The overland communications between Asia and Europe were of crucial importance to the economic and military survival of the East India companies. This applies equally to the English, French and Dutch East India companies - and even to the Portuguese empire.

At some of the most crucial moments of its history, the very survival of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) depended on the thin thread connecting it overland to Europe. One of these crises occurred in the mid-seventeenth century when during the first Anglo-Dutch war, English fleets challenged Dutch naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. Reflecting on the defeat of the British fleets and the near eradication of the English East India Company or EIC's naval presence there in 1654, the Dutch director of Surat commented: ‘We would never have gained such an easy victory if the English had reacted more promptly or had we not received warnings so promptly [tijdig].’ Similarly, the catastrophic defeat suffered at a later date by the French admiral De la Haye is normally attributed to De la Haye's hesitations. Yet is is doubtful whether the VOC would have been able ot assemble a fleet quickly enough to destroy De la Haye's fleet had the VOC not received messages overland.

In 1888 Brazil abolished slavery as the last country in the Americas to do away with the ‘peculiar institution’. The following four essays study the widely varying impact of abolition on the economies and social structures of the ex-slave societies.

The computer is rapidly gaining ground in the history of European overseas expansion. Vast amounts of systematic data are being processed with the aid of a whole host of automatic routines and programming devices. Use of modern computer technology may allow expansion historians to tackle problems on a larger scale and to furnish arguments with a more solid empirical foundation than was possible in previous days. Yet the road towards computerization is one full of pitfalls. The variety of available software options is truly bewildering and the accumulated knowhow in the field is not easily accessible. On the level of the individual researcher, there is a constant trade-off between investments in new skills and the actual processing of data and reporting of results. There is no single optimal path leading to maximal sophistication with a minimum of effort.

The nature of the relationship between the metropolitan world and the colonies and of its impact on the economic development of each of the two sides has been the subject of intense debate and controversy over a very long period of time. As far as the role of the colonial relationship in the development of the West is concerned, an important viewpoint has been that it would be wrong to assign a significant role to this factor in explaining European industrialization. In some recent economic literature on ‘Modern Imperialism’ it has been argued that neither in the field of capital formation in the metropolitan countries, nor in that of finding a market for the foods manufactured there, can an important role be assigned to the colonial factor. Only in highly specific cases such as textile manufacturing in Britain during the nineteenth century could the export market in the colonial world have been of some significance.