On 4 June 2016, Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State University gave an all-day workshop on global history for graduate students and junior and senior scholars of the Universities of Dundee and St. Andrews in Scotland. The workshop consisted of three discussion sessions, each with a different theme, namely the conceptualization(s), parameters, and possible future(s) of global history. The central question was to what extent this fast-changing field required adjustments of “normal” historiographical methodologies and epistemologies. The workshop participants agreed that global history focuses in particular on connections across large spaces or long timespans, or both. Yet reconstructing these webs of connections should not obscure global inequalities. In the case of empires, many of the exchanges across space and time have been ordered in a hierarchical fashion—metropoles profiting from peripheral spaces, for example—and imposed by certain groups of people on others, resulting in, for example, the enslavement or extermination of indigenous peoples. As historians, we should also ask ourselves what we do about peoples or areas that were or remain unconnected, local, and remote. Where does globalization end?

In May 2016, Professor Ann Laura Stoler visited Leiden University as the Spring 2016 Global Asia Scholar. On the last day of her stay, Amrit Dev and Sanne Ravensbergen—historians affiliated with the Leiden Humanities Faculty—met Stoler on a sunny terrace situated alongside one of the canals for a conversation about the developments in her scholarly work, career choices, sources of inspiration, and the motivations for doing history. Professor Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York. She has published extensively on the colonial history of Indonesia and the sexual and racial epistemologies of imperial politics. Her recent research addresses how colonial histories matter and manifest in the world today.

This dossier focusses on non-European teachers within mission schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the period of colonial control. These teachers were central to the missionary project and helped to disseminate both Christianity and Western knowledge across the globe. Local teachers, alongside other mission assistants and helpers, also helped translate, transmit, and transform both Western and local forms of knowledge and contributed to broader discourse about knowledge, yet the importance of their work has often been overshadowed by the work undertaken in examining missionary elites. This dossier, with its extended introduction and three case studies from Africa, the Danish West Indies, and Bolivia, sheds light on the roles of non-European mission teachers as well as their recruitment and training, their self-representations, and methodological as well as conceptual issues about how information on these often inconspicuous intermediaries of mission education can be retrieved from disparate sources.

This article concentrates on Catholic mission teachers in Southern Tanzania from the 1890s to the 1940s, their role and agency in founding and developing the early education system of Tanzania. African mission teachers are an underrated group of actors in colonial settings. Being placed between colonized and colonizers, between conversion and civilising mission, between colonial rule and African demands for emancipation, between church and government and at the heart of local society, their agency was crucial to forming African Christianity, to social change and to a newly emerging class of educated Africans. This liminal position also rendered them almost invisible for historiography, since the colonial archive rarely gave credit to their vital role and European missionary propaganda tended to present them as examples of successful mission work, rather than as self-reliant missionary activists. The article circumscribes the framework of colonial education policies and missionary strategies, it recovers the teachers’ active role in the colonial education system as well as in missionary evangelization. Finally, it contrasts teachers’ self-representation with the official image conveyed in missionary media.

This article places missionary education squarely at the centre of any consideration of European expansion in the modern era. It focuses more specifically on the place of local teachers in Bolivia and their relationship with one evangelical Protestant mission, the Bolivian Indian Mission, which originated in New Zealand in the early 1900s. It takes a non-metropole and a “multi-sited” approach to missions and education. It argues that what we know about Bolivian teachers was mediated through the missionary voice and that these teachers negotiated their lives within a particular missionary space, in which there operated a number of intersecting influences from other sites within the wider imperial or Western network. It aims to both reclaim the identities of Bolivian teachers (focusing on teachers’ identity and function) and to reflect critically on intrinsic methodological and conceptual issues (emphasizing the nature of sources, missionary discourse, the resulting status of Bolivian teachers, and Bolivian agency).

This article studies the role of indigenous teachers within the school system run by the Moravian mission in the Danish West Indies. The mission opened its first day schools for enslaved children in 1841 a few years before the abolition of slavery. The missionaries were reliant on the support of teachers of Afro-Caribbean origin, which were trained in one of the teacher training institutes run by the Mico-Charity Society. This article proposes that the recruitment of Afro-Caribbean teachers with different denominational backgrounds and professional education challenged the mission hierarchy. This will be pointed out by focusing on the recruitment and training of the teachers and by an analysis of their position within the mission society.

In 1762, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, Britain’s Royal Navy and East India Company mobilised a motley army of Europeans, South Asians, and Africans and invaded Manila, the capital of Spain’s Asian Empire. The Black Legend blinded the British to the complexities of the real balance of power in the Philippines. The Spanish colonial government quickly raised militias of Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese mestizos, and indigenous Filipinos who ultimately defeated the British. The loyalties of the soldiers of many nations who converged in Manila could not be taken for granted. This article examines the ongoing bargaining that took place between imperial officials and soldiers, revealing the crucial role that negotiation played in eighteenth-century empire building beyond the Atlantic. War transformed fighting men of many nations into important historical actors who determined the outcome of the Seven Years’ War in the Indo-Pacific world.

The northernmost regions of Fennoscandia attracted attention of travellers and geographers for centuries. These regions were often imagined in ambivalent terms as homelands of evil and dearth or as places of true happiness. From the seventeenth century onwards, Sápmi (Lapland) became a destination of regular exploration undertaken by Swedish and foreign travellers. These travels made it possible to verify, dismiss, or authorize all that what was previously only speculated about, and ultimately led to the construction of new sets of representations. This paper studies the modes of imagining Sápmi in early modern writing, explores how these were intertwined with state programs in the region, and how the rhetoric and ideological underpinnings of the representations authored by the domestic authors differed from the visions of Sápmi produced by contemporaneous foreign travellers.

This article examines the decision-making process for a new fort which the Dutch West India Company proposed to build near Takoradi in present-day Ghana in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. By closely following the process of design, evaluation, and redesign of the fort, this article argues that the WIC was institutionally incapable of coordinating and carrying out such a complex project. The original design for the new fort was made in 1774 by Johan Frederik Trenks, a Silesian-born engineer who, as it turned out, was not current with modern design practices and used Dutch examples from the first half of the seventeenth century. The design was sent to the Netherlands for evaluation and returned with scathing criticism. The long, drawn-out process of design, evaluation, and redesign of what was after all a relatively small fort show the institutional paralysis of the WIC in the years leading up to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–84). Though the fort would never be completed, construction did begin shortly before the war. The conflict, followed shortly thereafter by the dissolution of the WIC, meant the project would never be completed.