Peter Carey

Peter Carey is a British historian and author who specialises in the modern history of Indonesia, Java in particular, and has also written on East Timor and Myanmar. He was the Laithwaite fellow of Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford, from 1979 to 2008. His major early work concentrated on the history of Diponegoro, the British in Java, 1811–16 and the Java War (1825–30), on which he has published extensively. His biography of Diponegoro, The Power of Prophecy, appeared in 2007, and a succinct version, Destiny; The Life of Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta, 1785–1855, was published in 2014. He has conducted research in Lisbon and the United Kingdom amongst the exile East Timorese student community for an oral history of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, 1975–99, part of which was published in the Cornell University journal Indonesia.

Before moving to Indonesia, Carey regularly commented on the history and politics of Southeast Asia to the British media. He was adjunct professor at the Department of Humanities of the University of Indonesia in Jakarta (2013-2023), and earlier served as Indonesia country director of the Cambodia Trust (2008–2012), a UK disability charity that he co-founded in November 1989 to address the needs of mine victims in Cambodia.¹

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