Java

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,…