Bali: History

History
Bali’s Hindu culture exists because of a historical accident worth knowing. As Islam spread across the Indonesian archipelago from the 13th century onward, the Majapahit Empire — the last great Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Java — collapsed in the 15th century, and its aristocracy, priests and artists fled east to Bali, carrying their religious and cultural traditions with them. Bali became, and has stayed, the one place in modern Indonesia where that earlier tradition survived fully intact.

The Dutch colonial period — trade contact from the 16th century, full military conquest by the early 20th — brought a real irony with it. Dutch administrators recognised the economic value of Bali’s cultural distinctiveness as a tourist draw, and actively protected the very Hindu practices and artistic traditions they were simultaneously suppressing elsewhere in the archipelago.

The puputan — a ritual mass suicide march into Dutch gunfire by the Balinese royal courts of Badung and Klungkung in 1906 and 1908, rather than submit to Dutch control — remains one of the defining moments in Balinese collective memory. The contrast between European cultural appreciation and colonial violence it represents still shapes how the island understands its own modern history.

The 2002 Kuta bombings, killing 202 people mostly in tourist areas, devastated the tourism economy for a time and brought a security dimension to Balinese life that hadn’t really existed before — a permanent shift in how the island relates to mass international tourism.