An island nation is named with a word that two 19th-century British scholars invented as a technical label for its people.
Etymonline dates Indonesia to 1850 and breaks it down into Indo-, "India," plus Greek nesos, "island," plus the place-name ending -ia. Before that the islands were usually called the Indian Archipelago or the East Indies.
The English writer and colonial official George Windsor Earl supplied the first version. In 1850 he wrote that "a distinctive name for the brown races of the Indian Archipelago is urgently required." He proposed calling them "Indu-nesians or Malayunesians."
Earl's articles appeared in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia. James Richardson Logan had founded it in Singapore in 1847 and edited it. Logan adopted Earl's coinage and modified it to "Indonesia," and he popularized the name.
Logan died in Penang in 1869 and is buried in the Old Protestant Cemetery in George Town. A history of the period published by ANU Press calls the coinage perhaps Earl's "most enduring claim to fame, though it is poorly known."
Then the label changed hands. In the early 20th century, nationalists opposing Dutch rule seized on Indonesia as a word to imagine a unity of peoples. The historian Adrian Vickers notes that earlier youth groups had talked of separate Javanese, Balinese or Sumatran nations. On 28 October 1928 the Youth Pledge set the goal of one country, one people and one language, all called Indonesia or Indonesian.
On 17 August 1945 Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia in Jakarta. The Netherlands formally acknowledged it in 1949.
The Greek nesos sits inside other island-region names. Polynesia, "many islands," was coined in French in 1756. Melanesia, modeled on it, followed by 1835.