In response to increasing academic interest, Cambridge University Press launched a new journal in 2006, entitled the Journal of Global History. To inaugurate the endeavour, the editors asked economic historian Patrick O'Brien to write an introductory essay to serve as a prolegomenon for this newly invigorated field of study. O'Brien began by noting that it is no mere coincidence that interest in global history should be growing, given the global challenges entailed in current-day economic, political and environmental issues. From this perspective, we might take “global history” to refer both to the field's geographical reach and its attempts to relate a global range of seemingly diverse phenomena. Both understandings require us to stretch beyond the narrow specialisms in which we were trained and invite increasing willingness to collaborate. Along these lines, O'Brien applauded those historians who have reached outside their own discipline to draw on the insights and methods of the natural sciences, as well as natural scientists whose work is shedding new light on historical development.

Just days after William Howard Taft arrived in the Philippine Islands in early June 1900 to take up his position as the chairman of the five member commission charged with the task of establishing a civilian government for the newly annexed colony, he wrote to J.G. Schmidlapp, an old friend in Ohio, to assure him that he was settling quite comfortably into his exotic surroundings. Taft found the climate in Manila much more agreeable than he had been led to expect was possible in the tropics. The heat, he estimated, was comparable to Cincinnati during the summer months. He was also heartened by the ‘strong, healthy-looking’ young Americans he encountered in the streets of the capital, which he deemed as robust as any back home. But Taft drew a much larger lesson from the apparent ease of his own acclimation and that of his countrymen to the tropical locale. He concluded that though ‘it may be that it is the survival of the fittest […] it is evident that men can live here and be healthy’.

When I was invited to participate in the conference marking the twentieth anniversary of Leiden's Centre for Overseas Expansion and to contribute to the conference's retrospection of recent scholarship on the history of overseas expansion, I happily agreed. And I agreed specifically to contribute a paper on what was rather casually, I think, called ‘The Atlantic in the Ancien Régime’. Since I had been working, one way and another, in that area for a long time, I expected no difficulty in writing up a reasonable paper. But the more I thought about the subject, and the more I reviewed what had been done in recent studies of ‘the Atlantic in the Ancien Régime’ the more mysterious and interesting the question became and the more strongly I was led back to earlier antecedents in the literature. I had a growing feeling that something strange had happened, something that, oddly enough, I had myself been involved in without knowing it, something that I was in fact attempting to formulate in connection with an international seminar on Atlantic history that I will be directing over the next few years.

The historiography of the late colonial era has had a love-hate relationship with the colonial state. In the early years of post-colonial independence, much history was written to record and celebrate the achievements of ‘nation-building’. The founding fathers of independence had defeated the colonial state in their struggle against its oppressions. The old state, now under new management, but with the same boundaries, language and (usually) administrative structure, had become a nation, with an undisputed claim to the loyalty of its former colonial subjects. The task of the historian was to show how a national identity had emerged ineluctably from the bundle of districts cellotaped together by colonialism into a dependency, and how it had been mobilised to throw off colonial rule and create a sovereign nation. Subsequently, as this version of the recent colonial past was undermined by the difficulties and divisions of the independent present, and, in some cases, by disillusionment with its ruling elite, the focus shifted towards the sources of popular resistance in the colonial period. In this ‘subaltern’ history, the emphasis was upon uncovering rural struggles, local solidarities, and ‘hidden’ communities of belief that colonial rulers had ignored, or suppressed but which had played a key part in destroying the legitimacy and exercise of their power. The implication here was that the colonial state was an alien coercive force whose continuation into the post-colonial era (even with a change of crew) had frustrated social justice and the achievement of an authentic post-colonial identity.

In 1861 the book Java: Or, How to Manage a Colony, by J.W.B. Money, which compared the deficits suffered by British India with the profitability of the cultivation of Java and Madura, caused considerable discussion among the Dutch politicians. At an international level, the last word has yet to be spoken in the debate among historians and economists on the profits and losses of former colonies.

There is something logical and perhaps even comforting about linking the history of European expansion to a narrative about the slow but steady rationalization of space. Periodic advances in techniques of navigation and mapping, an increasing focus on boundaries in treaty-making between imperial rivals, and the accumulation of geographic knowledge of conquered and colonized territories by the colonizers – these trends appear as defining elements of the construction of global European power both in older imperial histories and in post-Foucauldian studies emphasizing social control and governmentality in colonial societies. ‘Mapping’ features in this telling as both a technology in the service of empire and as a metaphor for the colonial project of mastery through knowledge accumulation and control.

