Virtually every account of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire identifies ‘Europe’ with Christian civilisation, echoing, consciously or otherwise, the universalist claims of the Byzantine emperors, the popes and the western Roman emperors. Yet it is also the case that Islam possessed a European presence from the eighth century onwards, first of all in Spain and the Mediterranean islands, and later, from the mid-fourteenth century, in the Balkans, where the Turks were able rapidly to establish an empire which directly threatened Hungary and Austria. The lands ruled by Islam on the European land mass have tended to be treated by historians as European only in geographical identity, but in human terms part of a victorious and alien ‘oriental’ civilisation, of which they were provincial dependencies, and from which medieval Spanish Christians or modern Greeks and Slavs had to liberate themselves. Yet this view is fallacious for several reasons. In the first place, there is a valid question about our use of the term ‘civilisation’, which Fred Halliday has expressed as follows:

‘Civilisations’ are like nations, traditions, communities – terms that claim a reality and authority which is itself open to question, and appeal to a tradition that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a contemporary creation.

Japan is a land where the lemons bloom. The earth yields three crops a year, and all sorts of animals, birds, and fish abound in this charming country. Water is plentiful – rivers, brooks, springs and hot springs – and there is a well in the large, fruitful, and beautiful garden attached to every house. The houses, made with excellent workmanship of wood, are built close to the ground on account of the windy climate. Their floors are remarkably clean, as they are covered with straw mats on which no shod foot is permitted to tread. There are no locks or bars on the doors.

It is common wisdom among the historians of the Dutch East Indies that everyone in the Dutch East India Company engaged in private trade. That is, ‘everyone’ traded in goods supposedly monopolized by the Company and ‘everyone’ abused his or her position to squeeze graft from the Company's trade. It was, supposedly, to get their hands on the private trade and graft that people joined the Dutch East India Company (VOC: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) in the first place. But back in the Netherlands the VOC's Board of Directors (the Heeren XVII) objected vociferously to private trade, which drained Company profits and shareholder revenue. To appease the Heeren XVII back at home, the various Governors-General and Councillors of the Indies (Raad van Indië), who represented the Heeren XVII in Asia, issued annual placards forbidding private trade while the High Court (Raad van Justitie) carried out infrequent desultory trials for private trade. But these prosecutions were inevitably doomed to failure, so the story goes, because everyone engaged in private trade would ‘cover’ for everyone else.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature of Dutch colonial policy at the turn of the twentieth century in what was then the Netherlands East Indies.’ Referred to in the historiography of this period as ‘the ethical policy’, it is usually characterized as a welfare or developmentalist government. More recent comparisons have drawn attention to similarities between twentieth-century colony policy and the New Order Indonesian policy with a focus on economic growth and the lack of individual ‘development’. ‘Ethical policy’ is not usually a term applied to the politics of other imperialist powers, which begs the question that somehow Dutch colonialism was different. Recent comparative research by M. Kuitenbrouwer, A. Stoler and J. Breman has questioned this assumption.

In order to understand the nature of eighteenth-century Spanish political development, the highest organs of central government (Councils, Boards, Ministries, Secretariats, etcetera), and the organs of regional and provincial government ought to be examined together with institutional practices such as: hacienda (the management of the public Finances or Treasury); fiscalidad (the system of taxation) and fomento (the promotion and protection of public works, buildings, etcetera). The latter is one of the favourite terms of the Enlightenment and represents the government's intention to intervene directly not only in social organization but also in economic activity. Private law (derecho privado) is another aspect that can provide a key to the understanding of family relations and forms of ownership in their interaction with norms of ideological behaviour and implementation. Finally, it is also necessary to analyze the role played by the administrative agents, or civil servants, who manned the state bureaucracy.

On the night when Nelson Mandela made his acceptance speech as victor of South Africa's first democratic election, he paid tribute to ‘some of South Africa's great leaders including John Dube, Josiah Gumede, Moorooghia Naidoo, Dr Abdurahman, Chief Luthuli, Lilian Ngoyi, Bram Fisher, Helen Joseph, Yusuf Dadoo, Moses Kotane, Chris Hani and Oliver Tambo. They should have been here to celebrate with us, for this is their achievement too’.

In November and December 1995, a discussion raged on the H-LATAM Internet newsgroup, surrounding the phenomenon of caudillismo. It centred mostly on Bolivian caudillo Mariano Melgarejo (1864–1871), and the editors of this journal believed that the way in which the discussion developed, indicated that it might be interesting to offer our subscribers an edited version of the whole discussion. In this manner, those not ‘connected’ may also benefit from the goings-on of the Internet.