This paper deals in general terms with social change in India between the second decade of the nineteenth century when the British emerged completely dominant in the subcontinent through to the 1870s when the railways, the growth of export trades and new political associations were palpably transforming the Indian Empire. Some suggestions about comparable developments injava will be made at the end of the paper.

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.

Hardly had the Spaniards and Portuguese established their first footholds in the newly discovered Americas they claimed as their exclusive preserves than their European rivals and enemies were on the scene. In what came to be known as the Spanish Indies they endeavoured to obtain some of the continent's staggering wealth in precious metals. In Brazil they were after the logwood that could be more or less had for the taking. It produced dyes far superior to those then in use in Europe and in great demand in an expanding textile industry, of which that of England was a considerable part. Besides which there was the pleasing prospect that Brazil's great rivers might give access to the silver mining regions of Spanish South America. Such predatory urges were sharpened as Protestantism took root in Western Europe. Convinced that the military strength of Spain, the continent's leading Catholic power, stemmed from American bullion, zealous Protestants believed that could this wealth only be diverted into the right hands the true faith would be saved, its adherents duly rewarded and Spain, deprived of its lifeblood, ruined. But the implementation of this godly strategy was no obstacle to conducting a lucrative commerce with the arch-enemy. Sugar and tobacco, of which the Iberian Americas were soon substantial producers, could be purchased for sale in a growing European market. Equally appealing was the opportunity to sell to Portuguese and Spanish colonists the African slaves their plantation economies demanded. And no less attractive or rewarding was the chance to supply them with those European goods, both luxuries and necessities, which they were forbidden to produce for themselves and which Iberian industries were increasingly unable to provide, or which, through the inadequacies of the Spanish and Portuguese imperial commercial monopoly, were usually in short supply and invariably grossly over-priced.

“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.

J.C. van Leur was not very kind to his fellow historians in 1940 when he addressed the Historical Section of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, reviewing the fourth volume of the Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië by E.C. Godée Molsbergen. The gist of his talk, entitled ‘On the Eighteenth Century as a Category in Indonesian History’, was that colonial historical studies in the Netherlands and in the Netherlands East Indies were of a fairly parochial nature. For Van Leur, who was well acquainted with social and economic historical theory, it was not difficult to criticize the traditional approach of Godée's study of the eighteenth century. He pointed out that it made no sense to use the eighteenth century as a category in Asian history. The reverse in fact was true, he argued, as from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Asian civilizations were characterized by a steady continuity. Nowadays many historians would agree with Van Leur's point of view, except for his refutation of the eighteenth century as a category in Asian history. The eighteenth century is now generally regarded as a period of change in many parts of Asia.

In our Age of the Discovery of Space, many people still enjoy commemorating the Age of Global Exploration and Discovery. In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' epic voyage to the Caribbean islands off the American continent was celebrated in Spain and America, and in 1998 and 2000 Portugal also commemorated its Age of Descobrimentos in Africa, South America and Asia. Various campaigns are underway in China to celebrate in 2004 the 600th (!) anniversary of the great expeditions by Admiral Zheng Ho to South Asia and Africa. Most of these festivities, meant to foster international awareness in the current Age of Globalisation, have met with mixed reactions among the peoples who were ‘discovered’.

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.

The article builds on a succession of visually disturbing events that occurred in Goa—the capital city of Portuguese India—during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From the early years of the Portuguese conquest (1510), Goa went through a redefinition of its urban space, which implied the appropriation and re-semantization of buildings and other key sites of the old Muslim city. This process included the spread of images and symbols related to several Portuguese viceroys, soon-to-be targets of acts of political insult and even political iconoclasm performed by their Portuguese opponents in a context of growing factionalism. We speak namely of episodes of protest against places of memory associated to different clans, encompassing statues (both official and bogus), textual inscriptions, and viceroys’ portraits. These were European phenomena to a large extent, but coloured by significant local and native elements. The article engages with a grid of questions that places real statues, satirical effigies, and erased faces (and the diverse reactions they have aroused) in dialogue with current debates on popular politics; high and low vis-à-vis the colonial social fabric; the uses of public space; verbal, written, and visual insult; political languages; and disputed authority in an imperial setting.

