TRADITIONAL SUMATRAN TRADE

PAR

John N. MIKSIC

Introduction

Indonesia's particuliar character as an island nation makes the country an object of unusual interest to those who study the development of centralized political and economic institutions. In concrete terms, this involves the search for processes which lead to increase in the amount of goods, information, or people who flow through or at the direction of a small number of points in space. The extraordinary attribute displayed by Indonesia is that transport and communication between various regions must traverse stretches of open water. This has raised the suspicion that the development of centralized institutions may have taken a different course than in countries where overland routes have been the common form taken by networks binding together disparate regions.