What was seventeenth-century Dutch expansion in Southeast Asia all about? In the traditional historiography, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was predominantly presented as a multinational corporation and non-state colonial actor. Recent research, however, has significantly challenged this view, stressing instead the imperial aspects of VOC rule. This article aims to break new ground by analysing the vocabularies used in seventeenth-century reasoning about Dutch expansion overseas. Focusing on three critics of the VOC from the 1660s and 1670s, Pieter van Dam, Pieter de la Court, and Pieter van Hoorn, the article shows how voices within and outside of the ranks of the Company tried to make sense of the many-faced VOC as a commercial company that was also, in different ways, a state. In an on-going debate that centred on the issues of colonisation, conquest, free trade, and monopoly, the VOC was characterised as a distinctive political body that operated as an overseas extension of the state (Van Dam), as a competitor of the state (De la Court), or as a state as such (Van Hoorn). Following Philip J. Stern's recent analysis of the English East India Company, the VOC should therefore be considered to be a particular political institution in its own terms, which challenged its critics to think about it as a body politic that was neither corporation nor empire, but rather a Company-State.

The Swedish East India Company has been studied mainly from an economic standpoint, but throughout the eighteenth century its employees played a crucial role in Swedish knowledge production on China. This article studies travel writings, speeches, and eulogies by the employees of the Swedish East India Company, noting in which ways they produced knowledge on China, and discusses reasons for choosing these particular ways. The company employees' production of knowledge is found to have strong links with their constructions of masculinity. Consequently, this article discusses the political implications of a connection between masculinity and knowledge for men employed in a non-colonial East India Company from a militarily weak country, and the role that the perceived and presented knowledge of China and its inhabitants played in this intertwining of gender construction, natural history, and power.

Virginia was founded with a certainty of common humanity that had disastrous consequences for its native peoples. The English established Jamestown in 1607—in what was to become their first permanent settlement in America—with all the mixed motivations of benevolence and grasping desire of any colonial enterprise. Yet they firmly believed the peoples that they found there, whom they called Indians, were as human as themselves. Convinced that they possessed an absolute truth valid for all peoples in all times and places, they desired to embrace and mould these Indians into their own ideal vision of humanity. It was this inclusive embrace of the Indians, and not any cynical attempts to exploit them or to denigrate them as “other,” which led to the destruction of their way of life. The tragedy of the colony was due to the most benevolent of intentions.

On November 15, 1865, the French inhabitants of New Caledonia gathered together with a number of the island's natives to celebrate the lighting of the lighthouse. It was scheduled to coincide with the saint day of the Empress Eugénie, and the imperial vision rang loudly through Governor Guillain's inaugural address that evening

If, transporting ourselves in thought into the different regions of the civilized world, we examine the events transpiring there, the most magnificent panorama is unrobed before our eyes. Everywhere,—and this will be the glory of our epoch,—everywhere, great works are being executed to bring the peoples together, to multiply their relations, to prepare, in a word, that universal brotherhood, destined and reserved by Providence for future generations.

Universal brotherhood may seem like a tall order for a lighthouse, but Guillain was a man who liked to dream big. He had arrived in 1862 as governor of New Caledonia and director of the prison France hoped to establish there, but he really envisioned himself as an enlightened technocrat engineering a perfect society on his unspoiled island paradise.

The crossroads of nationalist historiographies in sub-Saharan Africa and of the history of developmentalist attempts that characterise the European late colonial states, have left us with very incomplete images of important trajectories. In the seemingly more “liberal” large colonial empires—notably the French and British—sails were set by 1945 towards a policy of investment and economic change. Some of the scholarly debates question whether this investment was genuine or just a last resort to avoid (rapid) decolonisation; others put the emphasis on inadequate routines of development implemented in these territories, many of which have apparently been continued since decolonisation.

In this context, we encounter a clear lack of understanding about how decisions made by individual actors on the administrative level interacted with the larger panorama of social conditions in colonial territories, and of the consequences that these interactions had for the paths towards decolonisation. For a smaller empire such as the Belgian colony of Congo-Léopoldville, these processes are still more obscure; and for the colonies ruled by authoritarian metropoles, as in the cases of territories under Spanish and Portuguese rule, stagnation and absence of change are often taken for granted. In other words, these territories, which were under the rule of metropoles regarded as rather weak in economic terms, are treated as unrepresentative of the broader, European movement towards change in colonial policies. However, the conditions of change towards economic and social modernisation in this latter group of empires, even when inhibited by lack of funding and weak professionalisation of the administration, are frequently very telling for the broader range of challenges that the late colonial states faced.

On 17 April 1946, seven Australian war crimes investigators left the military perimeter British troops were maintaining around the city of Batavia and travelled into an anarchic, lawless Javanese hinterland, rife with different Indonesian revolutionary militants fighting the Dutch and each other. As they entered the kampong of Tjaringin, north of Bogor, automatic rifle fire hit their car. Two men died immediately; a third was found days later in a nearby ditch, shot in the back of the head. Amid outrage in the Australian press, External Affairs Minister H. V Evatt announced he was sending an Australian judge, Richard Kirby, to investigate the killings. This article analyses Kirby's trip to Indonesia and his approach to the task of locating and bringing to trial the murderers.

Kirby's task was a microcosm of the challenge the West faced in responding to the nationalist uprisings that convulsed postwar Asia. Those uprisings, at times marked by violent antiforeign sentiment, raised for Western nations the spectre of permanent instability and anarchy impeding their interests and influence: O.S.S. officer Peter Dewey's murder in Vietnam the year before had similarly encapsulated this issue for the United States. Yet by the end of the 1940s, Western policymakers had for the most part moved from supporting formal colonialism to supporting the formation of independent states run by Asian nationalists. Australia's support for the Indonesian Republic in its struggle against Dutch rule was an early example of this shift. It so happened that Kirby's 1946 Java mission coincided with a period of backtracking in Australia's progressive attitude to the Indonesian question: indeed, Kirby's minister at times expressed qualms with Kirby's approach.