Repression and Economic Crisis, 1927–42

Abstract

Between 1927 and the destruction of the Dutch colonial state by the Japanese in 1942, the Indonesian national revival proceeded in a less flamboyant fashion. In political affairs, the anti-colonial movement went through a series of false starts which ended in nothing. The Dutch regime entered the most repressive phase of its twentieth-century history. The rural masses no longer played an active political role, being both disillusioned by their experience with SI and PKI in preceding years and, from 1930 onwards, more immediately occupied with surviving the hard years of the Depression.