If there is any country where it does make sense for a historian to buy a strong pair of boots, it is Sri Lanka. All over the country one may stumble upon reminders of the past. During two days of travel along the southern coastal strip, I, saw more outstanding pieces of Dutch East Indian Company architecture than in two weeks on Java. With some footwork there is a lot to discover, apart from the beaches. The same goes for the researcher in the National Archives of Colombo; it is full of unexpected surprises. As usual we offer in this section a piece by one of the local archivists, an article by a researcher who has spent several months there, and a short introductory piece by one of the editors whose main intention it is to come up with some practical suggestions and observations on lodging, eating and moving around.

Sri Lanka is an island in the Indian Ocean situated to the south-east of the southern point of India. It was colonised by an Aryan race that came from North India in the 6th century B.C. It has a recorded history of twenty-two centuries. Until the beginning of the 15th century it had political contacts mainly with the sub-continent of India. In 1518, the Portuguese captured a part of the maritime coastal area of Sri Lanka and started their own system of administration. The Dutch ousted the Portuguese from Galle in 1640 and established the administration of the Dutch East India Company along the same coastal region by 1656. They were active until they ceded to the British in 1796. The British administered the same coastal area from 1796 to 1815. The Kandyan kingdom was subsequently annexed in 1815 and the British gained complete control over the entire island. Sri Lanka regained independence from the British in 1948 and in May, 1972 it became a Republic within the British Commonwealth. Since February, 1978 it has been an Independent Republic with its first executive President.

The National Archives of Sri Lanka hold a vast number of hitherto little used documents which provide an excellent basis for the study of Sri Lanka under Dutch and British administration. This article is a result of my visit to the Archives to carry out research on crime in Sri Lanka in the second half of the nineteenth century. It seeks to describe some of the opportunities - and difficulties - in using this rich resource.

During the winter of 1980-1981 I visited China as a guest-lecturer and researcher on the invitation of both the Chinese Ministry of Education and Amoy University. The lecture schedule took me from Peking University to the southeastern coastal province of Fukien where short visits were paid to Fuchou, Ch'üanchou, and Changchou before settling down for a fortnight's stay at Amoy University. This introduction will be solely devoted to the Nanyang Institute, the only place where I spent enough time to acquire more than a superficial impression of what is going on. I do not think many people will have an opportunity to visit Amoy - which is a shame, since foreign visitors are very cordially received. Consequently it is of no use to offer a guide to visitors. Rather, I would like to raise a few points about the activities of the institute itself and Chinese research facilities for foreigners in general.

Nanyang Research Institute (i.e. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies) was founded in 1956. It is one of the earliest Chinese research institutes on international affairs. It focuses its attention on the politics, economy and history of Southeast Asian countries (particularly the five ASEAN countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines), as well as problems of overseas Chinese.

It is a well known fact that informational exchange between Cuba and the Western world is poor and, to the extent that it exists, highly polemic. This characterization of non-communication unfortunately, also applies to the field of historical research. In Western Europe, at least, there is not much scholarly interest in pre-Revolutionary Cuban history. There is no framework for historical contact either. I would say that this neglect of Cuban history is regrettable not only from an academic point of view, but also because we cannot possibly understand the Cuban Revolution without a more thorough understanding of its historical roots. Apart from being regrettable, this is also unnecessary, as I found out in the course of my particular investigation, entitled The Cuban railways, 1830–1868. Infrastructure and economic decision-making in a Caribbean plantation-economy.

The 1979 issue of Itinerario, (no. 2) opened with “A note on Suriname Plantation Archives at the University of Minnesota”, in which Richard Price of the Johns Hopkins University reported his discovery of some 2,000 manuscript pages on a number of Surinam plantations in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. This, of course, is very good news. It is perhaps still better news that the Dutch archives contain vast and almost untapped (resources on a 200-odd plantations! I am, however, certainly not the first tone to make this ‘discovery’: Mrs. M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz not only mentioned it in her Ph.D. dissertation “Asian trade and European influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630”, but she even ordered part of the archives herself. It must be the unbridgeable gap between scholars interested in the East Indies /and those who study West Indian history, that her enthusiastic remarks on the availability of plantation material went unheeded. When nine years later Th. Mathews published his article “Los estuadios sobre historia economica del Caribe (1585 - 1910)”2, he mentioned the Dutch West Indies as a blank on the Caribbean map as far as economic (plantation) history is concerned. Since Mathews wrote his article the historiographic situation has improved only slightly, and it is an ironic comment on Surinam historical scholarship that tiny Curaçao's XlXth century plantation economy by now has found its historian, while the Surinam plantations are still in search of an author.

The discovery of new areas beyond the Atlantic Ocean and the pioneering of a new searoute via the Cape to the Indian Ocean led to expansion of western Europe in the sixteenth century. There of course followed the development of trade routes to the new areas outside Europe, but there was also a significant expansion of trade inside Europe and the Middle East, as well as changes in existing trade and production patterns. These are the subject of this paper.

The system of apartheid in modern South Africa is in large measure camouflage for the maintainance of white supremacy. In the first place it entails the division of the South African population into what are euphemistically known as ‘national groups’, which.in practice come down to racial segments: white, the so-called ‘coloured’ - those of mixed race, and the descendants of the Cape colony's slaves - Indians and the Blacks. The last group, the indigeneous inhabitants of most of the land area of South Africa, form a vast majority of the country's population, but, with the so-called ‘coloureds’ and the Indians, have been systematically excluded from any real share in political and economic power. The official policy has stressed that what is intended is the creation of separate zuiien, or pillars of society. According to the ideology, South Africa is now a plural society, to such an extent that the title of the ministry formerly known as ‘Bantu Affairs’ is now ‘Plural Affairs’. In hard reality, there is geen spraak - no question - of equality between the various groups, but rather a rigourously maintained hierarchy. The whites are vastly more prosperous and control almost all sectors of the economy, through their exclusion of other races from the processes of political decision making.