This book presents, for the first time, a narrative of the history of Sumbawa in English. Sumbawa is a medium-sized island in eastern Indonesia with a long and highly interesting past. In the pre-modern era it lay on the trade routes that connected Melaka and Java's north coast with the spice-producing areas in Maluku. Among its export products were horses, sappan wood, and rice. The recorded history of the island spans over a period that includes Hindu-Javanese influences, the early-modern Southeast Asian Age of Commerce, Islamization via influences from Sulawesi, Dutch colonialism, and the dramatic political changes of the twentieth century. The text was originally authored in 1955 by the Dutch Indologist Gerrit Jan Held, who died before it could be published. The original manuscript has been translated into English by the historian Hans Hägerdal, who has written an introduction and provided extensive footnotes to relate it to more recent research. Gerrit Jan Held, who died in 1955, was a Dutch anthropologist and Indologist who wrote his PhD thesis about the Mahabharata epic.AUP S17 catalogue textSumbawa is a medium-sized island in eastern Indonesia which has a particularly interesting past. In the premodern era it lay on the trade routes that connected the north coasts of the islands of Melaka and Java with the spice-producing areas in Maluku, while Sumbawa itself exported horses, sappan wood, and rice. Its recorded history covers periods of Hindu-Javanese influence, the Southeast Asian Age of Commerce, early Islamisation, and Dutch colonialism. Dutch Indologist Gerrit Jan Held wrote this book in 1955 but died before it could be published; this volume represents its first translation into English, and includes extensive footnotes that set it in context of current research.