Ghamal Satya Mohammad

Mount Merapi is one of the most active volcanoes on Earth. It is also considered an integral part of a 'sacred landscape' of Java, currently inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people residing within 20 km of its epicentre. The thesis investigates the formation of 'co-volcanic' communities around this volcano through time as local people adapt to this hazardous volcano and the neighbouring environment. By the mid-1800s, successive European colonial administrations on Java had transformed the ‘wild’ yet fertile areas of Mount Merapi into economic ‘state-spaces’ with arable lands, human settlements, and plantations. The combination of colonial and post-colonial economic interests in developing the volcano's fertile slopes, and the traditional beliefs regarding the dangerous nature of this volcano and its impacts, have helped create the historical conditions for normalizing the development of hazard-prone communities on Mount Merapi. The people around Merapi, after experiencing several major volcanic disasters since the early Nineteenth Century (1822, 1872, 1930), learned to mitigate against such hazards, forming disaster response and recovery networks between local settlements, which also involved European planters, government officials, and volcanologists. In the 1920s, a group of dedicated volcanologists influenced the government to introduce a modern warning system with regular monitoring and forecasting of volcanic activity on Mount Merapi. However, the Dutch colonial administration failed to prevent significant casualties during the big 1930 Merapi eruption, which paved the way for further measures to improve the disaster mitigation system. The entangled history of human interaction with Mount Merapi since 1800 tells us that developing prosperous communities at the slopes of Mount Merapi has been a risky, albeit fatal, endeavour at times. Periods of political instability and bureaucratic constraints have also directly affected disaster mitigation efforts and the economic state of the communities living on the slopes of Mount Merapi since 1800.

Mount Merapi in Central Java is one of the world’s most studied volcanoes. The frequent eruptions of this volcano and the densely populated areas on its slopes make Merapi particularly important to scholars of the natural and social sciences. Considerable attention has been devoted to contemporary aspects of this volcano, including research into forecasting and monitoring possible volcanic activity and eruptions. However, research investigating artistic representations of Merapi in a historical context, particularly local artworks referring to how people responded to a natural hazard such as a volcanic eruption, is still rare. In this paper, I explore how artists in the period 1800-1930 have portrayed the volcanic activities in their drawings and paintings. Various historical data, including newspapers, reports, and records of volcanic eruptions, will be used to help interpret the accuracy of the paintings which depict Merapi at different moments in time. I argue that artists in the period under investigation were acutely aware of Merapi’s volcanic activities and depicted these in their drawings and paintings, because of the influence of science, which invokes interest in Merapi, landscape art, and a sense of humanitarianism. Their artworks are dynamic visual historical reflections of Merapi which testify to the power and beauty of nature.

The author of this book, Jan Breman, is a prominent Dutch sociologist and historian who has published a number of important and widely read works about colonial history, labor migration, poverty, and related socioeconomic issues in the Global South. The present book is an in-depth historical explanation of the connection between today’s problems of inequality and racism with Western (European) colonialism and imperialism in the past, with an emphasis on the Dutch expansion overseas...

What has made Island Southeast Asia, once a prosperous region in the world, into a source of unskilled workers? Was the ‘peripheralization’ of this region solely the product of the history of European colonialism? The author of the book under review, Ulbe Bosma, a reputable economic historian, invites the reader to discuss these thought-provoking questions by delving into current debates on relevant socio-economic theories and documents from various colonial archives, all in a compact 306 pages. The result is a noteworthy example of a comparative global history that is highly relevant in today’s context...