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Driving a Bargain: Automobile Industrialization and Japanese Firms in Southeast Asia

The book is organized into four chronological chapters and an epilogue. The author first introduces the Jakarta underworld before 1945, then the role of gangsters and revolutionaries during the five months after Indonesian independence was proclaimed in August 1945, eventually followed by an "enforced exile," decay into "social banditry" (Cribb uses Eric Hobsbawm's term here), and a path "towards extinction." Gangsters, according to Robert Cribb, have been "an ancient feature of the social landscape in Java"; their roots reach back to "Hinduistic philosophy," for which "the crime of the brigand was perhaps less against the victim than against the cosmologically sanctioned social order" (p. 1). Brigandry, ancient and thus deeply pre-colonial in many of its traits, inhabited the landscape of Java along with the Indonesian nationalist movement from the twentieth century on. There have always been, Cribb argues, some common points between both groups. It was during the Revolution of 1945-1949 that gangsters and revolutionaries came closest together, on the verge indeed of a formal alliance. Cribb's introduction of gangsterism and banditry as an important phenomenon of the Indonesian Revolution is convincing. He uncovered a body of evidence to support his position in both the archives and the newspapers of the time. He proves that quite a number of bosses of the Jakarta underworld, both of small and larger gangs, were much present both in the fighting and the politics of the city and in the surrounding West Java fronts. More significantly, Cribb met a few old, lively men, who still remembered—or believe.-i they remembered—how they had been gangsters. They kept their stories from academia until Robert Cribb came along. It is a little disappointing that Cribb does not let these people speak more in their own language, as if they were speaking among themselves. Occasionally we hear their voices when Cribb quotes some gangs' and gangsters' names: "Bubar (abolish, disperse, overthrow)," "Ribut (rowdy)," "Gembel (poor)," "Belah (split)," "Pasukan Siluman (Ghost Squad)," "Srigala Hitam (Black Jackal)," "Pemotong Leher (Neck Cutters)," "Garuda Putih (White Eagle)," or "Tiger of Jakarta," and "Broom of the World alias the Thunderbolt." Besides the fact that it denies us the pleasure, not letting the gangsters' voices be heard leaves the historian too much to himself. It may leave him with only the voice he had before the experience, a somehow awkward language for the occasion. He is left with words like "gangsters," for instance, a legal language to describe a time when law had broken down, or "opportunists," an ethical language to deal with a situation when naked power, or perhaps an ethic we do not know, reigned supreme. This may also explain why certain formulations reappear in the book: the gangsters' sorties on Jakarta's streets, he writes, were "random"; there was, in the street violence, "no single logical" target; behavior of the gangsters before action was "unusual" (pp. 64-65). Robert Cribb's is a very encouraging book, proof that something truly good can still be written on the historiographical monster of the Indonesian Revolution. Still, one would like to hear more about Cribb's heroes' own logic in the "illogical," about their sense of order in the "random," and about their norms in the "unusual." In this respect, Robert Cribb proved not to be brigand enough.