| The 'in-betweenness' of Indonesia's modernization - neither fully globalized nor wholly parochial - has been explained in terms of resilient patrimonial culture or the small size of modernizing elites. This research proposes to situate the social history of Indonesian modernization since decolonization more concretely as well as more broadly in provincial towns. The approach is to combine insights from urban geography and historical sociology. Nearly all of Indonesia's 200 substantial provincial towns grew up in step with the expanding colonial state from the mid-nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. The urban society that emerged in them was created by this process of state formation, and it in turn shaped the kind of state that developed, most decisively after the decolonization of 1945-49. Today the bureaucracy, under-resourced and therefore bound up with urban society in numerous particularistic ways, but highly desirable in an economy lacking industry, remains the central political fact in provincial towns notably outside Java. |
