Empires of the spice islands
Long before Europe arrived, powerful states rose in the archipelago: the maritime empire of Srivijaya, and Majapahit, whose reach in the fourteenth century is a touchstone of Indonesian nationalism. Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms left the great temples of Borobudur and Prambanan, before Islam spread through the islands by trade from the thirteenth century.
The spices of the Moluccas — nutmeg, cloves, mace — drew the world. The Dutch East India Company seized control of the trade in the seventeenth century, and by the nineteenth the Netherlands ruled the whole archipelago as the Dutch East Indies, growing rich on forced cultivation of coffee, sugar and indigo.
Bandung and the Non-Aligned world
Sukarno declared independence in 1945, and after four years of armed struggle the Dutch conceded in 1949. Indonesia's most lasting contribution to the wider decolonising world came in 1955, when it hosted the Asian-African Conference in the city of Bandung. Twenty-nine newly independent and soon-to-be independent nations met to reject colonialism and Cold War alignment alike.
Bandung was the seedbed of the Non-Aligned Movement, formally launched at Belgrade in 1961. Ghana was not yet independent in 1955 and so was not at Bandung, but Kwame Nkrumah became one of the movement's architects, and the Bandung spirit — solidarity among the colonised, a third way between the superpowers — ran directly into the pan-Africanism of the era. It remains a shared reference point between Asia and Africa to this day.
Dictatorship, democracy and a new capital
In 1965 a murky coup and its aftermath brought General Suharto to power in a wave of anti-communist killings that took hundreds of thousands of lives. His New Order ruled for three decades until the financial crisis of 1998 forced him out, opening the way to democracy.
Indonesia today is a boisterous democracy and a G20 economy, still marked by inequality, corruption and separatist tension in Papua. It won independence for East Timor only under international pressure in 1999, and is now building a new capital, Nusantara, in Borneo to relieve a sinking, overcrowded Jakarta.