What had begun as a respectable stream of information about Asia during the sixteenth century became a virtual flood during the seventeenth. Literally hundreds of books about Asia and its various parts were published during that century, authored by missionaries, merchants, mariners, physicians, soldiers, and independent travellers. At least twenty-five major descriptions of South Asia, appeared during the century; another fifteen on mainland Southeast Asia, about twenty devoted to the Southeast Asian archipelagoes, and sixty or more to East Asia. Alongside these major independent contributions stood scores of Jesuit letterbooks, derivative accounts, travel accounts with brief descriptions of many Asian places, pamphlets, newssheets, and the like. Many of these were collected into the several large multivolume compilations of travel literature published during the period. In addition, several important scholarly studies pertaining to Asia were published during the seventeenth century - studies of Asian medicine, botany, religion, and history- as well as translations of important Chinese and Sanskrit literature.

Perhaps, the story of Europe's views of Asia should begin with the question of when the term ‘Asia’, ‘Açu’, was introduced into what one must call the European perspective of the world. Meaning the 'sunrising’ in its original, Assyrian usage, it always seems to have denoted that part of the world which lay to the East. Once the Greek had adopted it to identify those lands which, precisely because they were threatening and near, they wanted to denote as ‘not theirs’, it became part of the dichotomy in which Europe was created as the geographical context for Greek civilisation, Hellas, while Asia -jealously viewed and, consequently, negatively judged - was the territory of the other, the enemy. From that time onwards, ‘Europe’ was part of the vocabulary the peoples of the Mediterranean used to structure the shores of their sea geographically.

It has been over a hundred years since the U.S. took control of Puerto Rico. In that time, the way in which the U.S. perceived Puerto Rico has changed from a colony requiring Americanisation to, in the 1950s, its showcase of democracy in the Caribbean, to today, an island that still retains geopolitical importance for the U.S., but represents an increasing economic burden. The failure of Operation Bootstrap, as the Puerto Rican industrialization program was known, resulted in permanent large-scale unemployment, with a population dependent on federal transfers for a living, and a constant source of migration to the mainland, where over half of Puerto Ricans now live. I shall trace the outline of these three stages in U.S. hegemony over Puerto Rico, and argue that throughout the U.S. Congress was reluctant to fully incorporate Puerto Rico, because its population was deemed racially and socially inferior to that of the mainland. Though the removal of Spain from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines was considered part of the its ‘manifest destiny’, the United States never intended to incorporate these people so different from the U.S. as part of the American nation, as was done with its earlier acquisitions in Texas, Alaska or even Hawaii.

In the recent debates gripping the Australian national psyche regarding the ‘Stolen Children’ (the often forcible removal of Aboriginal children of mixed European descent from their Aboriginal mothers practiced for most of the twentieth century under Australian Federal law) little credence is given to now outdated notion of ‘half-caste’ which inspired the original legislation. Today, self-identification, regardless of colour and heritage, determines Aboriginal ethnicity. But ‘half-caste-ness’ constituted a powerful concept in the process of nation formation in colonial Australia and in other colonial contexts.

What is, and was, South Africa? This is clearly not a question which has a single answer, nor has it ever had one. On the one hand, there is a constitutional answer. In these terms, South Africa did not exist before the creation of the Union in 1910 and since then has been the state created then, transformed into the Republic of South Africa in 1961 and transformed once again with the ending of white minority rule in 1994. On the other hand, there are innumerable answers, effectively those to be found in the minds of all South Africans, and indeed all those foreigners who have an opinion about the country. Nevertheless, these opinions are not random. Clearly, there are regularities to be found within them, such that it is possible, in principle, to describe at the very least the range of answers to this question which were held within particular groups of the population, either within the country or outside it, and also to use specific sources, emanating from a single person, or group of individuals, as exemplary of the visions held by a far wider group.

On 16 March 1792, King Christian VII of Denmark, his own incompetent hand guided by that of the young Crown Prince Frederik (VI), signed decree banning both the importation of slaves into the Danish West Indies (now the United States Virgin Islands) and their export from the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast, in what is now Ghana. To soften the blow to the planters of the Danish West Indies and to secure the continued production of sugar, the law was not to take effect for ten years. In the meantime, imports of slaves, and of women especially, would actually encouraged by state loans and favourable tariffs, so as, it was hoped, render the slave population capable of reproducing itself naturally thereafter.

In the late nineteenth century, the distance from Qui Nhon to Kontum – a trip of about two hundred kilometers – was nearly insurmountable. The route most travellers took led from the port town in southern Annam out across a narrow coastal plain of cultivated fields before crossing rivers and gorges, and ascending rocky mountains. Then the path leveled out on a high plateau of extreme weather and dense forests where fever, tigers, and unwelcoming local communities intimidated even the hardiest of travellers. Though well within the borders of French-controlled Annam, there was little Vietnamese – and even less French – about these highlands. The region was inhabited almost exclusively by a variety of indigenous groups like the Sedang, the Bahnar, and thejarai, who were both ethnically distinct from the majority Vietnamese population of Annam, and politically independent from the emperor in Hué as well as the French colonial administration. The region was so isolated from the rest of the colony that Frenchmen invoked the Vietnamese name for the area, calling it the Pays Moï– ‘savages' country’ – and even the missionaries, the only Europeans to live in the region until the early 1900s, referred to their headquarters in Kontum as the ‘Mission des Sauvages’. It was an unlikely focal point for one of the most divisive controversies in the French empire.