The peninsula of South Sulawesi is an oft-neglected corner of eastern Indonesia. After all, it is significantly smaller than West Virginia, its GDP is around that of Rhode Island, and it harbors no tourist magnets like neighboring Java or Bali. The only modicum of attention the area ever receives on this site is for having a gender system that seems peculiar to Western eyes, and to which Redditors show an astonishing lack of respect.

Yet the peninsula has one of the most diverse histories in Indonesia. South Sulawesi's history is first and foremost a narrative of change. It was a time and place when simple rice-farming chiefdoms became, within just three hundred years, "sophisticated, literate polities with a working knowledge of ballistics and the Galilean telescope." But on the darker side, it was also a time and place when the little peninsula exported as many slaves as the largest West African slave ports.

South Sulawesi's history is also a tale of old customs standing their ground in the face of unremitting change. In this deeply Muslim land, "third gender" shamans blessed pilgrims to Mecca, the nobility regularly elected women as rulers, and the I La Galigo--a pre-Islamic epic that is one of the longest works of literature in the world, far longer than even the Mahabharata--was recited. And despite all that had changed between 1300 and 1800, people in the peninsula held by the values that glued their society together: siriq (self-worth) and pesse (sympathy).

And South Sulawesi's history is finally a story of resistance and perseverance--a story of a great king asking the Dutch if they were "of the opinion that God has reserved these islands, so removed from your nation, for your trade alone," a story of exiles founding kingdoms two thousand miles away and of sailors toiling the long routes to Australia.

This AMA is about that history.

A very brief history of Early Modern South Sulawesi

To help with any readers introduced to Sulawesi or Indonesian history for the first time, a very brief (>3000 character) synopsis of this AMA's topic. Gross generalizations will be unavoidable.

Most of the kingdoms that mark South Sulawesi's Early Modern history emerged as agricultural chiefdoms focused on intensive rice-farming around 1300, though newer research is pushing up the dates into the 13th century. Many of these polities were probably loose confederations of villages; others had hereditary chiefs with claims to divine descent but with limited power. There was no writing and no bureaucracy to speak of.

From the 15th century onward and increasingly in the 16th century, agricultural intensification and the growth of foreign commerce propelled the stratification and territorial expansion of chiefdoms. Writing was adopted around this time as well. By the mid-1500s most of the peninsula had been united by the kingdom of Gowa with its fertile rice fields, great foreign trade, and incipient bureaucracy.

Gowa completed its unification of South Sulawesi in the first decade of the 1600s with its formal adoption of Islam and its conquest of its neighbors under the justification of spreading the new faith. Supported by immense volumes of trade--its capital and main port was home to more than 100,000 people--Gowa then embarked on a rapid campaign of overseas expansion and created the largest maritime empire in eastern Indonesian history. Yet Gowa's hegemony was short-lived; in the Makassar War of 1666-1669, the Dutch East India Company allied with South Sulawesi rebels to shatter Gowa's power.

The leader of said rebels, Arung Palakka, indirectly ruled the entire peninsula as a most faithful ally of the Dutchmen until his death in 1696. His successor proved unable to carry on his legacy, and South Sulawesi's 18th-century history is marked by great wars as no kingdom proved able to gain dominance over the peninsula. Not even the Dutch--who maintained a few forts here and there following the Makassar War--could maintain control, and indeed the VOC (Dutch East India Company) steadily lost authority in the 18th century.

But the century was not all doom and gloom. Literacy seems to have expanded, although almost no research has been done on this. South Sulawesi traders and warriors took to the seas in unprecedented numbers, supported by indigenous Indonesia's most sophisticated credit system. Some people went southeast and made regular contact with Australia; others went northwest and founded a long-lasting Sulawesi-derived dynasty in the heart of the Malay world.

In the year 1800, despite the wars and the slave trade, South Sulawesi remained a vibrant center of indigenous civilization. Indeed, it would remain so for a century after 1800 until 1906, when the Dutch colonial government extinguished the last independent kingdoms on the peninsula. But that is beyond the scope of our AMA.