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The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A History of Missed Opportunities. By ANNE BOOTH. London: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 1998. xvi, 377 pp. L24.95 (paper).
The Emergence of a National Economy: An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000. By HOWARD DICK, VINCENT HOUBEN, THOMAS LINDBLAD, and THEE KIAN WEE. Crows Nest, NSW: Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with Alien and Unwin; Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. xvii, 286 pp. $38.00 (cloth).
The two books under review here have a similar purpose, namely, to give persons interested in Indonesia some sense of the economic development of this archipelago during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both succeed in doing this, although with totally different approaches. Anne Booth is an economist par excellence who applies economic analyses and theories to the available data but recognizes the sociopolitical factors in the course of historical change. Howard Dick and his fellow authors are economic historians who provide an historical text integrated around the three main themes of globalization (i.e., trade), state formation, and national economy. Differences in approach in this case do not mean that the two books come to widely different conclusions. They agree that economic development in the Indonesian archipelago has not reached its full potential and is not in good shape now. Booth seeks the reasons for this in the consistent failure to provide open markets, hesitation in encouraging outside capital, and heavy remittances to the colonial motherland. Dick et al. focus more on authoritarian government and failure of democracy, policies of exploitation, and suppression of economic initiatives. Both, however, understand that the problems reside mainly in human biases and prejudices in both the colonial and the independence periods.
Both books begin by providing the reader with an overview of the ups and downs of two centuries of economic development....