Snouck could speak of the region of Aceh, on the nnorthern tip of Sumatra, as ‘that country… that old pirate-state’, and the American traveller Eliza Scidmore of ‘ the brave, liberty-loving Achinese’. Within a decade...

The word ‘Indonesia’ was first manufactured in 1850 in the form ‘Indu-nesians’ by the English traveler and social observer George Samuel Windsor Earl. He was searching for an ethnographic term to describe ‘that branch of...