In his recent work on the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy stresses the importance of Great Britain's colonial empire in establishing its credentials as the most imposing ofthe great powers in the decades before the First World War. Britain not only possessed ‘the greatest empire the world had ever seen’, but its status as the great global power appeared to be enhanced by the fact that in the last three decades of the nineteenth century ‘it had added 4.25 million miles and 66 million people to the empire’. Other key ‘indicators of British strength’ marshalled by Kennedy include overseas fleets, naval bases and cable stations, which were inextricably bound up with its farflung colonial enterprises. Though empire is essential to Britain's great power status, in Kennedy's argument it has almost nothing to do with the steady decline in British power in the period before the Great War and, at an accelerating pace, throughout the twentieth century. He alludes in places to imperial crises and commitments as key contributors to Britain's perilously overextended position both before and after the war. He also concedes that resistance by colonized peoples, whether in the form of ‘tribal unrest’ or ‘western-educated lawyers and intellectuals seeking to create mass parties’ was somewhat troublesome, but ‘less threatening’ than developments within Europe itself. In Kennedy's view, Britain's retreat from imperial and global power (and, for that matter, that of France as well) can best be understood by charting the decline, relative to that of the other great powers, of its economic base, both industrial and commercial, and its incapacity, due to that decline, to meet the ever-expanding and more costly military commitments that its leaders viewed as essential to the maintenance of its positions as a great power.

In the long run, no country can avoid capitalism. No matter how bad the condition of the lower classes in a country in which they are defenselessly subjugated to the capitalist mode of production, they would still be worse off in a country that is economically under the spell of capitalist exploitation, whereas the ruling system does not give capitalist production the opportunity to arise; in a country where the population is proletarianized by the usurer, the merchant and by foreign competition, and where this proletariat cannot be absorbed by nascent big industries and cannot be gradually prepared for resistance against capitalism. The example of such a country is nowadays Turkey, and the Philippines will arrive at the same situation if the Spanish regime continues for a long time.

It is now more than 25 years ago that the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz published his well-known book Agricultural Involution. The processes of ecological change in Indonesia. In this excellently written essay, Geertz to argue that involution rather than evolution had occurred in Java during the past century and a half. This process was said to be responsible for the stagnating development, the depression, on the Javanese countryside which was so easily discernable when Geertz was conducting his field research in East-Central Java during the 1950s within the framework of the so-called Mojokuto project, in which Mojokuto was the equivalent of the American Middletown. In brief, the involution thesis boils down to the theory that as a result of Dutch colonial intervention at the start of the nineteenth centuryJavanese rural society developed a very high degree of social homogeneity, while balancing on the edge of the minimum of subsistence or below it. This society was characterized by the absence of sharp class-differences or a clear social stratification, the presence of ‘shared poverty’ and the necessity, as the island became more and more densely populated, to cut the (rice) cake in smaller and smaller parts.

Time is catching up with today's student of the history of European overseas expansion in the sense that he has to add yet another facet to his already diverse array of skills. In order to fully explore and exploit the potentials of his field, he needs at least a working command of how to apply computer technology in research, thereby reaching beyond the art of word processing. Without turning into a full-fledged programmer, he will have to master some basic tools of processing and also to gain an insight into the options available. Perhaps even more importantly, he will have to know when and when not to apply the computer. This article aims at providing some guidelines for facilitating the computerization of European expansion history.

This checklist is a by-product of a study of Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimes (1625), a work which makes much use of contemporary accounts of the earliest Dutch trans-oceanic voyages, particularly those to the East. It is well known that the Dutch regularly published accounts of separate voyages, and that the appearance in English translation of many of these separate voyage accounts encouraged English sailors and merchants to follow the Dutch eastwards. Purchas sometimes used existing English translations, whether in print or inmanuscript, but more often used new versions — normally only abridged versions or extracts — made by himself or by an unnamed hack; and Pilgrimes thus contained a number of translations of Dutch voyage accounts previously not available to English readers. Hence the following checklist covers (a) published separate English translations of Dutch voyage accounts, up to 1625; and (b) the versions and summaries of Dutch accounts, and the briefer references to Dutch voyages taken from such accounts (whether derived directly or from intermediate sources) to be found in Pilgrimes.

Until quite recently the majority of Mexican archives were not easily accessible and working conditions were sometimes appalling. Many collections were only poorly catalogued, or not at all. Documents were brought together n i annual legajos or following the particularist norms of a local archivist, often without proper training or schooling. Nineteenth-century revolutions, and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) provoked considerable havoc. In several state capitals or municipal seats archives were destroyed or documents were used as wrapping paper in drugstores. In other cases documents were sold to foreign collectors.