The Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya are occupied by events like ceremonies for the Supreme-Holy-Lord-Omnipotent, and by the King's holy compassions and angers concerning his beloved Siam, especially at times of conspiracy. Westerners, in the times of kings like the famous Narai (1656-1688), appear only in the extreme margins of the Thai records. The Dutch are only mentioned twice, in particular when their ships were destroyed in the Burmese invasion of 1766.1 How did the Thai court perceive Westerners?

On 21 March 1956, the French Overseas Minister, Gaston Defferre, addressed the Assemblée Rationale, presenting a project with especially far-reaching implications. A loi-cadre was planned in order to enable a greater degree of participation by the indigenous populations in the sub-Saharan African overseas territories. The responsibility of the local Assemblées Territoriales was to be increased in various fields. Conseils de Gouuemement were proposed, with the objective to allow Black African politicians to have a role in the territorial executive. Defferre exhorted the deputies to prevent by their vote a development of the tropical African territories in the style of the Maghreb or Indochina. His speech seemed to impress the members of the chamber. At the occasion of two ballots, on 23 March and on 23 June 1956, his bill passed with a comfortable majority.

This paper deals with transformations in local political thinking in Northern Mali. It describes how concepts from what can be called ‘formal’ politics, or administration, have gradually seeped into local settings, where they have been taken up by local political actors. The transformation central to this paper is the movement from a political organisation essentially based on lineage, (fictive) kinship ties and a clan system, into a system in which territory, hitherto only important in the economic realm, takes a more central place. The society described is that of the Tuareg in Northern Mali, especially those inhabiting or bordering the so-called Tamesna plain. Influences in territorial thinking date back to the colonial conquest of the area, and were developed further during the late colonial period, when a system of indirect rule gradually became more direct. The developments then set in motion were taken over by the post-colonial nation-state of Mali which, after three decades of central administration (or absence of it), underwent a process of decentralisation in the 1990s. In describing these developments, the paper aims to provide a detailed case study of how both colonial and post-colonial administration have influenced local political views on territory, borders and land tenure, and the ways of dealing with conflicts over these issues. Finally, I intend to discuss the impact of decentralisation in Mali on territorial thinking and conflicts. Two Tuareg concepts regarding territory will be central in this paper: ihenzuzagh — economic geographical space, and akal — political geographical space.

In our Age of the Discovery of Space, many people still enjoy commemorating the Age of Global Exploration and Discovery. In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' epic voyage to the Caribbean islands off the American continent was celebrated in Spain and America, and in 1998 and 2000 Portugal also commemorated its Age of Descobrimentos in Africa, South America and Asia. Various campaigns are underway in China to celebrate in 2004 the 600th (!) anniversary of the great expeditions by Admiral Zheng Ho to South Asia and Africa. Most of these festivities, meant to foster international awareness in the current Age of Globalisation, have met with mixed reactions among the peoples who were ‘discovered’.

Plans of eighteenth-century Indian houses, papers concerning the Dutch hospital at Cochin, Tamil texts inscribed on palm leaves, documents of Dutch institutions in India functioning under British rule, and numerous proclamations each drawn up in Dutch, Portuguese as well as Malayalam, reminding one of hundreds of Rosetta Stones, these are just a few examples of the largely unique documents that are referred to as the Dutch Records and are kept at the Tamil Nadu Archives in the South Indian city of Chennai (formerly known as Madras). These materials seem to comprise virtually all that remains of the archives that were left by the Dutch in India to be taken over by the British. (A large part of the original archives must have been lost in the course of time.) They consist of about 1,800 volumes and a couple of bundles (numbered 1 to 1763), stretch 64 metres, and date from the period between 1643 and 1852. The Dutch Records at Chennai in fact encompass the remnants of the archives of four factories set up by the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company), which all functioned as the headquarters of a kantoor (regional establishment): Cochin (headquarters of Malabar, modern-day Kerala), Nagapatnam and later Pulicat (Coromandel, present-day Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh), Surat (Surat, modern-day Gujarat), and Chinsura or Hooghly (Bengal). These four archives have different custodial histories and were apparently put together just because they were all created by VOC institutions and their legal successors.