In recent years two high quality overviews of the economic history of Indonesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been published that testify of the growing maturity of the field. The two books – The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A History of Missed Opportunities by Anne Booth (1998), and The Emergence of a National Economy. An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000 by a team of authors (Howard Dick, Vincent Houben, Thomas Lindblad and Thee Kian Wie) (2002) – are written by distinguished experts in the field. Both books also aim to be comprehensive, but interestingly, they do this in very different ways. But let me focus on the similarities first: apart from the obvious fact that they want to present an economic history of Indonesia over the past twohundred years, they also have in common that they stress the links between economic and political history. Both try ‘to bring the state back in’, by focussing on the process of state formation – in particular in the colonial period – and, even more importantly, by analysing the consequences of government policies for economic development. The leading theme of the The Emergence (TE), as formulated in the programmatic opening chapter by Howard Dick, are the links between state-formation, the nation state, and the national economy. Similarly, The Indonesian Economy (TIE) contains a detailed analysis of government policy, and in the final analysis of the ‘missed opportunities’ of Indonesia's past, the state plays a crucial role. This also brings me to the other obvious striking similarity: both books try to explain the failure of Indonesian economic development in this period (or at least until the second half of the 1960s), and discuss the reasons why economic development was relatively slow.

This article contains a sweeping summary of Indonesia's macro-economic growth and development experience since 1880, largely on the basis of quantitative data from published research. It sets the scene for some of the other papers in this special issue. The paper identifies phases of economic expansion and contraction and some of the broad factors relevant to understanding the phasing of the development process that spans 120 years. Despite the halting progress in the country's development experience, the article underlines the continuity of economic change in Indonesia, beyond the years that demarcate the end of the colonial era. It also addresses the fact that in comparative terms Indonesia's growth experience during the twentieth century was remarkably fast.

The spectre of a global crisis, predicted in 1997, but then failing to materialise outside (parts of) Asia, Russia, and Brazil, now looms again. Expectations of the arrival of a world-wide economic recession might constitute a conducive atmosphere for the study of economic crises and depressions in the past, in this case the Indonesian past. It is in fact somewhat amazing that, the study of the 1930s Depression apart, economic and social historians have not taken up this topic more eagerly during the last five years.

The term indonesianisasi stands for the removal of Dutch tutelage and a subsequent fundamental reorientation of the economy of Indonesia at the time of decolonisation and during the years immediately after Dutch acknowledgement of Indonesian independence in December 1949. The term was initially used in a narrow sense designating the replacement of Dutch officials and managers by Indonesian nationals in the government bureaucracy and private firms in Indonesia during the years leading up to the nationalisation of remaining Dutch business assets in Indonesia in December 1957. There is a growing appreciation that the term needs to be applied i n a broader sense as the transfer of economic leadership in newly independent Indonesia with profound consequences for future economic development. This article forms a first exploration of the application of the term indonesianisasi in such a broad sense. It should be emphasised, therefore, that this is a starting-point of new research rather than the outcome of a completed undertaking.

Thanks largely to the work of Pierre van der Eng we now have quite a good picture of trends in growth of Indonesia's real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the twentieth century. There were two periods, each of around three decades when growth was positive in per capita terms. From 1900 to 1930, real GDP grew at 2.7 per cent per annum; if we assume that population grew over this period at around 1.2 per cent per annum, then annual growth in real per capita terms was 1.5 per cent per annum. This implies an increase over a thirty-year period in per capita GDP of around fifty-six per cent. Beginning in 1929, there was a sustained growth collapse which continued through the early 1930s; real per capita GDP in 1934 was only eighty-three per cent of the 1928 level in 1934 (Table 1). Some recovery occurred in the latter part of the 1930s, and by 1941 per capita GDP had returned to roughly the 1928 level. But the twenty-five years from 1941 to 1966 were characterised by foreign occupation, revolutionary struggle, and, after 1949, considerable macroeconomic instability culminating in hyper-inflation in the early and mid-1960s. In 1967, per capita GDP was estimated by Van der Eng to be only about seventy-five per cent of the 1928 figure.