European colonial domination brought with it the Western historicist Weltanschauung, and as third-world nations regained their autonomy, they sought new political and historical paradigms to characterize their past and present. In Indonesia, the attempts of intellectuals to constitute a truly Indonesian historiography reveal the special features of historical consciousness there. Because of the pluralism of Indonesian culture, Indonesian historians have been concerned with defining a collective identity or nationalism, which has tended to politicize their historiography. But Indonesian historiography has embraced both academic and polemical orientations, and, utilizing a broad spectrum of coexisting viewpoints to build a new historical awareness, has very early recognized the legitimacy of subjectivity in history.