This paper is a critical examination of the bi-polaric view of the Indonesian archipelago: Java being the center and the rest of the territory as outer islands. A discourse surrounding the centrality of Java within the conception of Indonesia is created through a variety of mediums, including through education and the arts. Anti-New Order thinkers have attacked this image as part of the way in which the state rams down an essentialist Javanese image to everyone in the archipelago. Yet to say that this was the creation of an elite-Javanese controlled state is misleading. Instead of being a primordial expression of an ur-nationality smothered under the weight of a colonial empire, this paper wants to show that this process was contingent upon a series of historical development in the eitghteenth and early nineteenth century that allowed for the creation of territorial image of a state.