On the morning of 30 May, freshly arrived from Wageningen, Professor Jan de Vries arrives at Leiden University. Later this day, he will be giving a lecture, to a full room, on his take on the so-called Great Divergence debate, but beforehand he has kindly agreed to an interview with Itinerario. Apart from him, present are three graduate students, the authors of this piece, and Professor Jos Gommans of Leiden University, in whose office we are, and whose grandmother's stately chair serves as the interviewee's place of honour. Over fresh cups of coffee, an amiable but wide-ranging conversation unfolds.

Professor Jan de Vries, of the University of California, Berkeley, is a respected economic historian with a long career reaching back to the 1970s. His work has taken on such diverse topics as Dutch rural economy in the Golden Age, European urbanisation and, in his widely influential book The Industrious Revolution, the developments that in his view paved the way to industrialisation in Europe. Lately his work has also taken a global turn, as he has addressed topics such as the Great Divergence and globalisation in history.

There are so many people named Jan de Vries. Helped by Wikipedia, we first thought we had somehow overlooked your early career as a motor driver! Yes, even in Berkeley there is more than one of us. If you look at the telephone book, you'll find three of us. One was even at the university [University of California, Berkeley]. He was an electrical engineer who worked in the space science laboratory which was affiliated with the university. Many years ago I had a telephone call in my office from a Dutchman who said, “Jan, I am waiting here for you.” And after a little bit he said, “you are Jan de Vries the electronicus [electronic engineer], right?” I answered “no, I am Jan de Vries the historicus [historian].” Later I met my name-sake and we still see each other periodically.

India's production of fine luxury and craft goods for world markets was discovered and exploited by Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Textile producers in Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast, and Bengal applied fine craft skills to European designs, colour codes, and textile lengths and widths. Through the intervention of the East India Companies and private traders as well as their intermediaries, brokers and local merchants, weavers, and printers produced the goods to satisfy Western markets just as they had done for Eastern and African markets in the centuries before.

Today Indian craftspeople are engaging in a new phase of production for global markets. They are using traditional techniques of the kind that attracted Western buyers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: hand weaving, hand block printing, and natural dyes. Accessing the niche national and international markets needed to provide a future for these crafts is a major challenge. This article focuses on the artisans, skills and markets in one area of India—the region of Kachchh in northern Gujarat, even now considered a remote part of the new global India. It sets this within a wider context of Gujarat and the earlier and more recent history of its textile industries. Douglas Haynes's recent book, Small Town Capitalism in Western India (2012) provides a framework for the study of small-scale industry, and the article will address his subject and methods. The new sources used are a collection of oral histories of craftspeople in a range of industries. These oral histories address skills and training across generations, and how these crafts have adapted and continue to adapt to the demands of national and world markets.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, remarkable developments in the realm of law were witnessed throughout the world. They expressed and paved the way for a new type of dispensation. For those parts of Asia and the Middle East with a substantial European presence, the legitimate rules, principles, and procedures for resolving disputes were progressively assimilated into systems of state-sanctioned legal pluralism. The process—at once gradual, charged, and punctuated—coincided with the initial consolidation of European imperial dominance and the emergence of Europe's modern global empires.

Though these changes in the realm of law date from the nineteenth century, the European presence there had long preceded them. This was perhaps most notable in maritime Asia. The Europeans in this region tended to cluster in their factories or in certain quarters of the towns and cities dotting the Indian Ocean rim. Notwithstanding differences between, say, a Mocha and an Aceh in size, location, and form of government, all these settlements had one quality in common: each was able to profit from the traffic conducted along the coast or across the high seas. As for the sovereign justice on offer, the dispensation that governed it in early modern times was far removed from its later analogue. This stemmed in large part from the rationale and basis for the European presence. In particular, Europeans could not dominate maritime Asia's provincial and imperial powers, especially those located inland, and the great majority of those arriving from western Europe intended to return as soon as possible; despite some involvement in racketeering and other forms of surplus extraction—famously in attempts to introduce and enforce a system of passports in maritime transport and travel—their interests were mainly commercial, oriented towards trade and shipping; the indigenous populations remained on the whole large and resilient; and many of the skills and techniques vested in livelihoods long associated with the region retained their primacy. As a result, the only realistic option for Europeans in maritime Asia was to reconcile themselves to the prevailing order. And this they did, with most of the region's fundamentals, not least in the realm of law, continuing to develop along what were essentially indigenous lines.

