Indonesia

The largest archipelagic state on earth, holding together seventeen thousand islands and seven hundred languages with a language almost nobody spoke natively. Srivijaya controlled the straits from Sumatra for centuries and Majapahit ruled from Java in the fourteenth, and Islam arrived through traders rather than conquest, which is part of why Indonesian Islam absorbed rather than replaced what it found. The Dutch East India Company took the spice trade by force from 1602, and the Netherlands governed the islands as a state only from the nineteenth century, imposing the Cultivation System that required peasants to grow export crops on a share of their land. Japan occupied the archipelago in 1942, and Sukarno declared independence two days after Japan surrendered in 1945; the Dutch fought for four years before conceding. The republic chose Malay, a trade lingua franca, as its national language rather than Javanese, the majority tongue - a deliberate decision that made the language nobody's property. The killings of 1965 and 1966 destroyed the communist party and killed at least half a million people. Suharto ruled until 1998. Timor-Leste was invaded in 1975 and left in 1999. Aceh's war ended after the 2004 tsunami killed some 170 thousand there. The country has about 280 million people, the fourth most in the world, and the largest Muslim population of any state. Jakarta is sinking so fast that a new capital, Nusantara, is being built in Borneo. Krakatoa's 1883 eruption was heard thousands of kilometres away. Komodo dragons live nowhere else. The archipelago spans three time zones.

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