The aim of this article is to analyse the on-the-spot interaction between agents of the Dutch West India Company and Danish African Company and African rulers on the Gold Coast from 1657 to 1662. The region saw a surge in European activity and rivalry in this period. The Scandinavian trading companies have received less scholarly attention compared to the Dutch and the English. The Danish African Company was an undercover Dutch enterprise, and has traditionally been studied from a purely Dutch or Danish standpoint. However, by combining Dutch and Danish sources and focusing on Dutch opposition to “Danish” activity on the Gold Coast, which incorporated local rulers, the author has challenged nationalistic and Eurocentric approaches in the historiography. Moreover, by concentrating on the forgotten but nonetheless strategically important site of Akong, the author identifies how local dynamics influenced the evolution of the Dutch and Danish maritime empires.

This article examines the illustrated pamphlet Ongeluckige voyagie, van’t schip Batavia (Unlucky voyage of the ship Batavia) and its representation of a 1629 shipwreck off the coast of western Australia, followed by mutiny and the massacre of many survivors. The pamphlet was published in Amsterdam in 1647, and included fifteen (six full-page) fine copper engravings. It was very popular, helping to shape a new genre of shipwreck narrative and expressing the preoccupations of contemporary visual culture. The pamphlet’s illustrations translated new conceptualisations of space emerging from the period’s unique collaboration between cartography and art into popular form within a booming Dutch print culture. Through innovative techniques of montage and vignette these engraved images conveyed the narrative’s drama and affirmed principles of morality, honour, and order. While the era’s spectacular violence now seems very far away, these historical images effectively communicate the contemporary relish of the disaster to modern audiences. This “earliest of Australian books” is sometimes offered as an alternative Australian foundation myth, and the Batavia disaster continues to grow in cultural significance. Now as then, these illustrations provide a vivid counterpoint to its audience’s comfortable lives.

Catechisms, Bibles, and other printed works were critical for the successful plantation and growth of Dutch religion and culture in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. This essay examines the provision, regulation, and various controversies surrounding religious books and pamphlets in that period. Under the joint supervision of the West India Company and the Dutch Reformed churches of the Netherlands, colonial clergy were supposed to teach everyone from Company soldiers and officers to European settlers, from Africans and African slaves to Native Americans. And the clergy certainly had some missionary achievements, especially where the Company’s power was greatest. However, colonial clergy and churches also faced tremendous difficulties and fell short of their original plans and goals. Studying the different tools they had at their disposal—studying the creation (and destruction) of their printed materials—helps us see the church’s own culpability in these difficulties and failures. Early seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism was restrictive enough and the churches of the Netherlands worried enough about deviance and heterodoxy that they unintentionally undermined their own mission and reduced the Dutch footprint overseas.

The Portuguese Empire was the stage for one of the largest movements of enslaved people during early modern times. Almost two millions enslaved humans were violently carried from Africa in Portuguese vessels in the eighteenth century alone. Yet, in contrast to British or French slave traders based in Europe, for which a vast literature is available, little is known about the Lisbon traders. This paper aims at filling this gap by paying attention to the trajectory of two Lisbon slave traders: Domingos Dias da Silva and José António Pereira. In recounting their biographies and their business in Africa, Brazil, and Asia, we draw attention to the active role Lisbon-based slave traders played in the financing, organisation, and carrying of slave traffic, as well as the different institutional conditions they confronted when profiting from the commerce in humans. Domingos Dias da Silva became a key state contractor in spite of his poor origins, while Pereira featured as a global broker, connecting different markets in four continents. These two agents and their diverse characteristics help shed light on the slave trade, the context in which it expanded, and on the people who conducted this infamous commerce.

Whereas seventeenth-century piracy has been recognised as an integrated component of the developing European Atlantic world, eighteenth-century pirates have been marginalised as an isolated group with few ties to landed communities. Such evaluations have stressed the heightened extension of state authority to the colonial theatre in the eighteenth century and, by doing so, have overlooked how pirates continued to interact with colonial actors operating in contested and unclaimed regions throughout the Atlantic commons. It is imperative that the Atlantic commons is given full consideration in any discussion of Atlantic maritime activity as it was within these expanses that inter-imperial, inter-colonial, and cross-border colonial actors converged. This article utilises the piratical voyage captained by Howell Davies (and later Bartholomew Roberts) to demonstrate that it was within this commons that eighteenth-century piratical voyages were sustained and facilitated through the forced acquisition of supplies, through markets for plundered goods, and through the opportunities available for dispersing amongst landed communities at the end of expeditions. Continued connections between colonial denizens and pirates in the eighteenth century compels a reassessment of pirates’ isolation to instead place them within the wider population of coastal traders, sojourning mariners, and marginal colonial settlers who existed both within and outside of the imperial framework espoused by state and colonial centres. Ultimately, this questions the overall ability of European states to regulate maritime traffic when vessels sailed out of sight of established colonial ports, and beyond the practical reach of imperial authority.

The article builds on a succession of visually disturbing events that occurred in Goa—the capital city of Portuguese India—during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From the early years of the Portuguese conquest (1510), Goa went through a redefinition of its urban space, which implied the appropriation and re-semantization of buildings and other key sites of the old Muslim city. This process included the spread of images and symbols related to several Portuguese viceroys, soon-to-be targets of acts of political insult and even political iconoclasm performed by their Portuguese opponents in a context of growing factionalism. We speak namely of episodes of protest against places of memory associated to different clans, encompassing statues (both official and bogus), textual inscriptions, and viceroys’ portraits. These were European phenomena to a large extent, but coloured by significant local and native elements. The article engages with a grid of questions that places real statues, satirical effigies, and erased faces (and the diverse reactions they have aroused) in dialogue with current debates on popular politics; high and low vis-à-vis the colonial social fabric; the uses of public space; verbal, written, and visual insult; political languages; and disputed authority in an imperial setting.

This article uses the records of the Bombay Mayor’s Court (1728–1798) to explore the ways in which an ostensibly English court of law attempted to administer law in a way that was acceptable to a cosmopolitan cast of litigants. I show how, due to the Court’s popularity with Indian litigants, and the difficulties of its hybrid jurisprudence, the Court eventually moved to a model of formalised arbitration. In this arrangement, local Indian elites exercised considerable autonomy, while British judges gained an illicit commission. As such, the evidence from the Mayor’s Court points to a novel iteration of legal pluralism in which ill-defined legal regimes came to blur and blend with each other in a single forum. I argue that this forces us to reconceptualise solely jurisdictional definitions of legal pluralism, which must be complimented with the study of a court’s ‘jurispractice’.

A renewed interested in Indian Ocean studies has underlined possibilities of the transnational. This study highlights lexical borrowing as an analytical tool to deepen our understanding of cultural exchanges between Indian Ocean ports during the long nineteenth century, comparing loanwords from several Asian and African languages and demonstrating how doing so can re-establish severed links between communities. In this comparative analysis, four research avenues come to the fore as specifically useful to explore the dynamics of non-elite contact in this part of the world: (1) nautical jargon, (2) textile terms, (3) culinary terms, and (4) slang associated with society’s lower strata. These domains give prominence to a spectrum of cultural brokers frequently overlooked in the wider literature. It is demonstrated through concrete examples that an analysis of lexical borrowing can add depth and substance to existing scholarship on interethnic contact in the Indian Ocean, providing methodological inspiration to examine lesser studied connections. This study reveals no unified linguistic landscape, but several key individual connections between the ports of the Indian Ocean frequented by Persian, Hindustani, and Malay-speaking communities.