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The Riau Islands are a province and a group of islands in Indonesia, located south of Singapore, off the eastern coast of Riau province on Sumatra island.
By size and population the most important Riau islands/archipelago are Bintan, Batam, Karimun, Anambas and Natuna.
From the Srivijaya time until 16th century, Riau was a natural part of greater malay kingdoms or Sultanate, in the heart of what is often called the Malay World from eastern Sumatra until Borneo. The malay-related Orang Laut tribes inhabited the islands and formed the backbone of most malay kingdoms from Srivijaya to Sultanate of Johor for the control of the trade routes going trhough the straits.

After the fall of Melaka in 1511, the Riau islands became the center of political power of the mighty Sultanate of Johor or Riau-Johor, based on Bintan island, and was for long considered the center of malay culture.
But political history of the region changed the fate of Riau as a political, cultural or economic center when European powers struggled to control the regional trade routes and took advantage of political weaknesses within the Sultanate.
The creation of a European controlled territory in the heart of the Riau-Johor natural boundaries broke the sultanate in two parts, destroying the cultural and political unity that had existed for centuries. The later agreements consolidated this separation, with the British basically controlling all territories north of Singapore, and the Dutch controlling territories from Riau until Java.
When the European powers withdrew from the region, the new independent governments had to reorganize and find balance after inheriting 400 years of colonial boundaries. Before finding their current status, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Borneo territories struggled and even came into military conflict against each other, and the Riau islands once again found itself in the middle of regional struggle like the Konfrontasi.
But the once strong cultural unity of the region with Riau in the heart of it never returned, and the line drawn by the British in 1819 remained, this time marking the divide between three new countries as of 1965: Singapore, the Malaysian federation in the north, and Indonesia in the South.
It is those new countries, however, which created back unity in the Riau world for the first time after 150 years with the creation of the Sijori Growth Triangle.
But while bringing back some economical wealth to Riau, the Sijori Growth Triangle somewhat further broke the cultural unity within the islands. With Batam island receiving most of the industrial investments and dramatically developping into a regional industrial center, it attracted hundred of thousands of non-malay indonesian migrants, changing forever the demographical balance in the archipelago.


from Wikipedia

*scanned image*