European expansion in Asia and the subsequent clashes between European trading companies and the trading systems of Asia have given rise to vivid discussions in the last decades. The discussions, ranging from Van Leur's theories of the tenacity of the indigenous ‘pedlar’-trade, to Steensgaard's theories of the structural superiority of the trading companies over their Asian competitors, have as yet been rather one-sided. Mostly, when comparing the two trading systems, the historians have concentrated on the trade which took place directly between Europe and Asia. Consequently, the competition between the ‘native’ Asian trade and the trade carried out by the companies have been discussed solely as an aspect of this bi-lateral trade. European participation in the intra-Asian distribution and re-distribution of goods has as yet not been fully discussed. Although authors like Holden Furber and K.N. Chaudhuri have acknowledged the need for further analysis of this subject, neither case-studies nor more theoretical works have appeared.

The five hundredth anniversary of the Columbian discovery of America is upon us, and with it the obligation to assess existing interpretations of the significance of that voyage and the establishment of permanent links between the Old and the New Worlds. The most influential of the several schools of interpretation are, on the one hand, the newest and analytic, and the other, the classic and bardic. The former is for many recondite and discomforting. The latter, the one most often taught, dramatized, and believed in North America, is for most as comfortable as an old pair of slippers. We learned it at primary school.

Among Third World countries, India stands out as having one of the most developed ‘big business sectors’, with a recent tendency by some firms to go multinational. This notwithstanding the fact that the public sector plays a major role in the Indian economy. Although the origins of some of India's business groups go back to pre-colonial times, most of them trace their beginnings to the 1850–1950 period, the ‘second colonial century’, during which India underwent a limited process of industrial growth as well as became a major exporter of some agricultural commodities to the world market (tea, jute, cotton, oilseeds, and, prior to 1910, opium and indigo). There are obvious parallels there with the developments in some Latin American countries, particularly Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Colombia, which also emerged as major suppliers of raw materials (coffee, sugar, wheat, nonferrous metals) while they built up manufacturing sectors of various magnitudes (with Brazil in the lead). However, the private business sector in these countries presents a picture which differs in many ways from the Indian case. It seems worth attempting a comparison between those two very different underdeveloped regions of the world, the Indian subcontinent and Latin America, in the hope of being able to put the Indian case in a broader perspective. Given the broad similarity in the constraints under which capitalist enterprise laboured in those two areas, a study of the differences in entrepreneurial responses might bring to light certain specificities in Indian entrepreneurial history which often go unnoticed.

Early modern Luso-Brazilian history is in a rut; and nowhere is that rut more evident than for the period between the late seventeenth century and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the period of the Brazilian gold rush. The mineral strikes made a profound impact on Portugal's society and economy: in both what changed and what remained the same. Yet surprisingly, this era remains one of the least studied periods in Portuguese history. There is not, for example, even a modern biography of Dom Joao V, whose forty-five-year reign encompassed the gold rush's most glittering moments. In what follows I will argue that several widespread perceptions of the lack of sources for early modern Luso-Brazilian history are incorrect and in need of substantial revision; and further that some traditional explanations of eighteenth-century economic history have been based on inadequate research more dependent upon ideology than sound scholarship.