This article concerns itself with the kind of legal conflicts that broke out in the Atlantic New World between merchant interests from different parts of Europe. Case studies are made of two disputes: one between Samuel Argall of the Virginia Company and a factor on behalf of Antoinette de Pons at the Île des Monts-Déserts, and the other between the Compagnie de Caën and the Kirke brothers at the Saint Lawrence River. Together, these case studies reveal how important it was for merchant interests to have resident ambassadors and state officials advancing their interests in England and France. Procedural difficulties and jurisdictional uncertainty often impeded the road to redress. Additionally, this article suggests that the peacetime reckoning of events associated with warfare provided an optimal opportunity for disaffected private actors to have their claims for redress recognised. The extent to which private overtures for restitution relied upon public acts of diplomacy reveals some of the reasons why it is not possible to date the origins of private international law before the long nineteenth century. Rather we might profitably identify, in events such as these, the prehistory of private international law.

This article analyses two databases with information on traveling Jesuit missionaries to calculate the human cost of connecting Europe and China between 1500 and 1800. After combining analysis of these statistics with travel accounts, the article argues that when missionaries did not arrive at their intended destination, it was more often the case that they had been redirected than that they had died en route. Particular groups and individual Jesuits were redirected as a result of political fissures within the global Jesuit network. Since Jesuit missionaries held allegiances to competing state patrons based on their national background, their travel patterns were altered significantly either by choice or by force.

While a thick vein of scepticism marked Enlightenment thinkers’ studies, such investigations cannot be divorced from their concurrent quest to merge the wondrous and the rational. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in philosophers’ investigations of merpeople. Examining European gentlemen’s debates over mermaids and tritons illuminate their willingness to embrace wonder in their larger quest to understand the origins of humankind. Naturalists utilized a wide range of methodologies to critically study these seemingly wondrous creatures and, in turn, assert the reality of merpeople as evidence of humanity’s aquatic roots. As with other creatures they encountered in their global travels, European philosophers utilized various theories—including those of racial, biological, taxonomical, and geographic difference—to understand merpeople’s place in the natural world. By the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers integrated merpeople into their explanation of humanity’s origins, thus bringing this phenomenon full circle.

This paper examines the attempt of British missionaries on Madagascar to use medicine and the mission hospital as a way to convert the Malagasy people during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In their attempt to educate the Malagasy about the benefits of Western civilization, which was often defined through science as well as Christianity, missionaries were challenged by Malagasy culture and the local environment. To counter the ability of the Malagasy to challenge Western methods through their cultural beliefs and healing practices and so convert the Malagasy to Western ways, British missionaries had to carve out a space isolated from the Malagasy environment. Medicine, particularly the mission hospital, offered a space to champion Western science and Christianity. In their attempt to bring civilization to Madagascar, missionaries directly tied together science and Christianity while domesticating the space of the hospital.

Among the roughly 150,000 soldiers sent to the Dutch East Indies between 1815 and 1914, the Luxembourg contingent made up a tiny minority of just 1,075 men. Based upon extensive research into their careers, data on these soldiers provide further clues to understanding what drove Europe’s young men to become colonial soldiers. The results of this national case study will be compared with earlier investigations by Bossenbroek and Bosma on recruits for the Dutch colonial army. Similar to the Dutch soldiers, their Luxembourg counterparts had a predominantly urban provenance. However, in contrast to the Dutch, they did not have a strong military background, and it appears that fewer Luxembourgers stayed behind in the Dutch East Indies after their tour of duty. They were more attracted by the payments that the recruiters doled out in advance, particularly at a time of economic crisis, than in a career in the tropics.

In 1905–1906 the Dutch colonial state ended the autonomy of the inland of West Timor, hitherto home to the prestigious but crumbling Sonba’i Dynasty. The article addresses the problems and possibilities of writing the history of this traumatic event, which is described in several colonial reports and memorandums, while the Timorese did not leave written texts. A number of oral accounts were recorded in the 1960s by local historian F. H. Fobia, some six decades after the event. The article discusses the possibilities of an oral history approach against a backdrop of recent research about such methods. The contemporary and near-contemporary Dutch reports are systematically compared with the recordings of oral versions. It is argued that the latter destabilize the colonial version in a number of ways regarding the causes of the conflict, the conduct of the colonial troops, and the circumstances of the capture of the Sonba’i lord. At the same time, the oral versions are likely to have been processed over the decades into a meaningful set of decisive events that make sense to “traditional” Timorese discourses as well as modern Indonesian ones.

In mid-October 1945, Edward and Frederika van der Sluys were murdered in gruesome circumstances, along with a number of other Dutch Eurasians, most probably in the yard of a Dutch-owned sugar factory in the Slawi district of the north coast of Central Java at which the husband had been employed since his youth. Their fate forms part of a larger narrative of the Bersiap! (“Get Ready!”) period of the Indonesian national revolution, which has attracted considerable attention from historians. Indeed, there are already two well-trod narratives of the violence accompanying the revolution and of ethnic cleansing during the Bersiap. The present paper argues, however, that there is room for a third: that of the sugar industry—and factory communities that lay at its heart—as a much older arena of social difference and conflicted loyalties. The account proceeds on the assumption that, without being embedded in a broader and deeper narrative, the story of what happened to the Van der Sluys couple remains incomplete.