Among the roughly 150,000 soldiers sent to the Dutch East Indies between 1815 and 1914, the Luxembourg contingent made up a tiny minority of just 1,075 men. Based upon extensive research into their careers, data on these soldiers provide further clues to understanding what drove Europe’s young men to become colonial soldiers. The results of this national case study will be compared with earlier investigations by Bossenbroek and Bosma on recruits for the Dutch colonial army. Similar to the Dutch soldiers, their Luxembourg counterparts had a predominantly urban provenance. However, in contrast to the Dutch, they did not have a strong military background, and it appears that fewer Luxembourgers stayed behind in the Dutch East Indies after their tour of duty. They were more attracted by the payments that the recruiters doled out in advance, particularly at a time of economic crisis, than in a career in the tropics.

The dominant theme in the historical literature on agricultural production for export is the fast-expanding demand by Europe in the course of the industrialisation during the nineteenth century of agricultural goods originating in Asia, Africa as well as the Regions of Recent Settlement. In a large number of cases, the growing supplies of agricultural export were put together through recourse to the plantation system. The colonial governments often played an important, and sometimes a decisive, role in the rise and the smooth functioning of this system. This could be in the form of liberal land grants, the delegation of coercive authority to the management over the labour supply and so on. The direct, including entrepreneurial, role of the government was often evident also in arrangements which were not of the usual plantation variety, but which operated on the basis of accommodation, and indeed integration, with the existing organisation of traditional peasant agriculture. An outstanding example of this is the well-known Cultivation System introduced by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch in Dutch Indonesia in the 1830s. The common theme that cuts across the bulk of the great diversity of arrangements of the use of coercive power by the colonial state in a variety of ways and often in fairly liberal doses.

In 1961, when the Union of South Africa became a republic, I wrote in ‘Interpretations and Trends in South African Historical Writing’: ‘The Afrikaner had won the constitutional struggle against the Briton but at the very moment that he was about to reap the rewards of his victory in a new Republic, he stood confronted with the challenge of a non-white majority, threatening to deprive him of his gains […] A national myth has already become established - that South Africa is an innocent nation and the victim of attack in an evil world, and that attempts to solve the racial problem by territorial divisions or separate development are “misunderstood”.’

When the abolitionists achieved the suppression of the British slave-trade in 1807, they believed that a brave new world of free labour was opening up for Africa. Although they thought mainly in terms of ex-slaves providing the labour for plantation areas, they hoped that any shortfall could in part be met by free emigration from Africa. The reality was to be cruelly different from these dreams. Emigration continued, but overwhelmingly in the form of coerced labour, and most attempts at stimulating free emigration failed. Labour exports across the Atlantic remained close to the late eighteenth-century high point for about four decades, and then fell away steeply to almost nothing by the First World War, as the long, halting and often contradictory European campaign to abolish coerced labour slowly bore its fruits. In the interests of comparison with other areas of emigration, this report will devote a little space at the end to analysing why a small current of free emigration developed, and why it remained so limited. But the bulk of the report will focus on large exports of coerced labour.

This paper introduces an innovative method applied to global (economic) history using the tools of digital humanities through the design and development of the GECEM Project Database (www.gecem.eu; www.gecemdatabase.eu). This novel database goes beyond the static Excel files frequently used by conventional scholarship in early modern history studies to mine new historical data through a bottom-up process and analyse the global circulation of goods, consumer behaviour, and trade networks in early modern China and Europe. Macau and Marseille, as strategic entrepôts for the redistribution of goods, serve as the main case study. This research is framed within a polycentric approach to analyse the connectivity of south Chinese and European markets with trade zones of Spain, France, South America, and the Pacific.

