If in the First Conference, which was held in New Delhi in January 1985, the main theme of the papers was focussed on social development in the first half of the twentieth century, while that of the Second Conference held in Leiden in September 1985 shifted to the nineteenth century, particularly on various aspects such as bureaucratic tradition, population changes, and cottage industries, the central theme of the Third Conference concentrated on historical dynamics in pre- and early colonial India and Indonesia. State formation, socio-political aspects of Islam, and early-colonial policies were the major topics discussed at the Conference.

The demarcation of phases of empire has a perennial fascination for historians of European expansion. One of the most elusive processes of change both to date and to define is what most scholars would recognise to be the shift from the colonial systems of ancien regime Europe to the empires of the nineteenth century. In outline, it seems that systems based on the close regulation of commercial capitalism through privileges devolved on more or less autonomous colonies and trading companies gave way to national empires under direct state authority and increasingly geared to the needs of industrial metropolitan economies. In the mid-eighteenth century the old order was generally intact; by the mid-nineteenth century it had largely been replaced. Greater precision about the timing and speed of change remains very difficult to attain, but within this wide parameter it seems reasonable to suppose that different empires moved at different speeds: the economically and politically sophisticated British are likely to have remodelled their system ahead of their competitors, probably forcing them towards modernity in the process.

On August 31, 1803, a group of seven men, comprising the Commission for East Indies Affairs (Commissie tot de Oost-Indische Zaken), submitted the final report of its deliberations to the Government of the State of the Batavian Republic (Staatsbewind der Bataafsche Republiek) in The Hague. This Commission had been called into existence in November 1802 to make recommendations on how best to administer and conduct trade with the nation's possessions in the East Indies in a fashion that would render the greatest advantage to the nation's finances and profit to its commerce. Only a couple of years earlier Holland's monopolistic United East Indies Company (VOC) had been terminated by the Republic, and its assets and liabilities assumed by the State. The liabilities were immediately identifiable, for they consisted of debts which had to be paid in hard cash. The assets, on the other hand, consisted of territories – most of which had fallen under English control – and factories that somehow had to be made profitable, but seemed, given the then-existing conditions in the world, to be almost out of reach. The Commission was supposed to make recommendations as to how the remaining, territories of the VOC should be managed and how the trade with the East Indies and Asia in general was to be made profitable. This was no small task, so it may appear somewhat wondrous that the Commission was able to complete its work in less than ten months. The dispatch with which the Commission's work was completed, however, is more understandable if it is realised that the financial collapse of the VOC had been openly recognised since 1786, and various proposals for either reform or total change of the Company's system had been presented and discussed. These alternative proposals were well known to the members of the Commission. Their work, therefore, involved striking a balance among these proposals rather than creating a system de novo.

In the aftermath of the Islamic conquests of the seventh and early eighth centuries the territory which came under effective domination of the caliphate extended from the Iberian peninsula and North Africa to Central Asia and into the Persian-Indian borderland of Sind which for three centuries remained its easternmost frontier. Beyond Sind a vast area was left unconquered which the Arabs called al-Hind and which, in their conception, embraced both India and the Indianised states of the Indonesian archipelago and Southeast Asia. In the countless kingdoms of al-Hind the Muslims penetrated, up to the eleventh century, only as traders. By the time that Islamic power was established in North India the political unity of the Abbasid caliphate was already lost. Neither India nor Indonesia were provinces of the classical Islamic state. But in the Middle East three decisive developments had occurred and these created patterns which were to survive the political fragmentation of the empire. Most important was that a thoroughly commercialized and monetised economy with a bureaucracy and a fiscal polity had been established which continued to expand. Secondly, from the ninth century onwards, the Islamic military-bureaucratic apparatus had begun to be staffed with imported slaves on an extended scale. And thirdly, from its Arab roots the Islamic conquest state had shifted to a Persianised foundation, adopting Persian culture and the Sassanid tradition of monarchy and statecraft.

The dominant theme in the historical literature on agricultural production for export is the fast-expanding demand by Europe in the course of the industrialisation during the nineteenth century of agricultural goods originating in Asia, Africa as well as the Regions of Recent Settlement. In a large number of cases, the growing supplies of agricultural export were put together through recourse to the plantation system. The colonial governments often played an important, and sometimes a decisive, role in the rise and the smooth functioning of this system. This could be in the form of liberal land grants, the delegation of coercive authority to the management over the labour supply and so on. The direct, including entrepreneurial, role of the government was often evident also in arrangements which were not of the usual plantation variety, but which operated on the basis of accommodation, and indeed integration, with the existing organisation of traditional peasant agriculture. An outstanding example of this is the well-known Cultivation System introduced by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch in Dutch Indonesia in the 1830s. The common theme that cuts across the bulk of the great diversity of arrangements of the use of coercive power by the colonial state in a variety of ways and often in fairly liberal doses.

