PTRSCE013 - Archipelago: Indonesia Past & Present

Course Description

Delve into the history of the world's largest Muslim country

Join us to examine Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, from its origins to present day.

Faculty Author

Eric Tagliacozzo is a professor of history at Cornell University and director of the Comparative Muslim Societies Program. He specializes in the study of Islam around the world and in the history of waterways and international commerce. He has also focused on the history of people, ideas, and materials in motion in and around the world's waterways, with a particular interest in the Indian Ocean.

Eric has written and edited numerous books about the cultural implications of trade between Asia, the Near East, and Africa, including Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (Yale, 2005), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) in 2007. In 2011, Duke University Press published Eric's Chinese Circulations, and in 2014, Oxford University Press published Burmese Lives, a book of essays introduced and co-edited by Eric.

Benefits to the Learner

We’ll start with the oldest known records of this incredible place, when Hinduism and Buddhism washed over the archipelago.

 From there, we’ll proceed to the Age of Commerce, when ships of many lands sought out these islands, mainly for the wealth of spices that could only be found on these shores.

 A third lecture and discussion will focus on the eventual resistance to colonization, which was most studiously practiced by the Dutch.

 Through select readings, we’ll examine the Indonesian Revolution in the mid-20th century, which brought Indonesians their own nation, before exploring contemporary Indonesia during our final day together.