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...

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...