Indonesia is a sprawling archipelagic state of some 17,000 islands,
more than 800 of which are permanently inhabited, stretching more than
3,000 miles from Sumatera in the west to New Guinea in the east. The
archipelago has been home to a number of locally powerful states from the
middle of the first millennium, but the territory that comprises the current
Republic of Indonesia was never under a single administrative authority
prior to the colonial era.