One of the great joys of teaching is when one’s students begin to produce awesome work and expand the field in new ways. I worked with a range of awesome graduate students while at Oxford, but today I get to be particularly proud of Dr. Matthew Woolgar, who has recently published an awesome article pushing the boundaries of our understanding of how and why the Indonesian Chinese community has been targeted for violence in specific incidents and calling for a fresh attention to sub-national dynamics in Cold War history.
Matt came back to Oxford for graduate work after a Master’s at SOAS and time studying Bahasa Indonesia in Yogyakarta, which means he was very prepared for deep fieldwork–even on sensitive subjects. His thesis on communism in West Java from the 1940s through 1960s is so detailed and thorough that it was a finalist for the Bayly prize last year. After finishing at Oxford, he got a position at the University of Leeds.
His latest article has just been published with Modern Asian Studies as a FirstView (i.e., waiting to be assigned to an issue), but for those without access to the journal it can also be found on Leeds’ online repository. In this article, “Ethnic politics, the Cold War and sub-national dynamics: The Indonesian Communist Party, the ethnic Chinese minority and anti-Chinese activities in West Java, 1949–67,” he unpacks three episodes of violence against ethnically Chinese Indonesians in the late 1950s and 1960s, and explains why the targeting of this community ebbed and flowed, using developments from provincial politics to provide context. This kind of hyper-detailed examination is only possible when a historian is engrossed in the sources of the time, and Dr. Woolgar does an amazing job of deploying archival sources, printed newspapers, memoirs, and secondary literature to tease out the specific people, groups, and incidents driving ethnic politics at the time.
One of the reasons this article is so fresh to me is because it reminds readers of anti-Chinese incidents that receive much less attention (1959-60 and 1963) to better illuminate the much discussed national violence of 1965-67, and also it picks apart different phases of the 1965-67 violence using changes within the local army command in West Java. This builds on existing research confirming the army’s determinative role in national violence, but by looking at the provincial level it shows how important local leadership was.
The kind of specific conclusions Dr. Woolgar is able to draw for West Java feed into his broader historiographical argument that Cold War studies have done a particularly poor job of understanding sub-national dynamics–a point on which I strongly agree. So many historians (and political scientists, and other scholars) of the Cold War are grounded in the politics or history of the US or USSR or PRC, and at most they recognize divisions between national political leaders in the other countries that became stages for Cold War conflict. Almost never do we see close attention to structural questions or political divides at the sub-national level, which were also crucially important in the conflict between left-leaning and anti-leftist forces. This article is a helpful reminder of how fruitful it can be to focus on a specific province or city to understand how things really played out on the ground, independent of transnational pressures or national rivalries.