M. C. Ricklefs


Merle Calvin Ricklefs was an American-born Australian scholar of the history and current affairs of Indonesia.
Ricklefs was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, on 17 July 1943 and died on 29 December 2019, aged 76.
Ricklefs received his PhD from Cornell University under the supervision of O. W. Wolters. He held positions at the School of Oriental and African Studies, All Souls College, Monash University, the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. He retired from the professorship of Southeast Asian history at the National University of Singapore. He was emeritus professor of history at both the Australian National University and Monash University.

Academic career

Ricklef's publications focused on the history of Mataram, Kartasura, Yogyakarta, Surakarta. He also regularly updated his history of Indonesia, A History of Modern Indonesia, ca. 1300 to the present. He dedicated most of his academic career to understanding how Indonesian society reacted to both the European presence and the spread of Islam, with an emphasis on cultural as well as political history. Few living English-speaking writers can claim the scope of his knowledge of the history of Java from the 17th to the 21st century.
In 2010 he edited and co-authored New History of Southeast Asia, which continued the work of his friend and mentor D. G. E. Hall, who first published his own History of South East Asia in 1955.
From 2004 to 2015, Ricklefs was sectional editor for Southeast Asia for the new third edition of Encyclopaedia of Islam. He was a member of the editorial boards of History Today, Studia Islamika, Journal of Indonesian Islam and Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. He co-edited the monograph series Handbook of Oriental Studies/Handbuch der Orientalistik and Brill’s Southeast Asia Library. He was a member of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Editorial Advisory Board for the publication series, Documents on Australian Foreign Policy. Ricklefs was a former member of the Australian National Commission for UNESCO. He was a founding member of the Australian Foreign Affairs Council and also a member of the International Council of the Asia Society.

Observations on warfare

In his book War, Culture and Economy, he observed a general pattern regarding foreign military interventions. Ricklefs noted that there is a “significant link between the transfer of military technology and questions of cultural identity” but said that he was not proposing a sort of “Ricklefs’ Rule". He observed that in wars of intervention or invasion, where social and economic circumstances on both the local side and an intervening side with superior military technology were such as to facilitate the transfer of technology, then the intervention was likely to produce a strengthening of cultural and political identities and lead to successful resistance to the foreign force. Thus, the wars of 17th and 18th century Java, with both sides pre-industrial, were unlike the colonial wars of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Asia, Africa and parts of the Americas, where the industrialized military technology of colonial invaders often led to collapses of morale and an end to resistance on the local, pre-industrialized, side. Those earlier wars were more like post-World War II wars where the foreign invaders’ superior infantry technology has been readily transferred to Vietnamese, Indonesian, Afghan, Iraqi and other local peoples, leading to prolonged and successful resistance.

Honours and awards

In 1989 Ricklefs was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
The Government of Australia awarded him in 2001 the Centenary Medal for "service to Australian society and the humanities in the study of Indonesia".
In 2010 he was elected as an erelid of the Netherlands Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, one of only eight people currently recognised in this way.
He was awarded the 2015 George McT. Kahin Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, "given biennially to an outstanding scholar of Southeast Asian studies from any discipline or country specialization to recognize distinguished scholarly work on Southeast Asia beyond the author's first book" for his work Islamisation and its opponents in Java: A political, social, cultural and religious history, c. 1930 to the present.
In 2016 the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture presented Ricklefs with its cultural award.
In June 2017, Ricklefs was made a member of the Order of Australia.

Civil and human rights activity

In the early 1980s Ricklefs became deeply involved in education for indigenous Australians, acting as the driving force behind and co-founding the Monash Orientation Scheme for Aborigines, the first bridging program for Aboriginal people in an Australian university. This aimed to prepare Aboriginal students, who suffered from great educational disadvantage, for university study. The scheme was a runaway success and by the time Ricklefs left Monash in 1993 it had been responsible for roughly doubling the number of Aboriginal university graduates.
Ricklefs was also involved in the 1980s ‘immigration debate’ in Australia, which was sparked when his counterpart at the University of Melbourne, Geoffrey Blainey, argued that Australia should limit Asian immigration. This came only a little over a decade after Australia had ended its controversial White Australia immigration policy. Ricklefs published, with Andrew Markus, a critique of Blainey's views entitled Surrender Australia? Essays in the Study and Uses of History.

Publications

;Major publications
;Sole-authored books
;Co-authored book
;Co-authored and edited books
;Edited and translated book
;Edited volumes
;Web publication