In the year 1819, three years after the British return of the East Indies to the Netherlands, a young man of twenty arrived to Kupang, a port on the coast of West Timor. Kupang was by no means a large place but it was the centre of Dutch colonial power over this part of Indonesia, and its administration monitored the various islands that the Netherlands laid claim to: Solor, Alor, Rote, Savu, and others. This task was made the more difficult since some of these places were also claimed by Portugal, which maintained a colonial governor in Dili, in the eastern part of Timor. The last serious conflict between the two colonial powers had occurred the previous year when the little harbour Atapupu was forcibly occupied by the Dutch resident. The tempests of the Age of Napoleon had been severely felt in Timor, whose inhabitants were located at the extremities of the colonial claims of the warring parties. Britons, Dutchmen, and Portuguese had fought or intrigued for the resources of an island that was neither the richest nor the most accessible in the island world of Southeast Asia—rather the opposite.

The name of the young man was Reint Le Bruyn. Born in Zutphen, Le Bruyn had spent his early years as a child labourer in a textile factory. Coming from relatively destitute conditions, he had nevertheless picked up some education, and in 1818 he signed up for the Nederlandsch Zendeling-Genootschap (NZG), the Dutch Missionary Society. This society, the first among about fifteen to concentrate on the East Indies, had been established in 1797 by a missionary who later worked in South Africa. It was modelled on the London Missionary Society which was founded two years earlier. Societies of this kind emerged as part of the wave of rising interest in undertaking missionary activity in non-Western societies, which, interestingly, coincided with the questioning of traditional clerical hierarchy after the outbreak of the French Revolution. Biographical sketches of Le Bruyn's life have typically pointed to his Christian devotion to explain his career choice. However, it could also have been a way for poor men of ability to engage in work that provided a degree of professional recognition that they could not have hoped for at home. Missionaries received scant preparation for their task in Rotterdam; they had little knowledge of the societies that awaited them, and they only learned any substantial Malay, the main language of communication, on arrival in the Indies. Le Bruyn successfully overcame these obstacles and had an eventful career on Timor for the next ten years, to the extent that posterity hailed him as the true pioneer of the Protestant mission in these waters.

By the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, two islands had come to dominate global cane-sugar production. For most of the sixty-year period between 1870 and 1930, around half of the world's internationally traded crop came from Cuba and Java. The two islands had many topographical similarities that made them particularly well suited to the establishment of sugar plantations: both are relatively large islands with fertile soils and semi-tropical climate. They were also situated in regions that had been drawn into the European sphere of influence in the sixteenth century but that had only been lightly exploited before the nineteenth, when they were both well placed to assume leading roles in the satisfaction of the escalating demand for sugar in the industrialising societies of Europe and North America.

However, Cuba and Java existed within two very distinct sets of imperial and commercial networks: Spanish and Atlantic, and Dutch and Indian Ocean respectively. As a result of this, while there have been a plethora of studies about cane agriculture and the sugar industry in each of the islands, there has been little effort to compare their histories or explore the interconnections between them. Only recently has a start been made to study systematically the “convergence and divergence” of the sugar industry in the two hemispheres and to compare the differences and similarities to be found in the paths followed by the two islands.

Although the sugar industries of Cuba and Java took different directions, these were inextricably linked. While Cuban planters could exploit the availability of large areas of underused land to overcome the relative scarcity of labour, planters in Java took advantage of the relative abundance of labour to maximise yields from the more limited land available to them. As a consequence of this, Javanese planters influenced by the work of Cuban agronomist Álvaro Reynoso paid considerable attention to the development of scientific methods in cane cultivation. Meanwhile, Reynoso's ideas fell on deaf ears in his home island, where most planters ignored the need for a more scientific approach in the fields in favour of technological advances in the sugar factory and what they saw as their immediate commercial interests.

