Many parts of the Indonesian archipelago play a role in local and wider trading networks from early times, and some are further connected to interregional routes reaching much farther corners of the globe.

Nearly four thousand years ago, cloves—which until the seventeenth century grow nowhere else in the world except five small islands in Maluku—had made their way to kitchens in present-day Syria.

By about the same time, items such as shells, pottery, marble, and other stones; ingots of tin, copper, and gold; and quantities of many food goods are traded over a wide area in Southeast Asia.

As early as the fourth century BCE, materials from South Asia, the Mediterranean world, and China—ceramics, glass and stone beads, and coins—begin to show up in the archipelago.

In the already well-developed regional trade, bronze vessels and other objects, such as the spectacular kettledrums produced first in Dong Son (northern Vietnam), circulated in the island world, appearing after the second century BCE from Sumatra to Bali and from Kalimantan and Sulawesi to the eastern part of Maluku.

Around two thousand years ago, Javanese and Balinese are themselves producing elegant bronze ware, which is traded widely and has been found in Sumatra, Madura, and Maluku.

In all of this trade, including that with the furthest destinations, peoples of the archipelago appear to have dominated, not only as producers and consumers or sellers and buyers, but as shipbuilders and owners, navigators, and crew.

The principal dynamic originated in the archipelago.

This is an important point, for historians have often mistakenly seen both the trade itself and the changes that stemmed from it in subsequent centuries as primarily the work of outsiders, leaving Indonesians with little historical agency, an error often repeated in assessing the origins and flow of change in more recent times as well.