In 1623, the Dutch governor of Amboyna, an important clove-producing island in modern-day Indonesia, executed a group of English merchants and Japanese mercenaries accused of plotting to seize control of the VOC castle on the island. After news of these events reached Europe, the Amboyna Massacre, as it came to be called in England, rapidly became invested with great consequences as English and Dutch leaders fought over the issues of blame and compensation. This article examines the Japanese mercenaries accused by the VOC, the silent participants whose cause was not taken up by any national government.

This article uses a comparative perspective to consider the role that English governors played in facilitating inter-imperial trade with the Dutch in New York City and the ports of the English Leeward Islands, including Bridgetown, Barbados, during the seventeenth century. As governors struggled to establish viable colonies these men worked to supply needed trade goods, often allowing their colonists to turn to Dutch colonies and the Netherlands as trading partners, understanding the ways in which these executives negotiated between imperial policies, primarily the Navigation Acts, and the needs of their charges is crucial to understanding how colonies developed. Further, investigating the ways in which governors fostered, regulated, or prevented inter-imperial trade with the Dutch illustrates how governors and colonists implemented and adapted mercantile policy in different colonies, places that depended upon the transfer of culture, goods and entrepreneurial activities across imperial boundaries. Complementing recent scholarship describing the extent of inter-imperial and cross-national trade in the seventeenth-century Atlantic, this article examines the impact English governors had on local merchant communities and their efforts to trade with the Dutch.

This study presents an in-depth analysis of Alexander von Humboldt's description and criticism of the various colonial societies of Spanish America which he visited during his well-known expedition through the Americas (1799–1804). His criticism of colonialism in general, deeply rooted in his personal convictions, has already been the focal point of several scholarly studies; however, during his American expedition Humboldt offered a more differentiated assessment of specific colonial societies, namely by comparing various regional and local traditions and developments. This differentiated assessment of Spanish American colonial societies has yet to be analysed. This essay focuses on Humboldt's little known personal diaries, which offer a wealth of interesting comments on colonial societies, but which have been scarcely used in international Humboldt research, since they have not yet been translated entirely.

In 1885, the Dutch East Indian state began a huge ‘civilisation offensive’ in the field of irrigation focussed on Java. It comprised creating modern irrigation works, regulating irrigation management and planning construction activities. This paper shows the successes and failures of this irrigation programme, which was part of the Dutch ‘colonial project’ as a whole. Particular attention is given to the question of why the colonial state made irrigation affairs one of its special missions. What emerges is that Dutch exploitation interests (sugar) were dominant, though the welfare interests of the native population (rice) clearly became more prominent. Another question to be dealt with is the issue of how the Dutch East Indian state realized its plans. As this paper argues, the engineers of the Public Works Department played a key part, but only in competition and cooperation with other relevant groups.