Orthodox viewpoints on the formation and transformation of states in early modern (or late pre-colonial) South and Southeast Asia fall broadly into two strands. On the one hand, there are those who see the state as ephemeral, and essentially divorced from society in general.

That territorial expansion was not necessarily good business had been succinctly stated by Governor-General Jacob Mossel eight years before Hartingh: ‘What the lord spends, the merchant has to pay.’ In fact, concern about the price of territorial expansion had been voiced almost from the beginning, especially in the Board of Directors in Holland, witness Coenraad van Beuningen's analysis of the dual nature of the Company in 1684, in which he decried the territorial role of the Company as detrimental to its true function as a trading company. Also the underlying cause for the eventuel decline of the Company has by contemporaries as well as later observers often been blamed on this almost congenital defect of mixing trade and government in one body.

One of the classical accounts on the coming and first establishment of Islam in Indonesia runs as follows: Already a long time before the birth of Islam a mighty stream of colonisation started from Hindustan towards Java and surrounding islands. This stream definitely dominated the culture of this area and its influence is felt until today. After part of the Hindus had accepted Islam, these Indian Muslims were active in the trade with the archipelago and part of them also settled in this area. These traders and emigrants brought Islam into the Indian Archipelago. It is true, that already before this period some other Muslim nations sought articles of trade from the East-Indies and even established small settlements there: surely there resulted no permanent religious influence from these settlements. Islam, such as received by the Indonesians, therefore already experienced a process of adaptation towards the world of Hinduism. This made it easier for this new religion to accommodate itself once again to a degenerated Hinduism. Islam in the East-Indies unmistakably shows the signs of this Indian origin.

The problem that I have been dealing with over the last few years is how it might be possible to create a historical context for the study of South Indian religion. Like a number of other South Indian historians I have been concentrating on the rise and development of new states and chiefdoms during the late pre-colonial period — that is in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of European expansion in the sub-continent which preceded the consolidation of British imperial rule. My own work has focused on the role of shrines and holy places within these pre-colonial domains and chiefdoms.

The reason to compare the recent histories of India and Indonesia was that they were the scenes of the two most extensive and populous colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The decision to push back the comparison to the pre-colonial era meant loosing track of the vital focus of the enterprise. Moreover, pre-colonial India presents a unity in only some respects whereas Indonesia as a territorial concept did not even exist then. The tendency of Indonesianists to focus, for convenience's sake, on the island of Java seems to become inescapable. This confronts those on the Indian wing of the comparison with the dilemma to what extent they are entitled to give up Indian unity and if they do, what part of India compares best with insular Java. Especially fit for comparison seem the regional states of South India: Vijayanagar, Madurai etc. Both the rice-based economies of the South Indian states and their size suggests this. Although Java became the core region of one of the colonial empires, whereas the South Indian states would stay at the periphery of the other, such a comparison could well be fruitful.

Certain stages of the European expansion process into Asia during the Age of Commercial Capitalism lend themselves well to the comparative historical approach because of the startling similarities and contrasts they offer. The Dutch and English commercial leaps forward into the Orient, for instance, occurred at the same time in the organisational framework of chartered East India Companies - the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) — which, moreover, chose the same theatre of action: Southeast Asia (Banten, Spice Islands) and South Asia (Surat and Coromandel). But although the aims, modes of operation and organisation of the two companies had much in common, these nonetheless each finally carved out their own sphere of influence in the trading world of Asia - the Dutch in Southeast Asia and the English in South Asia. While this consolidation process was taking place, the EIC and VOC gradually shed their semblance of being purely maritime trading organisations and, towards the second half of the eighteenth century, acquired the character of territorial powers. A shift in the balance of power also occurred between the two companies: if the Dutch were still paramount in the seventeenth century, the English totally overshadowed them as powerbrokers in Asian waters during the eighteenth. Did this transition of maritime hegemony occur gradually or should we rather speak of a ‘passage brusque et rapide’ as Fernand Braudel has suggested? Was it, as the traditional explanation has it, the inevitable outcome of the decline of the Dutch Republic to a second-rate power in Europe, or were local Asian developments, be they political or commercial, also involved?