There is no generally accepted explanation as to why Mare Liberum, or The Free Sea, was written. The most common view is that the Text was a propaganda instrument designed to improve the position of the United Provinces during the truce negotiations with Spain from 1606–08. Central to Grotius' strategy was his reliance upon Iberian Scholastics as a means of providing a series of irrefutable propositions to the Spaniards.

On transatlantic slave ships the Africans were predominantly there as cargo, while Europeans worked the deadly job of sailing and securing the vessel. On the plantations the roles changed, and the slaves were transformed into a workforce. European sailors and African slaves in the Atlantic world mostly encountered each other aboard slave ships as captive and captor. Once the enslaved arrived on the plantations new hierarchies and divisions of labour between slave and free suited to the particular working environment were introduced. Hierarchies of status, rank and colour were fundamental to the harsh and isolated working environments of the ship and the plantation. The directors of Surinamese plantations shielded themselves from the wrath of their enslaved by hiring sailors, soldiers or other white ruffians to act as blankofficier (white officer). These men formed a flexible workforce that could be laid off in case tensions on plantations rose. Below the white officers there were non-white slave officers, basjas, managing the daily operations on the plantations. The bomba on board slave ships played a similar role.

Jews in most of early modern Europe struggled to assert their rights within legal frameworks that presumed them to be intrinsically different—aliens—from the (Christian) population around them no matter where they had been born, how they dressed and behaved, or what language they spoke. This struggle played itself out on various fronts, not the least of which was in the Jewish assertion of the right to become more than aliens—to become citizens or subjects—of the territories in which they lived. Citizenship, in its various forms, was a structural representation of belonging. Moreover, citizenship conferred tangible rights. As such, being a recognised citizen (or subject) had not only great symbolic, but also great economic, importance.

This article examines the claims of Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials in the mid-eighteenth century regarding the Islamic source of a legal code prepared for the local population in Semarang, northeast Java. Although the VOC had encountered local legal cultures in Indonesia since the mid-seventeenth century, it preferred to circumvent those in favour of European laws whenever possible. But in the eighteenth century, VOC officials addressed indigenous legal systems more directly when the company sought possibilities for direct control. This resulted in the production of many codes on the legal status of Muslim and Chinese subjects of Indonesia. In the process of codification, some officials claimed to have consulted Islamic legal texts and Muslim jurists. One criminal code that came out of the effort supposedly took its rulings accurately from the Mugharrar, which is possibly the Muḥarrar written by the Islamic jurist ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1226). I argue that this assertion is baseless, and demonstrate that the very pretense is part of a larger colonial project that sought legitimacy from the indigenous subjects at a time of political and economic crises.

In 1964 F.R.J. Verhoeven, then Director General of the National Archives of Malaysia, wrote an article entitled ‘The lost archives of Dutch Malacca’ in which he lamented the apparent disappearance of the c. 2,000 volumes of records which he estimated must have been produced during the Dutch administration of Melaka from 1641 to 1824. Apart from 150 volumes in the National Archives of Indonesia in Jakarta, some fifteen volumes of Church registers now in the National Archives of Malaysia, and a small number of records in The Hague and elsewhere, nothing was known to have survived. It was only with the publication in 1983 of Ian Baxter' listing of series R/9 in the India Office Records that it became widely known that a portion of the archives had been shipped to London early in the twentieth century:

The records of the Malacca Orphan Chamber and Court of Justice, R/9, occupy 44 feet of shelving (ninety-eight boxes) at the India Office Records in London. They were donated by the Government of the Straits Settlements to the India Office in June 1927, after lying, neglected, for many years in the basement of the Court House at Malacca. It is only recently (1981) that they have been completely sorted and listed. They comprise thirty-six boxes of Orphan Chamber records, fifty-four boxes of records of the College of Justice, one box of records of the Political Council and seven boxes of miscellanea. For the most part the records are written in Dutch and although they extend in date from 1685 to 1835 the bulk of them relate to the period 1785–1825, i.e. the last years of the Dutch East India Company's administration, the British occupation of 1795–1818 and the second Dutch administration of 1818–25.

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.

