Academia
Indonesia’s missing entrepreneurs didn’t vanish by choice—they were systematically crowded out by a centuries-old governing instinct that still prefers centralized control over local economic freedom.
Students of the Al Khoir Islamic Excellence School sell things on Nov. 30, 2025, during an event called Pasar Bocah in Surakarta, Central Java. Accompanied by teachers and parents, the students learned about entrepreneurship and were introduced to the use of the rupiah at the event. (Antara/Maulana Surya)
Indonesia’s weak entrepreneurial formation is seldom examined seriously through the lens of culture. Culture may be mentioned, but it is rarely studied as a long-term force—largely because doing so requires patience, historical depth and a longer horizon than most policy thinking is willing to bear.Where social legitimacy, family expectations, fear of shame and informal signals carry immense weight, ignoring culture causes policymakers to misread how entrepreneurial choices are actually formed.
But the harder reading began in the 15th and 16th centuries, when the trading world of the archipelago was anything but empty of commercial initiative. As the sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas argued, Javanese and Malay societies contained a flourishing merchant class engaged in high-level trade across wide commercial networks.