As historians, living in the contemporary world, we ask and are asked about the causes of underdevelopment. And, as most of the former colonies belong today to the underdeveloped countries of the Third World, we are confronted with the question as to what importance the colonial era plays in the history of these countries. There is a consensus that the history of colonialism can only be meaningful approached in the broader spectrum of underdevelopment and the specific problems of the Third World. There is no satisfaction in retreatingto the ostensibly objective approach of the historian and wanting tolimit ourselves in showing how colonialism came into being, what administrative structures arose, what economic policies were followed and finally how the colonized revolted and the process of decolonization got under way. Society will simply not allow us to do so. Equally, if not more important, is the question regarding the impact of colonialism on the colonized societies and how far it may be held responsible for the existing structures of underdevelopment.

Historiography on the extreme violence of fin de siècle colonial wars has often remained nationally fragmented or actively invested in theories of national exceptionality. Focusing on the British, German and Dutch empires, this article seeks to understand the extreme violence as a transimperial phenomenon and asks how we can conceptualise and give empirical substance to this transimperial dimension. First, I give some indication of the degree of transimperial connectivity in the field of colonial warfare, highlighting how intensive mutual imperial observation and the individual mobility of actors fed knowledge into what Kamissek and Kreienbaum have called an “imperial cloud.” Secondly, I argue that a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence can be discerned on the level of colonial warfare's racialisation and the resulting specific communicative and performative aspects. Drawing on fin de siècle manuals of colonial warfare and a selection of case studies, I take the transimperial notion of “moral effect” to demonstrate how such basic notions both generated and legitimised extreme violence in colonial warfare.

In a by now classic definition, European expansion in the nineteenth century has been characterised as the integration of large tracts of the earth's surface into a world-economy dominated by Britain,. Distinctions are conventionally drawn between two processes of integration: on the one hand, the creation of new economies by European settlement in ‘empty’ lands of temperate climate, from which a thinly scattered indigenous population had been displaced, and, on the other, the subordination and partial development of existing economic systems in densely populated tropical areas. Migration from Europe clearly had a role in both processes. It was crucial to the first: economic integration of ‘new’ lands could hardly take place without it, or at least historically it has not done so. The role of European migration in the second process would appear to be more limited. Whites were only likely to be involved in productive processes of agriculture or manufacturing at the highest managerial levels or as technical experts, and much of the military and administrative underpinning deemed necessary for economic domination could be provided by Asian or African clerks and soldiers.

Even before signing the pact between Japan and Germany, Japanese musicians performed in the concert halls of the Third Reich. In particular, there was an active demand due to propagandistic performances such as German–Japanese concerts or concerts for German soldiers on the Eastern front or occupied territories. This study describes the activities of two “Japanese” conductors who became members of the Reich Chamber of Culture and performed with the Berliner Philharmonic orchestra: Ahn Ekitai (Iktae) from colonial Korea and Konoye Hidemaro, a high-ranking Japanese peer. Extracted from documents of the German–Japanese Society at the Federal Archives Koblenz (Germany), this article explores the cultural and political functions that these conductors faced in terms of German war propaganda and how their different musical compositions, both named “Etenraku”, related to propagandistic values. This essay further shows that Ahn, whom Koreans considered a patriot and fighter against Japanese colonial power in Europe for a long time, was active as a Japanese conductor in the Third Reich, calling Konoye's assertion that he was pursued by the Nazis into question.

In 1852, the naturalist and writer Louisa Meredith observed in her book My Home in Tasmania: “I know of no place where greater order and decorum is observed by the motley crowds assembled on any public occasion than in this most shamefully slandered country: not even in an English country village can a lady walk alone with less fear of harm or insult than in this capital of Van Diemen's Land, commonly believed at home to be a pest-house, where every crime that can disgrace and degrade humanity stalks abroad with unblushing front.”

Meredith's paean to life in the notorious Australian penal colony of Hobart was in stark contrast to her earlier, highly unfavourable account of colonial Sydney. It papered over the years of personal hardship she had endured in Australia, as well as avoiding mention of the racial warfare against Tasmania's Aborigines that had afforded her such a genteel European existence.

