Revolusi

Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World

David Van Reybrouck

Translated by:: David McKay and David Colmer

On a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a handful of tired people raised a homemade cotton flag and, on behalf of 68 million compatriots, announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first colonised country to declare its independence after the Second World War.

Four million civilians had died during the wartime occupation by the Japanese that ousted the Dutch colonial regime. Another 200,000 people would lose their lives in the astonishingly brutal conflict that ensued - as the Dutch used savage violence to reassert their control, and as Britain and America became embroiled in pacifying Indonesia's guerrilla war of resistance: the 'revolusi'. It was not until December 1949 that the newly created United Nations forced The Netherlands to cede all sovereignty to Indonesia, finally ending 350 years of colonial rule and setting a precedent that would reshape the world.

A landmark publication, Revolusi shows Indonesia's struggle for independence to be one of the defining dramas of the twentieth century and establishes its author as one of the most gifted narrative historians at work in any language today.

First published:: 08/02/2024
Published by:: Vintage, The Bodley Head
Length:: Hardcover 640 pages

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What the judges said
"Revolusi is an extraordinary achievement. David van Reybrouck's book argues powerfully and persuasively that Indonesia matters to the rest of the world"

About the author

David Van Reybrouck is the author of Congo: The Epic History of a People, which won twenty prizes, sold over half a million copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. His book Against Elections has been translated into more than twenty languages and has led to the trial use of participatory democracy in numerous countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. Revolusi was first published in the Netherlands, where it was a major bestseller. He is Belgian, writes in Dutch and is based in Brussels.

David Colmer (translator)

David Colmer is the translator of more than 60 book-length works of Dutch-language literature and has won many prizes for his translations, including the Vondel Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the NSW Premier and PEN Translation Prize for his body of work, and the Dutch Foundation for Literature oeuvre prize. Colmer is also a published novelist and short story writer.

David McKay (translator)

David McKay is a literary translator based in The Hague, best known for his translations of novels by the Flemish author Stefan Hertmans. He has been shortlisted for various translation prizes and won the Vondel Prize for Hertmans’s War and Turpentine. He served as the American Literary Translators Association Dutch-English mentor for the second time in 2023. His translation of Mariën's The Wetsuitman was premiered in 2022 by The Cherry Arts (Ithaca, NY) and Foreign Affairs (London) and has been published in The Mercurian.