In 1978 a hefty monograph, entitled Orientalism, appeared that would, in its own way, come to constitute a landmark in the history of Asian studies - to the satisfaction of some and the resentment of others. The author of this work, American-Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said, appealed to a wide intellectual circle, which was also shown by the sheer number of reviews in Anglo-Saxon papers and periodicals: there were at least sixty of them in the period following publication.

Many of the principles we know today about the world economy were first discovered in Early Modern Asia. The Portuguese and the Spanish were the first to extend their sphere of trade to encompass the world. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes and others, all made their way past the Cape of Good Hope seeking their share of the Asian trade. By the middle of the century, one of them became so successful that, aside from being the envy of the others, they set a new standard of efficiency in global operations. It was of course the Dutch.

In 1637 Hans Putmans, having just retired as governor of the Dutch East India Company's Taiwan comptoir, set out from the East Indies to return to Holland. During the long voyage home he composed a report about his last year as governor, describing how he had expanded the Company's control over large parts of the island's hinterlands. He himself had led Dutch troops against the town of Mattau, one of the most powerful aboriginal towns of Taiwan, and against the towns of Soulang and Taccareangh. The results of his expeditions were, he wrote, spectacular: ‘Through the […] guidance and will of God, [the conquest] was easily accomplished, and, since they had never before seen such a manner of war, our authority and respect among these blind heathen was extended and raised to such a point that not only the towns of Soulangh, Backeluan, […] Taccareijangh, […] and Mattau presented their lands to the Dutch state, but also Pangsoia, Tapouliang, and many other towns in the area’. In all some twenty aboriginal towns sought peace with the Company after Putmans' expeditions, a huge increase in the Company's holdings on Taiwan. When, in 1929, Putmans had taken his oath of office, his job had been to run a small trading factory on the island's coast, a base from which the Company could profit from the rich China trade. The subjugation of these twenty towns abruptly changed his job, and changed the Company's mission on Taiwan: How were these towns to be administered?

Taiwan is strategically situated within East Asia, but little is known of it until the sixteenth century. The Chinese spread far and wide throughout Asia even before the Christian era, but allowed this large and fertile island lying so close to the Mainland to remain in relative obscurity until the middle of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The cause of this isolation is that Taiwan had no large quantities of marketable products to attract traders and that the island still lay outside the network of Asian trade routes of the time.

Conventional accounts of economic links between the North Atlantic nations (USA/Europe) and Mexico state that the Europeans clearly dominated Mexican foreign trade in the first decades after national independence while the United States only achieved significance in Mexico's import-export trade in the Porfiriato during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Such studies suggest that the United States only gradually discovered an interest in Mexico so that in previous decades the Europeans ruled the field unchallenged. It is generally overlooked that from quite early on Mexico was a part of North American foreign and trade policy because of geopolitical and economic considerations. The geopolitical component was the result of the geographic proximity of Mexico to its northern neighbour; the economic ties due to Mexico's silver mines, the intensive smuggling between North and South from the outset, and the constant increase in trade volume.

In the languages of the Iberian Peninsula, there is a word unknown to other Romance languages: arbitrista. This term denotes a person who invents often impractical plans and projects to improve the general financial, political or social situation in his country, presenting them unsolicitedly to his government. The species was particularly prolific in the seventeenth century, when the term arbitrista became more or less synonymous to day-dreamer. In this field Spanish historiography even boasts of a specific bibliography of over seven hundred pages, composed by Evaristo Correa Calderón, entitled: Registro de arbitristas, economistas y reformadores españoles, 1500–1936: Catälogo de impresos y manuscritos (Madrid 1981). There even existed the sub-species of colonial arbitristas, with well known authors like Francisco Rodrigues Silveira (Reformaçao da Milícia e Governo do Estado da Índia Oriental), and Jacques de Coutre (Como Remediar o Estado da Índia?).

Until fairly recently it could be said that the bulk of historical literature concerning Bolivia was in some way or another to do with its colonial past, and especially the role that silvermining played in that past. Luckily for those interested in Bolivian colonial history, the nation's capital houses the so-called ‘national archive’, which contains a plethora of historical documents, archives, and so on. This ‘national archive’ has proven quite adequate for these purposes.