Indonesia

From the spice islands and the temples of Java to Southeast Asia's largest democracy.

Indonesia is a vast archipelago of thousands of islands whose history stretches from early Austronesian seafarers through the great Hindu-Buddhist maritime realms of Srivijaya and Majapahit, the coming of Islam and the spice-trade sultanates, and more than three centuries of Portuguese and Dutch colonial intrusion centred on the Dutch East India Company. A national awakening in the early twentieth century, accelerated by the Japanese occupation of 1942-45, culminated in the Proclamation of Independence on 17 August 1945 by Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta. After a four-year revolution the Netherlands recognised Indonesian sovereignty in December 1949. The republic passed through Sukarno's Guided Democracy, the violent birth of Suharto's New Order amid the mass killings of 1965-66, and since 1998 has built one of the world's largest democracies.