The history of slavery is by no means untouched, and there are now even ambitious global histories of the phenomenon in print. On the other hand, it is clear that much of the literature on this sombre side of human society has concentrated on the Transatlantic slave trade and non-free labour in the Americas. The relative wealth of documents in Western languages has presumably contributed to give the historiography of slavery a Western centre of gravity, coupled with the fact that the early modern Americas were restructured into settlement colonies. This made slavery a motor of socio-economic change in a more pronounced way than in Asian societies. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that the handling of slaves in an Asiatic context has been less thoroughly treated in the extant academic literature. It seems that aspects of Asian slavery have not fit well into the preconceptions of Asianists, or have at least been relegated to the margins of social history.

In September 1621, Governor Nathaniel Butler of Bermuda was woken in the middle of the night to hear a report that one hundred Spaniards had landed on the west part of the islands. Bermuda had long been at risk of attack because of its close proximity to the homebound route of the Spanish treasure fleet, so Butler understandably went on the defensive. He ordered the manning of several forts and repaired to the landing area with twenty armed men, expecting to pick up additional strength along the way. Rather than find an invading enemy, Butler and his men found a group of Portuguese and Spanish men, women, and children, whose ship—the 300-tonne, Portuguese-owned San Antonio—had been separated from the treasure fleet by a bad storm and wrecked upon the rocks ten miles west of the islands. Saving what goods they could carry, most of the castaways made their way to Mangrove Bay at the north part of Somerset Island in a small cockboat.

Nineteenth-century Europeans visiting Southeast and South Asia eulogised teak trees (Tectona grandis) for their value and beauty. Diplomatic diaries, travel memoirs, literary descriptions and geography books for children described the teak as a universal sovereign of the sylvan world, the regal “lord” of the forests. With dwindling supplies of oak in Britain, British elites saw teak as a vital component of the country's global naval supremacy in the nineteenth century. The fear of a dwindling supply of teak during the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries encouraged the creation of forestry departments and laws in British India that attempted to preserve the finite amount of teak in the sub-continent. Yet the finite ecologies of India and Burma could not supply all the teak required to fuel expanding demand. Britain would have to look beyond its formal empire in Asia to find more teak.

This article examines the Swiss anti-slavery movement during the last third of the nineteenth century. Despite being a country without colonies, Switzerland actively participated in international anti-slavery networks, often linked to the armed conquest of Central Africa.

Through an analysis of the socio-political affiliations of the leaders of these abolitionist campaigns in Switzerland, the authors show how the Swiss conservative protestant elite, whose role in international philanthropy had become more important after the founding of the Red Cross, relied on the anti-slavery movement, not only to reinforce its position in international networks, but also to pursue political and social objectives on a domestic level, in particular the “social regeneration” of the country.

On Tuesday 22 January, 1963, the First Secretary of State and Minister in charge of the Central Africa Office, R.A. Butler, met with the Southern Rhodesia Cabinet in Salisbury. Butler notified the Cabinet that he was visiting the Central African Federation in order to “gauge for himself” the situation. Southern Rhodesia, he remarked, was “an issue unjustifiably pursued at the United Nations” and countering this negative international opinion “was providing the British Government with a difficult, tedious and unwanted task”.