In the Summer of 1492 Christopher Columbus, a Genovese navigator, looks at the contracts he has just concluded with the queen of Castile. On first reading, these documents seem to be ordinary commercial contracts. The navigator agrees to explore, in the service of his contracting partners, new trade routes on the vast and uncharted waters of the Atlantic. His contracting partners will finance the venture. In return for his services the navigator will get a fair share of the future profits and extensive privileges over the unknown lands that he might discover on his voyage. Similar contracts are known, yet none would have such far reaching consequences as the contracts between the navigator Christopher Columbus and his contracting partners, the Catholic Kings Isabel of Castile and Leon and Fernando of Aragon.

Our knowledge of colonial Brazilian demography is appallingly low. European migration to Brazil remains a particularly neglected topic. It is no small irony that the migration of African slaves to Portuguese America is better documented than free white immigration. Surprisingly, reliable information is perhaps scarcest for the eighteenth-century gold-rush period when immigration to Brazil preoccupied Crown and treasure seekers alike. The manner of social and physical conditions which pushed individuals and families from their homes, the numerical ebb and flow of settlement patterns, even the simple mechanics of transport to the colony, remain caught inside a nebulous swirl of mythology, conjecture, and impressionistic conclusions. After two and a half centuries historians have scarcely gone beyond Antonil's oft quoted comment that ‘lured by the insatiable thirst for gold, a large quantity of Portuguese and foreigners arrive each year on the fleet heading to the mines […] the mixture is of every condition of people: men and women, young and old, poor and rich, nobles and plebeians, laymen and clerics, and friars from various orders, many of whom possess neither house nor convent in Brazil’.

The Swedish Africa Company (Svenska Afrikakompaniet, SAK) was a chartered trading company which conducted a limited and short-lived trade in the middle of the seventeenth century. Its political and economic significance for Sweden itself was negligible, and in West Africa the Company was one of the smallest and shortest lived of trading companies. At first glance, the SAK appears to be merely a historical curiosity and therefore outside the interest of scientific research. Yet closer examination reveals that the Company was actually quite profitable. An understanding of how t i achieved its success will surely add to our knowledge about European trade in West Africa.

African history was really born on a specific date and its parent was Prof. Phillips, then heading the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), in London. It began when the learned Collins and Asquith commissions advocated the upgrading of schools in four different parts of the continent (Nigeria, Ghana, Sudan and Uganda) to University College status whereupon the Colonial Office looked for a university in Great Britain to guarantee programming and quality and passed that job unto the University of London which in turn promptly passed much of the burden unto SOAS. Although no funds were attached to this Phillips accepted and eventually did get funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, to the greater glory of SOAS. Meanwhile however he had visited East Africa and he had been struck there in 1947 by the absence of ‘native histories’ such as one finds so thickly on the ground in his usual playing ground India. He decided to hire an historian of Africa who would both supervise the development of history departments in the new colleges and work to remedy this lack of local history.

In 1961, when the Union of South Africa became a republic, I wrote in ‘Interpretations and Trends in South African Historical Writing’: ‘The Afrikaner had won the constitutional struggle against the Briton but at the very moment that he was about to reap the rewards of his victory in a new Republic, he stood confronted with the challenge of a non-white majority, threatening to deprive him of his gains […] A national myth has already become established - that South Africa is an innocent nation and the victim of attack in an evil world, and that attempts to solve the racial problem by territorial divisions or separate development are “misunderstood”.’