The ethnic composition of the contemporary world has become very confusing. Recently, the thirty years' anniversary of the Cuban revolution was commemorated and some journalists remembered that in 1959 it was not yet clear as to whether Castro headed a nationalist or a communist insurrection against the then ruling dictator of Cuba, Batista. In fact, at the time a commentator of the New York Times made much of a photograph showing a triumphant Castro with a Chinese face among his entourage. Was that not a sure sign of the influence of Communist China on the future direction of Cuba's revolutionary movement? Fortunately, a reader's letter pointed out that more than 100,000 Chinese had moved to Cuba when the island was a Spanish colony and when many governments with sugar colonies had concluded treaties obtaining the right to recruit migrant Chinese labourers. Thus, the Chinese face on the picture did not necessarily belong to a newly arrived Chinese, it might also have belonged to someone from the Cuban Chinese community established more than a hundred years ago.

In a by now classic definition, European expansion in the nineteenth century has been characterised as the integration of large tracts of the earth's surface into a world-economy dominated by Britain,. Distinctions are conventionally drawn between two processes of integration: on the one hand, the creation of new economies by European settlement in ‘empty’ lands of temperate climate, from which a thinly scattered indigenous population had been displaced, and, on the other, the subordination and partial development of existing economic systems in densely populated tropical areas. Migration from Europe clearly had a role in both processes. It was crucial to the first: economic integration of ‘new’ lands could hardly take place without it, or at least historically it has not done so. The role of European migration in the second process would appear to be more limited. Whites were only likely to be involved in productive processes of agriculture or manufacturing at the highest managerial levels or as technical experts, and much of the military and administrative underpinning deemed necessary for economic domination could be provided by Asian or African clerks and soldiers.

When the abolitionists achieved the suppression of the British slave-trade in 1807, they believed that a brave new world of free labour was opening up for Africa. Although they thought mainly in terms of ex-slaves providing the labour for plantation areas, they hoped that any shortfall could in part be met by free emigration from Africa. The reality was to be cruelly different from these dreams. Emigration continued, but overwhelmingly in the form of coerced labour, and most attempts at stimulating free emigration failed. Labour exports across the Atlantic remained close to the late eighteenth-century high point for about four decades, and then fell away steeply to almost nothing by the First World War, as the long, halting and often contradictory European campaign to abolish coerced labour slowly bore its fruits. In the interests of comparison with other areas of emigration, this report will devote a little space at the end to analysing why a small current of free emigration developed, and why it remained so limited. But the bulk of the report will focus on large exports of coerced labour.

It seems no exaggeration to say that the Caribbean used to ‘eat’ people. The autochthonous inhabitants of the region, the Amerindians, estimated to have numbered about one million before Columbus, quickly embarked on a course of rapid demographic decline after the intrusion of the Europeans. Around 1700 all Amerindians had virtually disappeared from the islands and only a fraction of them remained in the hinterland of the Guianas.

A new found interest in social history, recent developments in historical thought and methodology and a fresh awareness of the importance of gender-specific experience have led historians to question an ‘ordinary woman's place’ in Singa- pore's past. In the historiography of Singapore, there is a need to foreground the critical importance of the ah ku and karayuki-san in the sex,politics and society of the city, stressing not only alterations in their life and circumstance, but also variations in the role of the colonial government, and changes in the ideology of sex and social policy.