“Above all, we will put on record, that the Rechtsschool has not missed its target: the creation of independent (native) lawyers, who are aware of their position as independent judicial officers in the indigenous social relations.”

C.C. van Helsdingen,

Gedenkboek Rechtsschool 1929

When the Dutch introduced peace and order as the governing doctrine in the East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century, the network of colonial state institutions needed to project themselves as a unified, legitimate state with an authority to enforce justice. This state required a corps of jurists who embodied specific forms of subjectivity in order to maintain the projected authority. Educating natives as jurists offered the most economical means to staff the judiciary. This essay looks at legal education for Native elites as a colonial project of subject formation that was inseparable from colonial state formation. It does so by surveying three institutions in the Indies and the Netherlands between 1909 and 1939: the Batavia Rechtsschool, the Leiden United Faculty of Law and Letters, and the Batavia Rechtshoogeschool. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power and biopower in education and concepts from state theory, I argue that the pedagogical strategies and the legal education curricula in the Indies were deliberately designed to produce independent and critical Native jurists who were at the same time loyal to the Netherlands. The argument, thus, stands in contrast to literature that relies on early Foucault to construct education as a strictly normalising institution. I further suggest that although various state institutions did not unanimously agree on this ideal vision of Native jurists, they nevertheless tolerated it due to the urgent need to project the presence of a just state.

Using a variety of sources I focus my attention on two arenas of investigation: the vision of the ideal subjectivity to be embodied by Native jurists, and the technologies employed to achieve it. With this focus, I do not attempt to represent a comprehensive native point of view. Instead, I limit myself to examining the debates among Dutch educators and policy makers regarding proper legal education for the Native elites, the resulting policies as decreed in various ordinances, and the policies' implementation in the schools' curricula and pedagogy.

British private investors were not inclined to view the leaders of newly independent Indonesia with much confidence. In 1949, when the transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands to the Republic of Indonesia was imminent, the chairman of the United Serdang (Sumatra) Rubber Plantations disclosed the following opinion to the firm's shareholders at a gathering in London's Great Tower Street: “The Republican leaders are mainly ambitious men, whose records are well known, striving for personal aggrandizement. The measure of their interest in the welfare of the country is to be gauged by their policy of wanton destruction of life and physical assets, such as estate factories and ancillary buildings, which are essential for the restoration of the economy of the country once the political problem has been settled.” This article is about how a British enterprise dealt with the significant uncertainties prevailing in the business environment of Indonesia during the early independence period, in particular the 1950s.

The economic situation in newly independent Indonesia was a peculiar one. As a major exporter of primary products in high demand such as oil and rubber, prospects were generally bright for the Indonesian economy during and after the Korean War. Just as under colonialism, a modern, large-scale sector accounting for almost 25 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product) was still dominated by Dutch firms and British and American multinationals. Eight large Dutch trading companies handled 60 per cent of consumer goods imports. Nevertheless, the business climate had changed dramatically for foreign firms operating in Indonesia. The 1950s saw a gradual shift away from moderate policy-makers towards an increasingly vocal economic nationalism. The former were acutely aware of the country's dependence on foreign capital and know-how, whereas the latter relentlessly pushed for full decolonisation, that is not only in political but in economic terms. Nationalist sentiments gained the upper hand during the first cabinet of Ali Sastroamidjojo (July 1953–July 1955), culminating with the takeover of virtually all remaining Dutch-owned enterprises in Indonesia from December 1957 onwards, eventually followed by formal nationalisation in 1959. Although economic nationalism in the 1950s primarily targeted Dutch enterprises, British foreign firms were affected as well. At a later stage, in the context of the Indonesian military confrontation with Malaysia (1963–6), they were also seized, albeit not nationalised.