As was the norm with frontispiece illustration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the figures personifying the four continents on the title page to Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum were allegorical stand-ins, representing both a geographical place and its identifying features, symbolised by their appropriate accoutrements (fig. 1). They were not meant to serve as documentary evidence of diverse peoples, which partially explains why the personifications of the four continents are generalised and generic and adopt classicising ideals for body type and posture. In contrast, Willem and Joan Blaeu's map of Africa from 1655 includes ethnographic images as border decorations (fig. 2). These are more naturalistic and taken from contemporary travel accounts, suggesting the presence of factual information sources. Yet both the title page and the map share a visual language that signalled culturally-specific meaning to the viewer.

In 1675, William Dampier set sail from Jamaica for the Bay of Campeche on Mexico's Yucatán coast to trade for logwood. Dampier, who would later become famous as a naturalist, a buccaneer, and one of the foremost chroniclers of the Golden Age of English buccaneering, recorded his experiences over the course of a year spent in English logwood communities near this Spanish settlement. The author's account gives a fascinating portrayal of a society beyond the margins of imperial control. In Laguna de Términos, an inlet just west of the town of Campeche (in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula), English sailors cut logwood, a popular dyestuff used in Europe for red, purple, and black clothing dyes and ink, that grew throughout the swampy tropical lowlands of the area. They traded their harvest with merchants who would ship it to ports as far away as Boston, London, and Amsterdam. Seeking an independent life separate from the arbitrary power of shipboard hierarchy, the loggers lived communally. They worked, hunted, and drank on their own schedule.

The European overseas enterprises that began to push into Asian waters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were maritime organisations geared towards commerce and seaborne warfare. As such, they looked very different from the powerful territorial states like Mughal India that traditionally dominated early modern Asia, and they were able to create a new kind of empire consisting of a network of fortified ports and trading centres connected by long sea routes. The construction of these empires was initially driven and subsequently sustained by maritime technology. To borrow Carlo Cipolla's words, guns, sails, and empire were always bound tightly together in this period. European vessels held a significant advantage over local shipping; neither the wealthiest groups of merchants nor the most formidable Asian states were in a position to field maritime forces that could challenge them on the open ocean. In virtually every encounter at sea, ships from Europe were able to inflict overwhelming defeats on the fleets assembled to oppose them. Since it represented their most significant advantage, Europeans made frequent use of maritime violence: against competing merchant groups (in order to disrupt commercial networks and to gain a dominant position), and against Asian states (to pry open port cities and improve trading conditions). This article explores the role played by maritime violence in the relationship between European overseas enterprises and two powerful territorial states, Mughal India (1526-1757) and Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), in the first half of the seventeenth century.

In late 1874, the Colonial Government of the Gold Coast passed an abolition measure which was designed to end slavery, all other forms of compulsory labour, and slave trading in the colony. The measure took the form of two laws: the Gold Coast Slave-Dealing Abolition Ordinance (1874) and the Gold Coast Emancipation Ordinance (1874). The Gold Coast Legislative Council passed the laws on 17 December 1874 and they received the assent of the Governor on 28 December. On 30 December 1874, the measure was proclaimed. The first of the ordinances absolutely and immediately outlawed the importation of slaves into the Gold Coast, and abolished slave dealing and pawning. The other ordinance provided for the emancipation of slaves by abolishing the legal status of slavery and empowering slaves to leave their owners at will.

Karl Gützlaff set up the Chinese Union in 1844, which was a missionary society based on the principle that China's millions could never be converted to Christianity by foreign missionaries: Chinese Christians themselves must carry out the evangelisation of the empire while Western missionaries would serve as instructors and supervisors. Ever since the founding of the Chinese Union, the effectiveness of this evangelistic methodology has given rise to heated debates among contemporary missionaries and subsequent generations of Christian mission historians. Both Jessie G. Lutz and Wu Yixiong discussed the employment of this evangelistic methodology from the perspective of foreign missionaries, such as Gützlaff's evangelistic thought, the founding and development of the Chinese Union, and its crisis. By making use of more substantial mission archives, Jessie G. Lutz's research is more detailed; she even included Gützlaff's European tour from 1849 to 1850. It was Gützlaff's absence from Hong Kong that gave the other missionaries, such as Theodor Hamberg (1819-54) of the Basel Mission, Gützlaff's co-worker, the opportunity to investigate the function of the Chinese Union, and which eventually caused the dissolution of the Chinese Union during 1852 to 1853. How Gützlaff came to the idea of utilising native agency to evangelise the Chinese and how he managed to maintain his enterprise are quite clear. Although it did not come to a respectable result in his time, this idea of “self-propagation” was inherited by the missionaries who were sent to China by the other missions. Yet how did the Chinese evangelists carry out the evangelistic work independent from the missionaries? This is a question Jessie G. Lutz focused on for years.

Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx considered British colonies to be a net burden on British society. Ever since the issue has been a controversial one and has received a great deal of attention from scholars, not least thanks to the publication of Eric Williams's book “Capitalism and Slavery”. To a large extent the debate has been concerned with the issue of whether the profits from colonialism were large enough to have a decisive effect upon, or at least contribute to, the industrialisation of Britain and/or other countries in Europe.