For forty years much of the research on Britain's relationship with Latin America has been dominated by a rather narrow agenda, the boundaries of which were established by radical and conservative writers in the middle third of the twentieth century, just when Britain's role in Latin America was rapidly declining. Essentially this was a debate about power, that of British governments and businessmen on the one hand and Latin American governments and elites on the other. More recently, however, younger historians have begun to break free of the confines established by those writing in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result there is some hope that new research on this topic may offer more of interest to non-specialists and contribute to other historical debates, both in British and Latin American history. The purpose of this historiographical essay, which is based primarily, but not entirely, on the research undertaken in Britain during the last twenty years, is to review the recent literature on British investment in Latin America, and to investigate some of the implications of what we now know about the subject for our understanding of the evolution of Latin American societies.

As the first European printed image of the Aztec capital, the first European map of the Gulf of Mexico, and the first map to use the names Florida and Yucatan, the 1524 map of Tenochtitlan from Cortes’ second and third letter earned a place in the history of cartography (Figure I). This map, published in Nuremberg to accompany the Latin edition, is commonly mentioned in histories of cartography, but scholarship about this map is relatively general, with the exception of a few historians’ efforts. The prevailing scholarship revolves around its possible authorship, while issues of the map's function and cultural meaning within visual culture are largely missing. In fact, J. Brian Harley notes that the latter type of analysis is rather scarce in most cartographic histories:

What is missing in the history of cartographic literature are studies of the theoretical frameworks which might be appropriate for the reconstruction of such meaning in maps.

About seven years ago the journal Itinerario issued a special volume on the Ancien Régime in India and Indonesia that carried the papers presented at the third Cambridge-Leiden-Delhi-Yogyakarta conference. The aim of the conference was a comparative one in which state-formation, trading net-works and socio-political aspects of Islam were the major topics. Thumbing through the pages of this issue (while preparing this essay) I had the impression that the results of the conference went beyond its initial comparative goals. Directly or indirectly, several papers stressed that during the early-modern phase India and Indonesia were still part of a cultural continuum that was only gradually broken up by the ongoing process of European expansion during the nineteenth century. It appeared that even after the earlier course of so-called ‘Indianisation’ – a designation that unjustly conveys an Indian ‘otherness’ – India and the Archipelago shared many characteristics, especially in terms of their political and religious orientation. More importantly, these shared traits were shaped by highly mobile groups of traders, pilgrims and courtiers who criss-crossed the Bay of Bengal, traversing both the lands above and below the winds.

In examining the process of modernization in Qajar Iran, modern scholarship has tended to focus either on the effects of Western exposure on Iranian intellectuals and educators, or on bureaucratic and military reforms initiated by the three major reformers of the nineteenth century, ‘Abbas Mirza, Mirza Taqi Khan (Amir Kabir), and Mirza Husayn Khan (Sipahsalar). This paper will address a different and equally important aspect of the modernization process, technological innovation, by discussing the introduction of mechanized coin production in Qajar Iran in the context of the country's prevailing social, political and economic structure.

David Arnold in his recently published work on colonial medicine in India refers to the necessity of assessing, ‘the various compulsions that lay behind attempts to propagate Western medicine in India, the agencies involved in this work of medical evangelization, and the various constraints – political, cultural, financial and technical – which operated in the reverse direction. The colonial context vithin which Western medicine was required to function and the contradictions – many of them remarkably deepseated and pervasive – that beset its diverse operations also require investigation’. Taking one of the agencies involved in this work of ‘medical evangelization’ – that of medical education – I would like to compare the utilitarian and the hegemonic considerations which led the two colonial governments of British-India and the Dutch-Indies to promote a particular kind of medical education in their colonies and to assess their impact on the colonized societies concerned.

In the Chinese technological tradition, no sector, apart from that of agriculture, is as rich in original ideas as naval architecture. Over the past three millennia, hundreds of different types of craft have been developed for use on China's shallow lakes, on its fast flowing rivers and along its often stormy coastal waters. Each type was developed for specific use as a means of transportation, and would seem to represent the ultimate answer to the challenges posed by local conditions. Ultimate answer, that is, within the limitations of the traditional building materials with which these boats were constructed and fitted out. Nor was ingenuity confined to construction techniques.

Traditional boats of Indonesia, usually called perahu or proa, cover an extremely wide range of sailing craft and date back centuries. The oldest known picture of an Indonesian ship can be seen, carved in stone, on a panel of the Borobudur, the famous eighth-century Buddhist temple in Central Java. This picture basically shows the same built-up hull rigged with tripod masts that can still be seen sailing today. Traditional boats of Indonesia, as they are built today, vary much in shape and size from a simple dug out canoe to large, motorized, cargo boats of over 500 tons of deadweight.

Both overseas trade and shipbuilding in India are of great antiquity. But even for the early modern period, maritime commerce is relatively better documented than the shipbuilding industry. When the Portuguese and later the North Europeans entered the intra-Asian trade, many of the ships they employed in order to supplement their shipping in Asia were obtained from the Indian dockyards. Detailed evidence with regard to shipbuilding, however, is very rare. It has been pointed out that the Portuguese in the sixteenth century were more particular than their North-European counter-parts in the following centuries in providing information on seafaring and shipbuilding. Shipbuilding on the west coast has been discussed more than that on the eastern coast of India, particularly the coast of Bengal. Though Bengal had a long tradition of shipbuilding, direct evidence of shipbuilding in the region is rare. Many changes were brought about in the history of India and the Indian Ocean trade of the eighteenth century, especially after the 1750s. When the English became the largest carriers of Bengal's trade with other parts of Asia, this had an impact on the shipbuilding in Bengal. It was in their interest that the British in Bengal had their ships built in that province.

The history of Indian shipbuilding is a relatively well-studied topic. There are two strands of literature on Indian shipping. First there is the Indian: R.N. Mukherjee (1923) is, in spite of some minor criticism which could be levelled at it, still the basic work on the topic. Among the more recent contributions should be mentioned those of L. Gopal and J. Qaisar. The second strand is Portuguese. Much of the Portuguese work on ‘Portuguese’ shipbuilding in the sixteenth century deals with shipbuilding in Goa. Now, was this ‘Portuguese’ shipbuilding or ‘Indian’ shipbuilding? ‘European’ and ‘Indian’ technology were so closely interlinked on the west coast of India that it is impossible to make a clear distinction. The seminal contributions on this topic are the already very well-established works of Commodore Quirinho da Fonsequa and of Frazāo de Vasconselhos. Their articles, which have appeared in several Portuguese journals, very much deserve an English translation. More recently the important work by A. Marques Esparteiro on the ships used in the carreira da Índia has appeared.

It is already a cliché that the fall of the Soviet Union is providing an archival bonanza to historians. Naturally most attention is on sensational revelations from previously-inaccessible collections about Russia's own past. Yet those interested in other nations can also profit from the new openness of Moscow's and St. Petersburg's archives. This is particularly true for specialists in nineteenth-century Chinese history: Tsarist diplomats, officers and geographers actively studied their Asian neighbour, and their documents provide a fascinating perspective on the latter years of the Qing Dynasty. At the same time, the years before 1917 mark the golden age of Russian Sinology. While their accomplishments are largely ignored in the West, St. Petersburg's Orientalists produced much original and important work.