Java

About this book

Java: A Travellers' Anthology contains accounts of Java by thirty-five Western travellers, most of them English or American. Their writings span the years from the earliest European contacts with the Island to the mid-1980s. Through their eyes we see Java transformed from a distant realm of wealth and danger into an orderly and prosperous Dutch colony and then, in the twentieth century, into the centre-piece of the Indonesian nation. Over the years, the 'Java' that armchair travellers of the English-speaking world came to know was largely shaped by witnesses like Thomas Stamford Raffles, Alfred Russel Wallace, Elizah Ruhamah Scidmore, S. J. Perelman, Frank and Helen Schreider, V. S. Naipaul, and many others who appear in this volume. Their tales also have much to tell us about the West itself and about its evolving relationship with this populous South-East Asian centre of civilization and power, and with its people.