India and the island world of Southeast Asia were in close cultural andcommercial contact for many centuries before both came under the influence, and ultimately the domination, of the European colonial powers. In spite ofthe fact that the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago were the chief colonial possessions of two of the most advanced and wealthiest countries in West Europe, both emerged into independence in the aftermath of the second world war as extremely poor, technologically backward countries.But in both countries an indigenous political leadership had assumed power, which was determined to accelerate the pace of economic progress, and achieve a high level of development, in the shortest possible time. It is thus interesting to make a pairwise comparison of these two countries, both in respect of the colonial legacy they inherited, and in respect of their post-independence economic policy-making, in order to indicate the specific contributions of two different colonial systems to subsequent economic policy efforts and achievements. We begin with a brief discussion of the economic legacy bequeathed by the two colonial powers to independent India and Indonesia.

A systematic comparison of the development of modern bureaucracies in India and Indonesia during the colonial era has never been made. No equivalent of the excellent work done by J.S. Furnivall on the colonial administration in Burma and Java is available. Yet, much of what he said is useful for the subject of this paper and we shall therefore lean heavily on him. It would be an overstatementto say that Indians before the Second World War felt interested in the events and developments in Indonesia. In the other direction that interest surely existed. We need only to recall the deep impact the Indian nationalist movement made upon such Indonesian nationalists as Sukarno.‘The example of Asian nationalism to which Indonesians referred most often was the Indian one.’ This applies for instance to the Congress non-cooperation campaign in the early 1920s. Indonesian nationalists could since then be classified as cooperators and non-cooperators, although for them the principal criterion was not the wish to boycott Dutch schools, goods and government officials(such a boycott actually never occurred in colonial Indonesia)but the refusal to participate in representative councils such as the Volksraad(i.e. People's Council).

It was a reluctant Dutch government, representing an equally reluctant Dutch population, that had to recognize the independent Republic of Indonesia in 1949. The so-called decolonization process had been a traumatic experience for all parties concerned. The academic community in the Netherlands was no exception to this rule, and Dutch ‘Indonesian studies’ went into a long hibernation. This applies particularly to the study of the welfare services, an aspect of Dutch colonial rule that had been the pride and glory of civil servants and scholars alike (many of them former civil servants).

When we intone the words ‘Unity in Diversity’, we know we are faced with a problem. At best these words express an aspiration rather than a reality — otherwise it would hardly be worthwhile to utter them. But most of all they seem to be an incantation meant to exorcize the threat of both disruptive diversity and oppressive unity. It is, in other words, a mantra that owes its expressiveness to the neatly concise formulation of an unresolved paradox. It is concerned with the cosmogonic conundrum of the One-and-the-Many that has exercised the mythopoeic imagination of the Vedic seers and their likes as well as the rational mind of present-day physicists. Our mantra, then, evokes the riddle of the cosmic order which must encompass its opposite, disorder, so as to be truly universal. It is not surprising, therefore, that we should encounter the same paradox on the more mundane level of the political order. The manyfold diversities undermine the integrity of the whole. Unity, in its turn, threatens to extinguish diversity and to replace it with deadening sameness. Between them, unity and diversity provide for an unpredictable dynamic, and it is a fitting tribute to the dangers involved that our mantra has been enshrined in its Indonesian form in the Republic's armorial motto: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.

In May 1934 Nehru and Sukarno were both in detention. Nehru was in Dehra Dun jail sentenced to two years after having been found guilty of making a seditious speech. Sukarno, also arrested for sedition, was in exile on the island of Flores. For both men it was a period of reflection and analysis, a time to review the progress of the nationalist movement and make some assessment of their own contributions to it. Nehru, more given to introspection than Sukarno, composed his autobiography during this time, and continued with the historical studies he had commenced during earlier prison terms. Sukarno in exile spent much of his time getting to grips with Islam, primarily, it would appear, to prepare arguments to convince the leaders of the Islamic movements in Indonesia of the compatibility of Islam with modernization and progressive political action. In this respect, like Jinnah, he was attracted to the figure of Kemal Attaturk whose general outlook on the relationship between state and religion he endorsed.

