Repair of the cultural damage inflicted by colonialism is an increasingly explicit aim of museums, libraries and governments in the 21^st century. This project aims to provide a secure historical basis for arguments about the restitution and repatriation of the heritage objects of colonised peoples, focussing on the case study of the 19^th-century Lombok Royal Library. The project investigates how relations of domination, including violent relations between different Indonesian peoples, shaped the production of cultural heritage even before first contact with European colonialism. I aim to reconstruct the pre-European history of the Lombok Royal Library, using textual and paratextual data from its palm-leaf books, primarily written in Old Javanese language and Balinese script. The project pays critical attention to the concept of repair, arguing that a deeper understanding of the precolonial history of objects and texts is an essential prerequisite to any consideration of reparative action.

Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan is a historian specialising in the premodern history of Indonesia. He is a postdoctoral research fellow at the École française d’Extrême-Orient (Paris), and a research affiliate at the University of Sydney. He is especially interested in using indigenous Southeast Asian sources to rethink how history is practised. Jarrah has written widely on Southeast Asian history in leading discipline and area studies journals, including History and Theory, Journal of Global History, Bijdragen and Indonesia. He has written on his research for New Mandala, The Conversation, Inside Indonesia, as well as blogs of the British Library and Malay Heritage Centre. He has given public talks, seminars, and national radio interviews on his research, and has an active outreach program on traditional and social media. His current research project, funded by the European Research Council, focusses on the development of social institutions and state formation in eighth- to tenth-century Java.