of many followers. He was also a devout Muslim of the Mystic Synthesis style, a devotee of Javanese culture and a lover of beautiful women and Dutch gin. His enemies—the Surakarta court, his uncle the rebel and later Sultan Mangkubumi of Yogyakarta and the Dutch East India Company—were unable to subdue him, even when they united against him. In 1757 he settled as a semi-independent prince in Surakarta, pursuing his objective of as much independence as possible by means other than war, a frustrating time for a man who was a fighter to his fingertips. Professor Ricklefs here employs an extraordinary range of sources in Dutch and Javanese—among them Mangkunagara I’s voluminous autobiographical account of his years at war, the earliest autobiography in Javanese so far known—to bring this important figure to life. As he does so, our understanding of Java’s devastating civil war of the mid-18th century is transformed and much light is shed on Islam and culture in Java.