Such intra-Australian complexities, however, were lost when Meredith's account was superimposed onto German debates about the desirability of penal colonies for Germany. Instead, Meredith's portrait of a cultivated city emerging from the most notorious penal colony in Australia was presented as proof that the deportation of criminals was an important dimension of the civilising mission of Europe in the extra-European world. It was also presented as a vindication of those in Germany who wished to rid Germany of its lumpen criminal class through deportation. The exact paragraph of Meredith's account cited above was quoted in German debates on deportation for almost half a century; first in 1859 by the jurist Franz von Holtzendorff, and thereafter by Friedrich Freund when advocating the establishment of a penal colony in the Preußische Jahrbücher in September 1895.

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.

The origin of the Saint-Joseph University of Beirut, or USJ, dates back to the Seminar of Ghazir founded by the Jesuit Fathers in 1843. The College of Ghazir, established with the intention of training the local Maronite clergy, was transferred to Beirut in 1875. This centre for higher studies was named Saint-Joseph University. In his audience of 25 February 1881, Pope Leo XIII conferred the title of Pontifical University on the USJ.

This article deals with the history of the USJ, the first great French-speaking Jesuit institution in the area which, at the time, bore the name of “Syria”. (The term Syria is used henceforth to represent the geographical entity of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which includes Syria and Lebanon of the present.) The underlying reasons for the creation of Saint-Joseph University of Beirut have to do with its being located in a province of the Ottoman Empire coveted by the future mandatory power, France. By the 1870s, the Ottoman Empire was being preserved chiefly by the competition between the European powers, all of whom wanted chunks of it. The Ottoman territory, like the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, encompassed a great many ethnic groups whose own nationalism was also stirring. Under Ottoman rule, the region of the Levant developed economic and religious ties with Europe. Open to the West, it became a hotbed of political strife between various foreign nations including France, Russia and Britain. These powerful countries assumed the protection of certain ethnic and religious groups, with France supporting the Christian Maronites and Britain supporting the Druzes.

This paper examines the attempt of British missionaries on Madagascar to use medicine and the mission hospital as a way to convert the Malagasy people during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In their attempt to educate the Malagasy about the benefits of Western civilization, which was often defined through science as well as Christianity, missionaries were challenged by Malagasy culture and the local environment. To counter the ability of the Malagasy to challenge Western methods through their cultural beliefs and healing practices and so convert the Malagasy to Western ways, British missionaries had to carve out a space isolated from the Malagasy environment. Medicine, particularly the mission hospital, offered a space to champion Western science and Christianity. In their attempt to bring civilization to Madagascar, missionaries directly tied together science and Christianity while domesticating the space of the hospital.

Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx considered British colonies to be a net burden on British society. Ever since the issue has been a controversial one and has received a great deal of attention from scholars, not least thanks to the publication of Eric Williams's book “Capitalism and Slavery”. To a large extent the debate has been concerned with the issue of whether the profits from colonialism were large enough to have a decisive effect upon, or at least contribute to, the industrialisation of Britain and/or other countries in Europe.

On Tuesday 22 January, 1963, the First Secretary of State and Minister in charge of the Central Africa Office, R.A. Butler, met with the Southern Rhodesia Cabinet in Salisbury. Butler notified the Cabinet that he was visiting the Central African Federation in order to “gauge for himself” the situation. Southern Rhodesia, he remarked, was “an issue unjustifiably pursued at the United Nations” and countering this negative international opinion “was providing the British Government with a difficult, tedious and unwanted task”.

“Goa has never been other than fundamentally Indian …” J.M. Richards, 1982.

“The posteritie of the Portingales, both men and women being in the third degree, doe seeme to be naturall Indians, both in colour and fashion.” J.H. van Linschoten, c. 1590.

“Rich on trade and loot, Goa in the halcyon days of the sixteenth century was a handsome city of great houses and fine churches… In the eyes of stern moralists the city was another Babylon, but to men of the world it was a paradise where, with beautiful Eurasian girls readily available, life was a ceaseless round of amorous assignments and sexual delights”. G.V. Scammell, 1981.