As the decolonisation process began after World War II, new ties developed between independent countries, international organisations and donors of development aid. While the former colonial powers were prominent providers of aid to their former colonies, Sweden and Norway took pride in their lack of a colonial past, and considered themselves to be particularly suitable aid donors for this very reason. Norway established its first aid project in 1952; but despite this relatively early beginning, aid transfers remained low through the 1960s. Since the 1970s, however, both Sweden and Norway have been among the most generous aid donors. The countries have been comparatively active in the development policy area, both bilaterally and on an international level, encouraging international co-operation and co-ordination.

African history was really born on a specific date and its parent was Prof. Phillips, then heading the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), in London. It began when the learned Collins and Asquith commissions advocated the upgrading of schools in four different parts of the continent (Nigeria, Ghana, Sudan and Uganda) to University College status whereupon the Colonial Office looked for a university in Great Britain to guarantee programming and quality and passed that job unto the University of London which in turn promptly passed much of the burden unto SOAS. Although no funds were attached to this Phillips accepted and eventually did get funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, to the greater glory of SOAS. Meanwhile however he had visited East Africa and he had been struck there in 1947 by the absence of ‘native histories’ such as one finds so thickly on the ground in his usual playing ground India. He decided to hire an historian of Africa who would both supervise the development of history departments in the new colleges and work to remedy this lack of local history.

The seven districts of present-day Assam state, comprising 7.8 million hectares (78,496 km2), lie in the valley of the Brahmaputra river in the extreme northeast of India. On the map they form an extended finger of riverine land pointing toward the mountain boundary. Assam has been a steadily developing frontier region since the middle decades of the nineteenth century. One arm of this development has been that of the plantation economy devoted to tea production in the highlands. British capital, British managers, and Indian coolie labor formed the essential elements in this growing export-oriented economy. From 1870 another settler-based frontier society emerged when peasant migrants from Bengal and ex-tea-laborers took up government-owned wastelands along the Brahmaputra and its tributaries to grow paddy rice. Together these two forces have transformed the face of the land and created a new society in Assam over the past century. The British colonial regime's policies generally favored the development and growth of both the estate and the smallholder sectors of Assam's economy. In this process the indigenous Assamese — whether peasant cultivators or tribal hill peoples — have faced immense pressures on their society and way of life. The purpose of this essay is to delineate the transformations in the land and the agricultural economy that accompanied this process in Assam.

The northernmost regions of Fennoscandia attracted attention of travellers and geographers for centuries. These regions were often imagined in ambivalent terms as homelands of evil and dearth or as places of true happiness. From the seventeenth century onwards, Sápmi (Lapland) became a destination of regular exploration undertaken by Swedish and foreign travellers. These travels made it possible to verify, dismiss, or authorize all that what was previously only speculated about, and ultimately led to the construction of new sets of representations. This paper studies the modes of imagining Sápmi in early modern writing, explores how these were intertwined with state programs in the region, and how the rhetoric and ideological underpinnings of the representations authored by the domestic authors differed from the visions of Sápmi produced by contemporaneous foreign travellers.

What was seventeenth-century Dutch expansion in Southeast Asia all about? In the traditional historiography, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was predominantly presented as a multinational corporation and non-state colonial actor. Recent research, however, has significantly challenged this view, stressing instead the imperial aspects of VOC rule. This article aims to break new ground by analysing the vocabularies used in seventeenth-century reasoning about Dutch expansion overseas. Focusing on three critics of the VOC from the 1660s and 1670s, Pieter van Dam, Pieter de la Court, and Pieter van Hoorn, the article shows how voices within and outside of the ranks of the Company tried to make sense of the many-faced VOC as a commercial company that was also, in different ways, a state. In an on-going debate that centred on the issues of colonisation, conquest, free trade, and monopoly, the VOC was characterised as a distinctive political body that operated as an overseas extension of the state (Van Dam), as a competitor of the state (De la Court), or as a state as such (Van Hoorn). Following Philip J. Stern's recent analysis of the English East India Company, the VOC should therefore be considered to be a particular political institution in its own terms, which challenged its critics to think about it as a body politic that was neither corporation nor empire, but rather a Company-State.

