In the formation of ethnicity the interaction between the views of outside observers and insiders themselves is an important process. The Minangkabau, whose homeland is located in the uplands of central Sumatra, have been a popular source of study because of their matrilineal social organisation and the practice of the merantau, where young Minangkabau men leave the homeland to seek knowledge and fortune abroad. Since the 1970s as a result of the women's movement, there has been a growing number of works focusing on the matrilineal principles which underlie Minangkabau society. The merantau, too, has often been cited for the dynamism in Minangkabau society which has led to its considerable contributions to the Indonesian state in a number of fields. It is not surprising, therefore, that today the Minangkabau themselves see matriliny and the merantau as primary components in their identity. While these components were present in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they did not play the central role in ethnic identity as they do today. As I hope to show in this paper, there were different historical circumstances in those years which required another approach to ethnic identity.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the development of a Mongol identity. The Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century had laid the foundations but had not truly forged such an identity. These earlier events provided, in modern parlance, the cultural memory that eventually served to unify them. However, the Mongol Empire actually revealed the fractiousness of the Mongols and their inability to promote the unity that might gradually have fostered a Mongol identity. As Joseph Fletcher argued, the creation of a supra-tribal identity for nomadic herders has proven to be extremely difficult. The so-called Mongol Empire attested to this predicament, as within two generations it evolved into four separate Khanates, which occasionally waged war against each other. For example, individual Khanates frequently sided with non-Mongols against fellow Mongols. In addition, the military, the quintessential Mongol institution, was not, as the Empire expanded, composed simply of Mongols. Turks, Persians, and even Chinese served in and sometimes led the Mongol armies, contributing to the blurring of Mongol identity.

In the pre-modern period, Japanese identity was articulated in contrast with China. It was, however, articulated in reference to criteria that were commonly accepted in the whole East-Asian cultural sphere; criteria, therefore, that were Chinese in origin.

One of the fields in which Japan's conception of a Japanese identity was enacted was that of foreign relations, i.e. of Japan's relations with China, the various kingdoms in Korea, and from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, with the Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutchmen, and the Kingdom of the Ryūkū.

The Nias sense of space is a curious one. Lest anyone suspect me of harbouring a complaint about the size of the rooms on the famous campus in Wassenaar, let me insist at once that I am thinking not of NIAS, the delightful research institute, but Nias, the island off Sumatra. There, space to build the splendid houses for which the islanders are justly celebrated is allocated, not according to notions of the proper relationship between authority or status and centrality or ‘social distance’, but on a system of priorities established by symbolic directions. ‘Upriver’ — a direction which only sometimes corresponds to the flow of a nearby waterway — is ennobling, whereas ‘downstream’ is demeaning. Beyond the confines of the village, ‘downstream’ designates the world of increasing remoteness. Its outer reach is the horizon, the abode of the monstrous and evil. In conjunction with the inveterate hostility the islanders have always exhibited towards intruders, this seems suggestive. The horizon, though contemplated with reverence in some cultures, is not always divine. Distance does not always lend enchantment – or if it does, the ensorcelment may be malign. Different cultures have contrasting attitudes to intrusions from far away and, therefore, different strategies for receiving the sojourner, entertaining the traveller, accommodating the migrant, and absorbing the invader.

To nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship, the early modern expansion of powers like Spain, Portugal, England and Holland, was a necessary preliminary step towards Europe's ultimate domination of the Asian and African continents. Moreover, the relative ease with which colonial powers manhandled regions like North Africa and the Indo-Pak subcontinent suggested that their early modern ‘pioneering’ counterparts must have shared similar experiences. While some historians highlighted superior business concepts (joint-stock companies, profit-sharing) or superior shipbuilding and navigation techniques as the means with which trading powers like the Estado da India and the English East India Company penetrated and overwhelmed Indian Ocean commerce, other scholars boiled it down to the European affinity for using ‘men-of-war, gun, and shot’. The critical underlying assumption of any of these teleological explanations s i that ‘encountered’ cultures were unable to adequately respond to European technology, of course hinting at some deeper and more profound deficiency. Scholarship in recent decades has shorn such confidence and begun to scrutinise this seedling period of interaction between Europe and non-Europe, suggesting that the initial playing ground between ‘encounterer’ and ‘encountered’ was perhaps more level than previously portrayed.

This article is specifically concerned with ‘American’ agriculture between 1820 and 1930. Let me emphasise straight away how unusual and problematic such an approach is. After all, it covers such disparate phenomena as plantation agriculture in the southern states of the US, the Caribbean, or Brazil, rural household economies working at subsistence level in New England or in the highlands of the Andes in South America, extensive cattle farming in the frontier regions of the southern part of South America, in the west of the USA, and in the north of Mexico and so on. The most varied geographical and climatic conditions for agricultural production can be found in the Americas, ranging from the North American plains to the Argentine Pampa, the highlands of the Andes region and Mexico to the coastal regions on the Atlantic and Pacific including the Caribbean. The extension of this subject becomes all the more apparent when we realise how wide the range of changes really was: in the USA, for example, this era is defined by the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, in agricultural technology from the simple wooden plough to the tractor, and with regard to work systems, to name just one example, the end of slavery.

In August of 1587 Manteo, an Indian from Croatoan Island, joined a group of English settlers in an attack on the native village of Dasemunkepeuc, located on the coast of present-day North Carolina. These colonists, amongst whom Manteo lived, had landed on Roanoke Island less than a month before, dumped there by a pilot more interested in hunting Spanish prize ships than in carrying colonists to their intended place of settlement along the Chesapeake Bay. The colonists had hoped to re-establish peaceful relations with area natives, and for that reason they relied upon Manteo to act as an interpreter, broker, and intercultural diplomat. The legacy of Anglo-Indian bitterness remaining from Ralph Lane's military settlement, however, which had hastily abandoned the island one year before, was too great for Manteo to overcome. The settlers found themselves that summer in the midst of hostile Indians.