On December 15th last, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Professor of Russian Studies at Brock University in Ontario, visited Leiden for a lecture on the applicability of Edward Said's theories on Orientalism to Russian images of Asia. He kindly consented to a lunchtime conversation with fellow Russianist Henk Kern and Carolien Stolte to talk about his life, his work and his most recent book. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye teaches courses in Russian and Inner Asian history. His research interests focus on Imperial Russian intellectual, cultural and diplomatic issues. He has written two books, Toward the Rising Sun: Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), and Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

In July of 1633, Captain Sussex Camock set sail from London with around 50 men to establish an English outpost on the mainland of Central America. His voyage was sponsored by members of the Providence Island Company, recent founders of a Puritan colony on two small islands 150 miles off the coast of Nicaragua (fig. 1). Company adventurers—so called because they ventured their capital—instructed Captain Camock to establish a “Colony upon the Mayne” and to start a trade with local Indians. The group was directed to “carry themselves wislie and modestlie towards the Indyans, for the honor of our Religion and nation”. They were to endear themselves “to the Indyans…and by some reasonable guise to winn their Friendship”. In case the Indians did not have sufficient commodities to trade, Camock's men were implored to investigate the region for any and all potential resources, “or to give ye full Intelligence of the possibilities of that designe”. The adventurers specifically sought information about:

The importance of the Atlantic Ocean during the Early Modern period has been stressed in a growing number of studies since the 1960s. However, some aspects of the contacts between different cultures and continents have enjoyed little attention. One of these is the role of individuals behind the Atlantic economic system: merchants, businessmen and entrepreneurs.

On a cold October day a leaky yacht sailed into an unknown bay. It was 1661, and the two low-level Dutch bureaucrats who rowed ashore thought they'd return to their ship the same night. Instead they were swept up on a weeks-long journey into China, until finally they found themselves bowing before one of the most powerful men in the imperium: the Jingnan Prince Geng Jimao. Their clothes were tattered, they had no gifts to give, their translator was incompetent, and they were hopelessly out of their league, yet their audience with Geng led to one of the most unlikely alliances in world history, between the Calvinist merchants of the Dutch East India Company and the Buddhist Qing Dynasty, which was struggling to extend its rule over all of China.

On December 23, 1965, the president of newly-independent Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, wrote a letter to the prime minister of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar. Kaunda—an outspoken opponent of continued Portuguese rule over the African colonies of Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea—found himself in the awkward position of asking for Salazar's help. Zambia needed Portuguese support, Kaunda wrote, in “confronting the present difficulties provoked by the retaliations of Rhodesia owing to the punitive economic measures of England”