South Africa and Indonesia are countries whose postcolonial trajectory has been characterised by racial, ethnic and religious tensions: tensions whose roots lie in their shared colonial past. Whether simmering and subdued, or overt and necessitating international intervention, these tensions demand a renewed critical perspective by academics who, until now, have made little attempt to transcend the two, previously discrete, arenas of scholarship. This volume aims to initiate a comparative study of the ‘Greater Netherlands’, which has been widely recognised as long overdue. Our aim in this volume is to delineate the distinctive governmental and cultural processes which currently shape the emergent democratisation of these two states, and to establish how far these owe something to Dutch (and related European) influence.

Catarina de San Juan was a slave woman who was brought to the Philippines in the 1610s on her way to Mexico, where she became a beata of great renown. Her experiences in the slave markets of Cochin and Manila suggest that Portuguese traders played a key role as the primary suppliers of Asian slaves to the Philippines. This paper argues that Portuguese slavers made a significant contribution to the Manila economy by providing an important labour force that helped build and maintain the colony from 1580 to 1640, the years of Iberian Union or, from the Portuguese perspective, the “Spanish Captivity”. One-crown rule gave Portuguese traders free trade access to Manila, allowing them to meet the city's demand for this important commodity. The slave trade's volume and profits testify to its social and economic significance and suggests that the Portuguese helped sustain the Philippines, even as they faced the logistical difficulties and legal barriers evident in Catarina's story. This paper shows that the forced migration of individuals like Catarina was a notable outcome of “Spain's Asian presence”—less significant in economic terms than the transfer of silver and textiles, but no less important in human terms.

This forum discusses the utility of ‘corporate constitutionalism’ as a category of historical analysis. Corporate constitutionalism privileges the constitutional activities of international trading corporations to understand the cross-cultural dynamics at work in European expansion. William A Pettigrew sets out the possibilities of corporate constitutionalism in the first essay which defines the concept, makes the case for viewing trading corporations as constitutional entities at home and abroad, signals some possible interpretive benefits for historians of empire, corporate historians, global historians, and constitutional historians, before offering an illustrative case study about the Royal African Company. Leading thinkers in international history (David Armitage), legal history (Paul Halliday), constitutional theory (Vicki Hsueh), and corporate history (Thomas Leng and Philip J Stern) offer their reflections on the possibilities of this new approach to the international activities of trading corporations. Although the Forum focuses on seventeenth century English trading corporations, it proposes to start a discussion about the utility of corporate constitutionalism for other European corporations and for periods both before and after the seventeenth century.

It was a reluctant Dutch government, representing an equally reluctant Dutch population, that had to recognize the independent Republic of Indonesia in 1949. The so-called decolonization process had been a traumatic experience for all parties concerned. The academic community in the Netherlands was no exception to this rule, and Dutch ‘Indonesian studies’ went into a long hibernation. This applies particularly to the study of the welfare services, an aspect of Dutch colonial rule that had been the pride and glory of civil servants and scholars alike (many of them former civil servants).

Perceptions of the earliest stages of interaction between European nations and the indigenous peoples of Africa, from the beginnings of European maritime expansion in the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century, are easily clouded by consciousness of the subsequent imposition of European rule over almost the entire African continent. There has, arguably, been a tendency to read back into earlier periods the military and political dominance which became manifest in the European Partition of Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. The temptation is, perhaps, especially strong in relation to the history of the Atlantic slave trade, which appears so obviously damaging to the African societies involved that it is readily assumed that their participation in it must have been somehow coerced. Although strongest in popular perceptions, this tendency has been reflected in the work of some academic historians also: perhaps most emphatically in the general survey of Afro-European commercial relations by the late Walter Rodney, which remains probably the most widely read book on African history. There we are told, for example, that ‘From the beginning, Europe assumed the power to make decisions within the international trading system […] Above all, European decision-making power was exercised in selecting what Africa should export – in accordance with European needs.’ Primarily, according to Rodney, this was a question of disparity of economic power; but ‘as a last resort’ armed force could be used ‘to ensure the pursuit of favourable policies in the dependent areas’.