The eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa in 1883 made itself heard over 2,000 miles away.

It sent ash 50 miles into the air, higher than airplanes fly. And the disaster killed upwards of 35,000.

In other words, this isn’t the first time in modern history that the entire planet has focused its attention on natural disasters in Indonesian waters, said Simon Winchester, the author of “Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded.”

“Krakatoa was a human interest story,” said Arthur Lerner-Lam, an earthquake expert at Columbia University. “Nothing was in place to help people at that time other than what the indigenous populations could do for themselves.”

Partly because the 19th century world couldn’t act on its knowledge of the disaster, it catalyzed an early episode of religiously motivated Muslim violence against the West, Mr. Winchester wrote in “Krakatoa.”

When the volcano erupted over a century ago, people on the island of Java had been suffering since the 1600s under a Dutch regime cruel even by colonial standards, Mr. Winchester said in a phone interview with The New York Sun yesterday. Local clerics interpreted the explosion as evidence of God’s displeasure with the Dutch for colonizing the island, and the Javanese for allowing it to be colonized.

“Local clerics said, this is a sign from Allah,” Mr. Winchester said. “Allah is displeased, and for good reason. You Javanese are letting yourselves be run by the Dutch, so rise up and kill them. And in a few weeks they did begin to kill them.”

The sermons inspired an uprising that ejected the Dutch from the islands and planted the seeds of Indonesian Islamic fundamentalism, Mr. Winchester said.

A repeat ratcheting up of religious intensity shouldn’t follow upon this past weekend’s tsunamis, Mr. Winchester said, because aid has already reached the affected nations and none of them are as politically unstable as Java was then.

“The world will take care of them,” Mr. Winchester said, but added that he didn’t understand why the world didn’t try to mitigate the recent disaster: “They could have been warned.”

Thanks to technological advances between 1883 and 2004, experts knew about the deep sea quake, said Waverly Person, a geophysicist at America’s primary earthquake tracking center, the United States Geological Survey in Denver, CO. They also knew what kind of havoc it could wreak.

What they didn’t know was who to tell, after they’d informed the State Department, White House, and United Nations. “We have no contact information for governments in that part of the world,” Mr. Person said. “We give this information to people that request it and want it. We haven’t turned anyone down.”

But nations surrounding the Indian Ocean hadn’t set up the tsunami warning system that exists in other parts of the world, said Mr. Lerner-Lam, of Columbia University. “There is a tremendous gap between what the scientific and technological communities know, and what the development community is implementing, a tremendous gap,” he said. “We hope to God that this changes.”