This article discusses the early modern Acehnese epic tradition to demonstrate the emergence of an individualized Muslim ethics. From the late seventeenth century onwards, a protracted decline of Acehnese royal power initiated a process of political fragmentation as well as the gradual integration of rural areas in the globalizing economy. This shift coincided with the emergence of local religious teachers as a new and influential social group. Contingent upon these changes, the Acehnese epic tradition shifted from a dominant cosmological model based on ritual hierarchies to a paradigm of reflexive ethics based on individual responsibility to God.

In the “Concluding Remarks” appended to his journal for 1853–63, published in London in 1866 as Ten Years in Sarawak, Charles Brooke gave his support to the unfashionable idea of miscegenation between Europeans and Asians. The younger nephew of the first Rajah, James Brooke, and heir apparent to the Brooke raj to which he succeeded two years later, his views were of some significance. Accepting that a tropical climate was “not adapted for the permanent residence of Anglo-Saxons,” he proposed that a mixed race could provide Sarawak with a “suitable population.” To support his argument, Brooke cited the observation of Dr W.J. Moore of the Bombay Medical Service that Europeans had not survived as a race after many generations of British rule in India:

Of the numerous pensioners, etc. etc., there is not one single instance – there is not a great-grand-child or grand-child of these pensioners retaining their European characteristics. An infusion of native blood is essential to the continuance of the race. The fact is, for the white man, or his offspring, there is no such thing as acclimatisation in India. Exposure, instead of hardening the system, actually has the contrary effect, and the longer Europeans remain in this country, the more they feel the effects of the vertical sun.

The historical image of Suriname – and maybe of colonies in general – is dominated by stereotypes, as well as by assumptions which are far too facile. That at least is the impression left after comparing a variety of primary sources on Suriname with the historiography of this colony. One small example will suffice. Almost every time slavery is introduced in literature on the history of Suriname, emphasis is placed on the fact that it was one of the hardest or cruellest slave systems in the entire Americas. The implication is that Suriname slavery is invariably considered to have been a system which remained static for more than two centuries. Something it certainly was not. Moreover, it shows that not one of the authors has ever troubled to take a look at the available demographic sources. Had they done so, they would have noticed there are no indications that Suriname deviated in this respect from the average Caribbean pattern.

The island of Bombay is the ancient property of the English East India Company; it hath hitherto been, of all her settlements, the most conducive to the greatness of the nation in Asia; yet, through the splendour of achievement, great acquisition of the territory, and immense harvests of wealth in Bengal and the Coast of Coromandel, it hath been in some measure overlooked, and, as if in a corner of the world, unnoticed.

At the end of the Second World War, the islands of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia were all under foreign control. The Netherlands retained West New Guinea even while control of the rest of the Dutch East Indies slipped away, while on the other side of the South Pacific, Chile held Easter Island. Pitcairn, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Fiji and the Solomon Islands comprised Britain's Oceanic empire, in addition to informal overlordship of Tonga. France claimed New Caledonia, the French Establishments in Oceania (soon renamed French Polynesia) and Wallis and Futuna. The New Hebrides remained an Anglo-French condominium; Britain, Australia and New Zealand jointly administered Nauru. The United States' territories included older possessions – the Hawaiian islands, American Samoa and Guam – and the former Japanese colonies of the Northern Marianas, Mar-shall Islands and Caroline Islands administered as a United Nations trust territory. Australia controlled Papua and New Guinea (PNG), as well as islands in the Torres Strait and Norfolk Island; New Zealand had Western Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau. No island group in Oceania, other than New Zealand, was independent.

Certain stages of the European expansion process into Asia during the Age of Commercial Capitalism lend themselves well to the comparative historical approach because of the startling similarities and contrasts they offer. The Dutch and English commercial leaps forward into the Orient, for instance, occurred at the same time in the organisational framework of chartered East India Companies - the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) — which, moreover, chose the same theatre of action: Southeast Asia (Banten, Spice Islands) and South Asia (Surat and Coromandel). But although the aims, modes of operation and organisation of the two companies had much in common, these nonetheless each finally carved out their own sphere of influence in the trading world of Asia - the Dutch in Southeast Asia and the English in South Asia. While this consolidation process was taking place, the EIC and VOC gradually shed their semblance of being purely maritime trading organisations and, towards the second half of the eighteenth century, acquired the character of territorial powers. A shift in the balance of power also occurred between the two companies: if the Dutch were still paramount in the seventeenth century, the English totally overshadowed them as powerbrokers in Asian waters during the eighteenth. Did this transition of maritime hegemony occur gradually or should we rather speak of a ‘passage brusque et rapide’ as Fernand Braudel has suggested? Was it, as the traditional explanation has it, the inevitable outcome of the decline of the Dutch Republic to a second-rate power in Europe, or were local Asian developments, be they political or commercial, also involved?

