In analysing the history of the Portuguese expansion, it is tempting to use purely economic factors. This perspective minimizes two non-economic problems confronting Portuguese society at the beginning of the fifteenth century: on the one hand the general cohesion of Portuguese society, which could only be brought about by the noble and military élites, and on the other the problem of national independence, which at the time was under threat from Castile. In fact, these problems persisted, alongside others that were generated by the very solution that was found for them, namely by overseas expansion. The capture of Ceuta in 1415 was an ingenious attempt to overcome these problems in one go. Due to their military weakness, it had been impossible for the Portuguese elites to take part in the conquest of Granada. The project of Ceuta did permit territorial growth. Besides, it mobilized the nation ideologically, thus reinforcing its identity without threatening the unity of the Respublica Christiana.

I first came upon Henry Davison Love's Vestiges of Old Madras a decade ago in The Hague. The four volumes were published at London in 1913 and have been very lately reprinted by the Oriental Books Reprint Corporation of Delhi. The dull cloth bindings of the Indian edition, however, hardly conjure the thrill I experienced the first time I watched the original volumes heave into view on the book conveyor of the Royal Library. Probably no one had checked them out for over fifty years, and they sparkled pristinely, as though they had been delivered from a time warp. Golden letters embellished on ivory-coloured boards flashed richly out from maroon and black mouldings decorated with slender urns and caryatids. How much we miss today for not having editions like that!

‘One does not write history with value judgements.’ Van Leur made this remark, countering the ‘Dutch refrain’ sung by Godée Molsbergen, which indicted the corruption of the VOC-servants as a cause of the Company's downfall. Van Leur explained that the standard for a modern officialdom was only created with the Napoleonic state and ‘it was therefore anachronistic to apply this standard to the 18th century’. Criticism of the integrity of the Company servants in this century is a post facto criticism. But if history cannot be written with value judgements, it cannot do without any judgements at all. Van Leur judged ‘the achievements of a Hartingh, a Von Hohendorff, a Mossel, a Van der Parra, and, on the Indonesian side, of a Mangkubumi, a Mas Sahid, a Cakraningrat certainly on par with those of Speelman, a Van Goens, and a Aru Palakka’.

The historiography with which most of us interact outside our own country or area of expertise is predominantly western and primarily in English. Although increasingly diverse in authorship, this historiography continued to build on traditions and sources which were developed in a less universalist age. It is not surprising the find that the period (roughly mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries) in which most independent countries of eastern Asia sought to disengage from the European-dominated world economy is poorly understood or appreciated. I am conscious of the danger that my own recent work on the Southeast Asian ‘Age of Commerce’ may unintentionally reinforce negative images of those states which reacted to the traumas of the seventeenth century by decreasing their interaction with European traders.

The period from the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the creation, expansion, contraction, and fall of empires, enhanced and expanded communications, creation and growth – as measured by volume, range and intensity – of trading diasporas, diffusion of major religions far beyond their points of origin, intercontinental and transoceanic dissemination of flora and fauna, major movements – both coerced and voluntary – of population, growing technological sophistication, and advanced in humankind's knowledge of natural, earth, and planetary sciences. It also witnessed religious strife, conquest and war, decimation of populations through disease and hunger, and continued subjugation and oppression of groups of people. Taken by themselves, none of these aspects had been absent before this period and many had manifested themselves, albeit in vastly differing degrees of intensity on a very broad spectrum, on the major landmasses of the world.

Our joint work, like so much else in life, had its origin in an accident of fate. It would never have seen the light of day, at least in its published forms, had it not been for the chance that the authors both came to the University of Birmingham in the mid-1960s, from different backgrounds and with different interests, and then found that, by the mid-1970s, their research interests had converged to the point where co-operative work began to appear both logical and feasible. At that moment, like countless other scholars in all branches of research, we did not have a clear idea of what we were embarking on or, of course, how long it would take. But we made a conscious decision, at a time when we had built up a considerable amount of intellectual capital, to attack one of the big problems of modern history, namely the causes of imperial expansion, and to take a chance on the outcome.

In their impressive new study on British imperialism, Cain and Hopkins mention ‘the desultory negotiations sharing out the Dutch and Portuguese empires should they collapse’ between Britain and Germany at the turn of the century. In the corresponding note, however, they substantiate only the well known negotiations on the Portuguese empire and not those mysterious talks on the Dutch empire. It is one of only a few instances where Cain's and Hopkins’ 2,500 well-documented footnotes do not fully explain their 850 pages of thick description and analysis. Their suggestion of an Anglo-German understanding to divide the Dutch East Indies if necessary, however, does strike some raw nerves among Dutch contemporaries. In the official and unofficial minds of Dutch imperialism, there was a strong fear that die Netherlands could lose their large colonial empire to the great powers. In that case the Netherlands would be reduced to the ‘rank of Denmark’, to a ‘farm at the North Sea’. But this imperial fear was connected with the high hopes that the Netherlands could indeed become the ‘first among the nations of the second rank’, a real middle power, because of its vast colonial empire.