Historians have very little information about the operation of Asian commercial networks and the social interaction between merchants. Hampered by this lack of data scholars have focused on trade routes and commodities. Our knowledge of the Armenian trading network is more or less limited to its geographical dispersal. The network stretched from New Julfa, a suburb of the Iranian capital of Isfahan, to Amsterdam and London in Europe, and to important centres in the Levant and Central Asia, covering the Indian Subcontinent, and extending eastwards to Manila in the Philippines. Armenian merchants were prosperous and communities were located in commercial towns all over the world. The brothers Khojah Joseph and Khojah Johannes Marger, for instance, established a partnership at Hyderabad in 1666 with a starting capital of 27,550 rupees. Some forty years later on the death of Joseph Marger, the trading activity of the two Armenians was worth more than two million rupees.

Perhaps one of the saddest consequences of the demise of traditional Khoikhoi societies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the loss of their languages. Contemporary reports by visitors abound with references to how difficult the Khoi language was to learn, while at the same time commending the Khoikhoi for their ability to learn European languages. By about 1700, only half a century after Dutch colonisation, most Khoikhoi living in the colonised areas of the Western Cape could speak some form of Dutch in addition to their own language. However, the rapid spread of European settlers deeper into the interior, on the one hand, and the acculturation of the Khoikhoi and their inclusion in the colonial polity and economy, on the other hand, meant that by the end of the eighteenth century Khoi was spoken only on the fringes of the Cape colony. Cape Khoi was increasingly replaced by (a form of) Dutch as the first language of the native inhabitants of the Cape. Thus, on his tour of Southern Africa in 1803-1806, Heinrich Lichtenstein could observe that ‘on the borders alone are some Hottentots to be found who speak their own lariguage; but among them several foreign words are introduced, spoken with the Hottentot accent and snort’. Cape Khoi was by this stage rapidly dying out.

This could be considered as the ‘swan song’ of a French colonial administrator in Tropical Africa. Between 1958 and 1961, most of these colonial administrators had to leave what was soon to be considered one of the major sins committed by France in the twentieth century: the Empire. For some of them it was a real shock, from which they never recovered. Of course, it was the normal outcome of the very process they had prepared: to teach the African peoples how to rule themselves. But: ‘Did it not come too early leaving the new African elite insufficiently prepared?’ If this were so, was ‘the great sin of France not to colonise but to decolonise too quickly?’