Nusantara Ep. 1 – The Long Arc of Dutch Colonialism
The Dig
Daniel Denvir
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2026
⏱️ 141 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nusantara is a new Dig series on the history of Indonesia: a hinge in the world system where colonialism and revolution have decisively shaped the trajectory of global history. This episode traces a long period of European plunder and domination that began with the Portuguese and then continued, for centuries, under the Dutch—a story stretching from the murderous mercantilism of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) seeking to monopolize the spice trade to a modern colonial administration profiting from plantations, petroleum, and countless commodities. The first installment features Rianne Subijanto and Made Supriatma. Other scholars of the archipelago will join us in the episodes that follow.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com |
| 0:05.3 | and by University of California Press, publishers of the book, Boom to Bust, How Streaming Broke Hollywood Writers, by Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmuller. |
| 0:17.8 | Hollywood workers are in crisis. This book, written by two media industry experts, |
| 0:23.7 | captures the lived experiences of workers struggling in a new Hollywood marked by disruptions and |
| 0:29.7 | strikes. Providing a roadmap to make sense of Hollywood's present, this book looks at the |
| 0:35.4 | complex issues that come next. Learn more about boom to bust at UCpress.edu. |
| 0:42.3 | Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. |
| 0:55.4 | My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. |
| 1:01.1 | This is the first episode of Nusantara, a series on the history of Indonesia. |
| 1:08.2 | Nusantara is a word that refers to the vast geographic archipelago that only through |
| 1:14.0 | centuries of colonial capitalism and the struggles against it became a nation, one whose boundaries, |
| 1:20.8 | identities, and purpose remain contested to this day. I've long been planning to do a series on the history of Indonesia. |
| 1:30.7 | It's the fourth largest country, home to the world's largest Muslim population. And it once |
| 1:37.1 | boasted the largest communist party outside the Soviet Union in China. In 1965, the Indonesian Communist Party, or P.K.I. |
| 1:47.5 | was wiped out in a mass U.S.-backed military-led genocide that killed between 500,000 and 1 million people. |
| 1:56.2 | That horrific episode is now far more widely known, thanks to Joshua Oppenheimer's 2012 documentary film, |
| 2:04.0 | The Act of Killing, and Vincent Bevin's book, The Jakarta Method. |
| 2:08.4 | And yet in the West, Indonesia remains, I would argue, the least understood country on earth per capita, |
| 2:17.0 | a giant country that most of us know almost |
| 2:20.7 | nothing about. This is an important story for the global left to understand. It's a story that |
| 2:27.0 | begins at the dawn of European capitalist colonialism, first briefly with the Portuguese, |
| 2:33.1 | and then for hundreds of years under the Dutch. |
... |
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