This final chapter reviews what this book has aimed to do differently and suggests some conclusions. There have been a number of histories written in Australia and Indonesia about the momentous events described above. In India, only P.R.S. Mani has published about these events despite the importance of Indian involvement in them. Each of these histories leads to questions about who has been remembered and who has been forgotten in each country. I consider the implications for future histories of the region, before turning to consider the afterlife of the visions that motivated the actors in the 1940s. By 1950 these visions of new worlds beyond borders seemed to have stalled, but they were to re-emerge in later decades. This chapter closes with a sketch of some of those reimaginings.

Beyond Borders has stepped outside the usual frame in two ways: first, by looking at two major, simultaneous events – the Boycott of Dutch shipping in Australia and the Battle of Surabaya – from the perspective of the region; second, exploring this regional view by following the working people whose mobility took them back and forth across this region, making the region itself a lived experience. The soldiers, sailors, and traders in this book, as well as the activists they worked with, were not limited to one place or one affiliation.

Neither the Boycott nor the Battle was an isolated event: both involved networks of people from many different places that had been building for centuries through religions and colonial trade, and that accelerated during World War II due to changes in the technologies of transport and communication, moving people ever more quickly and stories even faster. For these two events, not only the participants but the news itself became part of the story. Accounts and images of the conflicts were cabled around the world and back, selecting, interpreting, and reshaping the stories as they went. These two events interacted with each other: not only did they occur simultaneously and in relatively close proximity, but they were also linked through new forms of media. This ensured that the events in Indonesia would have ramifications in India and in Australia, as well as in the colonising metropoles of Britain and the Netherlands.