India's national day is 26 January; Indonesia's 17 August. They point to a difference. 26 January derives from the Indian National Congress' decision at its Lahore Congress in December 1929 to launch a Civil Disobedience movement against the British Government in India. Jawaharlal Nehru as Congress' President arranged that the first step would be for thousands of Congress rank and file to join together on 26 January 1930 to take the Independence Pledge. This declared that since ‘it is the inalienable right of the Indian people […] to have freedom, […] if any government deprives a people of those rights […] the people have a […] right to […] abolish it […]. We recognise, however, that the most effective way of gaining freedom is not through violence. We will, therefore, prepare ourselves by withdrawing, so far as we can, all voluntary association from the British Government and will prepare for Civil Disobedience.’ From that moment onwards 26 January has been India's Independence Day, though when it was first held India's independence still stood 17 years away. The celebrations have thus come to link post-independent India with the feats of the Indian national movement which for so many years pursued the strategy of civil disobedience, and which, despite a series of intervening fits and starts, is seen to have been crucial to its success. For India the heroics of its freedom struggle lie, that is, in its elon-gated pre-independence past, of long years of humiliating harassment and costly commitment. They are not much associated with the final run up to independence. With the emphasis rather upon the earlier, principally Gandhian years, of protests and processions, of proscriptions and prison, the final transfer of power is not seen, moreover, as comprising a traumatic break with the past, but as the logical climax to all that had gone before. The direct continuities between the pre- and post-independence periodes in India in these respects are accepted as a central part of its national heritage.

Discussing the issue of foreign investment in colonial economies, such as those of India and Indonesia, in the first half of the twentieth century gives rise to a number of problems. In addition to the obvious difficulties of data collection there are also complex conceptual and definitional issues. The aim of this paper is to set out what we know about the quantities and performance of foreign investment in the two economies, and to use this information to draw more general conclusions about the economic history of the two areas. In analysing the material only those lines which seem to offer a genuinem comparative perspective will be followed. We are interested in those aspects of the history of foreign investment in India which can tell us something about the history of foreign investment in Indonesia, and vice versa. It is convenient to split the subject into two time periods, 1920-38 and 1945-60.

This essay attempts to analyse the differential effects of the Great Depression on two very dissimilar economies bound only by the commonality of colonial overlordship. Though the motivation was noble enough, the quality and quantity of research that went into making this article has been well below par. For the Indonesian section, I was particularly hamstrung by my total ignorance of the Dutch language and also of the subtle intersectoral nuances of the economy. What I say about the archipelago is, therefore, much in the nature of broad, indicative statements culled from the data and interpretations available in English. Even these I say with all manners of qualification. This exercise in comparative economic history was thrust upon me in order to broaden my knowledge of other things in the universe. Perhaps, at the end of it all, I have become a trifle more knowledgeable. Nevertheless, writing this essay constantly reminded me of Daniel as he faced the lions: he was doing an extremely foolhardy thing under severe duress and with prayers on his lips.

The dawn of the twentieth century witnessed a significant development in Indonesian social history in that urban centers replaced the role of rural communities as the loci of change. As much as the colonial demand of land and labour in the nineteenth century had changed the structure of the countryside, the development of commerce and industry inthe twentieth century resulted in the reconstruction of the social life in the centers of those activities Urban population, especially in the large cities of over 100,000, increased rapidly. Basing himself on the 1930 census data, Wertheim noted that in 1930 8 51 percent of the population of Java and Madura lived in 102 urban centers. In the course of a decade from 1920 to 1930 urban population percentage to the total population had increased 1 percent Only in East Java was the development less impressive. There the cities of 25,000 to 50,000 were stagnating, and there was sharp relative and absolute regression in the cities with a 10,000 to 25,000 population. What is more important, according to Wertheim, is the ‘mental climate’ of the urban centers that signified a new era in history

Numerous writings on intellectuals as learned or professional middle class have been published since the sixties for the obvious reason that this social group played a central role in the struggle for independence from which they emerged as the new leaders or ralers of new nations. Furthermore, being protagonist of change the intelligentsia showed their pre-eminence in giving their society a modern shape. Those studies show clearly the striking similarities of the characteristics of the intelligentsia from various developing countries. Their emergence was closely related to the expansion of western education, their marginal socio-historical location created the propensity to protagonize modernization, their oppositional role was inherent in their being a counter-elite in the colonial power structure. More similarities or parallel development can be brought up in our comparative study between India and Indonesia by asking the following questions: (1) Within the frame-work of the colonial setting what kind of factors were at work in creating the intelligentsia; (2) To what extend did endogenous factors impede the mobility and dynamics of the intelligentsia; (3) Did the intelligentsia's social origin put constraints on their capacity to accommodate themselves to new situations; (4) In fulfilling their function as intellectuals did they succeed in playing their leadership role in the nationalist movement; (5) Which structural conduciveness was necessary in order to provide a leverage to antagonize the establishment; etc. What kind of political commitment one came across among the intelligentsia? Were new ideologies quite instrumental in endorsing the intelligentsia's political role? Did they succeed in realizing political modernization?