Digital Atlas of Indonesian History

by Robert Cribb

  • Published: 2010
  • Pages: 80 pp. (user guide)
  • 487 maps on DVD in 5 formats
  • Series number:
Available from NIAS Press worldwide
ISBN Paperback: 978 87 91114 66 3, £35.00 (June 2010)

About the book

• Digital reinvention of Robert Cribb’s landmark Historical Atlas of Indonesia including about 150 new maps.
• Fully interactive exploration of Indonesian history in maps and text using a normal web browser.
• Available both on DVD and online.
• Almost 500 maps output as JPEG images suitable for use in classroom teaching (e.g. using Powerpoint) plus high-resolution files suitable for royalty-free reproduction by scholars in their own publications.
• Much more extra material including links to historical maps of Indonesia located on external sites.

This interactive, electronic work is the follow-up to the author’s landmark Historical Atlas of Indonesia that so many have been looking for in the past decade. The Digital Atlas builds on its predecessor by adding many more maps and extra text, packaging these for teaching and individual use, and delivering them on DVD and online together with much additional material. Based on traditional research and scholarship, and available both digitally and online, its nearly 500 specially drawn full-colour maps are augmented with a detailed companion text. The result is an astounding, pioneering work that brings fresh life to the fascinating and tangled history of Indonesia’s immense archipelago. An essential resource for scholars and teachers of Indonesian history.

About the author

Robert Cribb grew up in Brisbane, Australia, and spent much time as a child wandering the bush and the Barrier Reef with his botanist parents. A keen appreciation of the environmental and geographical dimensions of history still informs much of his research and writings.

After completing his undergraduate studies in Asian History at the University of Queensland, he took his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, with a thesis on Jakarta during the Indonesian revolution, 1945–1949. This was the basis of his subsequent, and highly praised, book on gangsters and revolutionaries in the Indonesian independence struggle.

After graduating, Robert Cribb taught at Griffith University and the University of Queensland (both in Brisbane) and as guest lecturer at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands. He held research positions at the Australian National University, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, where he was also director for two years. He rejoined the Australian National University at the beginning of 2003 and he is currently Professor of Indonesian History in the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific. He is also the immediate past president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA).

Professor Cribb’s research interests focus mainly on Indonesia, though he has some interest in other parts of Southeast Asia (especially Malaysia and Burma/Myanmar) and in Inner Asia. The themes of his research are mass violence and crime, national identity, environmental politics, and historical geography.

Go to author page

Reviews

by Stein Tonnesson
From journal:
H-Net Reviews, August 2011

In Greek mythology Atlas was condemned to hold the heavens all alone. Yet most atlases are team work; if one scholar writes the text, the maps at least are drawn by teams of professionals. Not so with Robert Cribb’s Atlas of Indonesian History, first published by NIAS Press [sic.] in 2000. It was a titanic one-man project worthy of Atlas himself.

In Greek mythology Atlas was condemned to hold the heavens all alone. Yet most atlases are team work; if one scholar writes the text, the maps at least are drawn by teams of professionals. Not so with Robert Cribb’s Atlas of Indonesian History, first published by NIAS Press [sic.] in 2000. It was a titanic one-man project worthy of Atlas himself. Cribb drew all the maps on his computer and connected them intimately with his own precisely balanced text. Now Cribb and NIAS Press have achieved another huge endeavor by adapting the atlas to a digital world, while thoroughly revising and updating it. It sells as a package with three components: a DVD with a user-friendly 2010 version of the atlas as a whole; a printed user guide; and privileged access to a Web site where it is being updated, and is searchable with familiar Google software. … 

The text is of vintage Cribb quality, building on his expertise as a historian specializing in contemporary Indonesian political history and long-term environmental history […]. Cribb is a detached historian, with no apparent agenda except the scientific one, and perhaps environmental protection. Yet he is not the kind of historian who lists one damn fact after the other. He asks pertinent questions, dismisses flawed answers one after one, and concludes with a sound and clear judgment.

by Nick Ford
From journal:
Aseasuk News 49 (2011)

The Digital atlas of Indonesian history can serve as a valuable and useful resource for a very wide audience, for teaching, as a basis or contributing spatial dimension, for research for an enormous range of disciplines at different levels, or just as a volume to browse out of pure interest.

The Digital atlas of Indonesian history can serve as a valuable and useful resource for a very wide audience, for teaching, as a basis or contributing spatial dimension, for research for an enormous range of disciplines at different levels, or just as a volume to browse out of pure interest. It will also be useful for many scholars to have this on their laptops when out on fieldwork in Indonesia.

Given that today you would be pushed to find a copy of the original book for much less than a hundred pounds, priced at £25 the Digital atlas is also good value. In short this atlas will be appreciated by anyone fascinated by the extraordinary archipelago. My thanks go to Robert Cribb and NIAS Press for all the meticulous work that has gone into making this available.