Peter Carey (born 30 April 1948 in Rangoon) is a British historian and author who specialises in the modern history of Indonesia, Java in particular, and has also written on East Timor and Myanmar.

[3] While at Cornell, Carey found out about the Javanese prince Diponegoro, who led a five-year war against the Dutch colonial government in the East Indies from 1825 to 1830.

[10] Carey responded, maintaining that his words had been taken out of context and pointing out that his original interview had not been done as a piece of political propaganda, but as an historical reflection on the impact of the Java War on Indonesian society.

He still maintained his creativity and his humanity by becoming a writer, a leader, a statesman, a mystic, a clean administrator who was scrupulous in his financial dealings and benefitted the tenants and farming communities under his authority.

The book opens with a 60-page introduction that discusses the manuscript and text, including a review of contemporary literature related to the Java War, and closes with 30 pages of notes, glossaries, bibliography, index and maps.

The English used, she found, was "clear and smooth, if not poetic", and the interspersing of "valuable, scattered information" in the notes led readers to become "impatient" for a social history of Java.

She concluded that the book was "exemplary", and its usefulness and origin as a "by-product of a major research effort" became "a tribute to Carey's careful scholarship and historical imagination".

[14] The 2007 publication The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785–1855 is an almost thousand-page biography of Diponegoro, including his rarely discussed exile in Manado and Makassar.

Amrit Gomperts, reviewing for the Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, described it as "impressive", an "outstanding and authoritative study on the background of the Java War and Diponegoro's life" written in a style which "will hold the reader's attention until the last page".