Goan inquisition case summaries from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide invaluable information about African and Asian slaves in the Estado da Índia, the eastern domains of the Portuguese Empire stretching from southern Africa to China. As most of the full trial records have been destroyed, the case summaries fill a crucial gap. The summaries also provide context for extant Goan trials. This article discusses the methodological challenges of using these records.

Since 1997, all the archives of Belgian Congo are deposited at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels and are opened up the public. For more than fifteen years, researchers have consulted and scrutinized its documents produced by the colonial authorities between 1908 and 1960. Still several collections have not been explored. This article relates of the history and the organization of the archives of Belgian Congo.

This essay addresses the origins and functions of Ethiopian church archives. It investigates the processes used in making documents and the procedures implemented to ensure their preservation and access. While recognizing their commemorative and symbolic functions, this essay emphasizes that written records were created in the first instance for practical purposes. It argues that the change in recordmaking and recordkeeping activities that is discernible in the eighteenth century was inspired by a corresponding change in the patterns of landholding in Ethiopia.