As was the norm with frontispiece illustration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the figures personifying the four continents on the title page to Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum were allegorical stand-ins, representing both a geographical place and its identifying features, symbolised by their appropriate accoutrements (fig. 1). They were not meant to serve as documentary evidence of diverse peoples, which partially explains why the personifications of the four continents are generalised and generic and adopt classicising ideals for body type and posture. In contrast, Willem and Joan Blaeu's map of Africa from 1655 includes ethnographic images as border decorations (fig. 2). These are more naturalistic and taken from contemporary travel accounts, suggesting the presence of factual information sources. Yet both the title page and the map share a visual language that signalled culturally-specific meaning to the viewer.

Since their independence in 1975 the former Portuguese African colonies of Guiné, Angola and Mozambique have been notorious for their instability, while the microstate of Sāo Tome has sunk to become one of the poorest and most debt-burdened countries in the world. The easiest explanation for these disasters can be found in the circumstances of the Portuguese withdrawal from Africa and the maelstrom of the final phases of the Cold War in which these states became embroiled. But are these explanations adequate?

Countless studies by historians, art historians and anthropologists have dealt with the early modern image of the South African Khoikhoi. Lacking everything that Europeans valued, they fell prey to the most contemptuous imagery available. The term ‘Hottentots’, by which they were known, was considered more or less synonymous with monstrous appearance, beastly habits and cultural ignorance. As such they were portrayed in official reports and travel journals, in prints and drawings. Few European artists and travel writers published their observations with any recourse to reality, however. They usually created their images in Europe in accordance with prevailing artistic and literary conventions, time and again reverting to stereotypes that were embedded in prejudice and based on incomplete and distorted knowledge. Thus far scholars have not discovered a single drawing by an eyewitness from the first two centuries of Khoikhoi-European encounters. As a consequence our insight into the mechanisms of stereotyping is far from complete. We neither know how the images were perceived by European viewers nor do we know if and how the stereotypes blurred the perception and judgement of eyewitnesses themselves.

This article engages questions of colonial intimacy in the context of the market – specifically, by white commercial sector in apartheid South Africa to lure black South Africans into burgeoning consumer markets. I focus on the 1960s, when the exercise in racial domination grew more ambitious and coercive, at the same time as buoyant economic growth efforts spurred consumerist desire. African consumers were largely invisible and incomprehensible to white businesspeople, who turned to advertisers and market researchers to bring ‘the African consumer’ to light. This was largely an epistemological challenge – the pursuit of new modes of knowledge about African people, and especially the material intimacies of their daily lives. This article examines this knowledge-making project, along with the anxieties, lapses and contradictions that inhered in it.

The investigation of a shipwreck must extend beyond the uniqueness of the single event in order to have interpretative value for social scientists. One or even several shipwrecks will not necessarily represent a universe. Since statistically significant numbers of shipwrecks may never be studied, methods of inquiry must be devised where quantity is not a prime concern. When we noted the discrepancy between cargoes listed on ships manifests and cargoes actually recovered from shipwrecks of the Spanish Colonial period, the challenge was to determine where and under what circumstances contraband behavior occurred and might be predicted.

It was Charles Boxer who has characterized the struggle between the Portuguese and the Dutch about their respective positions in world trade as the First Global War. In summing up the results at around 1650 Boxer contended that the Portuguese had won in the New World, that the Dutch had won in Asia, while the two countries had reached a stalemate in Africa.

This conclusion is correct only within the political domain. In fighting the Portuguese and the Spanish, the Dutch, together with the British and the French, did not reach economic the limits of their expansion because of Iberian resistance, but because of the general demographic and economic constraints on overseas expansion at the time. These limitations allowed for the creation of two expansion systems, each with its own sphere of influence in the Atlantic. The Iberian system covered the South Atlantic and the Northwest European system the Middle and North Atlantic. Both systems had a similar structure and incorporated European ports providing European and Asian trade goods, trading posts in Africa and plantation areas and settlement colonies in the New World.