In August of 1587 Manteo, an Indian from Croatoan Island, joined a group of English settlers in an attack on the native village of Dasemunkepeuc, located on the coast of present-day North Carolina. These colonists, amongst whom Manteo lived, had landed on Roanoke Island less than a month before, dumped there by a pilot more interested in hunting Spanish prize ships than in carrying colonists to their intended place of settlement along the Chesapeake Bay. The colonists had hoped to re-establish peaceful relations with area natives, and for that reason they relied upon Manteo to act as an interpreter, broker, and intercultural diplomat. The legacy of Anglo-Indian bitterness remaining from Ralph Lane's military settlement, however, which had hastily abandoned the island one year before, was too great for Manteo to overcome. The settlers found themselves that summer in the midst of hostile Indians.

This article studies the role of indigenous teachers within the school system run by the Moravian mission in the Danish West Indies. The mission opened its first day schools for enslaved children in 1841 a few years before the abolition of slavery. The missionaries were reliant on the support of teachers of Afro-Caribbean origin, which were trained in one of the teacher training institutes run by the Mico-Charity Society. This article proposes that the recruitment of Afro-Caribbean teachers with different denominational backgrounds and professional education challenged the mission hierarchy. This will be pointed out by focusing on the recruitment and training of the teachers and by an analysis of their position within the mission society.

Cui bono information and record keeping? In his most recent work devoted to the study of British and French imperialism in the Levant in early modern history, Cornel Zwierlein has argued that “empires are built on ignorance.” It is, of course, true that during the old regime Western knowledge of things “Oriental” was patently defective, marked as it was by blind spots and glaring gaps; and if observed in the broader context of European colonialism in Asia, the British and French cases are hardly exceptional. Sanjay Subrahmanyam's Europe's India has shown compellingly that the Portuguese, too, blindly forged ahead in their imperial expansion into South Asia, with a good dose of improvisation. By focusing on a mission to Khiva, Bukhara, and Balkh in 1732, I set out to show that the Russian venture in Asia too was premised upon ignorance, among other things. More specifically, I argue that diplomatic and commercial relations between Russia and Central Asia developed in parallel with the neglect of intelligence gathered and made available in imperial archives. Reflecting on the fact that the Russian enterprise in Asia was minimally dependent on information allows us to complicate the reductive equation of knowledge to power, which originates from the “archival turn.” Many today regard archives as reflective of projects of documentation, which granted epistemological virtue to the texts stored, ordered, and preserved therein. The archives generated truth claims, we are told, about hierarchies of knowledge produced by states and, by doing so, they effectively operated as a technological apparatus bolstering the state. However, not all the texts which we find in archives always retained their pristine epistemic force. To historicise the uses, misuses, and, more importantly, the practices of purposeful neglect of records invites us to revisit the quality of transregional connectivity across systems of signification in the early modern period.

In 1885, the Dutch East Indian state began a huge ‘civilisation offensive’ in the field of irrigation focussed on Java. It comprised creating modern irrigation works, regulating irrigation management and planning construction activities. This paper shows the successes and failures of this irrigation programme, which was part of the Dutch ‘colonial project’ as a whole. Particular attention is given to the question of why the colonial state made irrigation affairs one of its special missions. What emerges is that Dutch exploitation interests (sugar) were dominant, though the welfare interests of the native population (rice) clearly became more prominent. Another question to be dealt with is the issue of how the Dutch East Indian state realized its plans. As this paper argues, the engineers of the Public Works Department played a key part, but only in competition and cooperation with other relevant groups.

In 1914, most New Zealanders welcomed the opportunity to stand together with the British Empire. Historians have long recognised that for a small country the contribution to the war effort of pakeha New Zealanders was substantial. Much less well recognised is the contribution of Māoris who served at Gallipoli and on the western front. In the face of opposition from within the Māori community and from British High Command, a determined group of Māori leaders argued forcefully for sending Māoris into action. Many young Māori men responded with enthusiasm to the recruitment drive and the First Māori Battalion sailed to Egypt in February 1915. This paper explores the tensions that resonated within the Māori community around the recruitment of Māori men and argues that the debates were shaped by different understandings of nationhood. Māoris who opposed recruitment believed that volunteering to fight in a foreign war distracted Māoris from dealing with the difficulties in their own communities. Conversely those who argued for participation in the war believed that their contribution to the war would lead to utu (justice), and that only by including Māoris as soldiers in fighting units could all New Zealanders claim to belong to an authentic nation.

Both overseas trade and shipbuilding in India are of great antiquity. But even for the early modern period, maritime commerce is relatively better documented than the shipbuilding industry. When the Portuguese and later the North Europeans entered the intra-Asian trade, many of the ships they employed in order to supplement their shipping in Asia were obtained from the Indian dockyards. Detailed evidence with regard to shipbuilding, however, is very rare. It has been pointed out that the Portuguese in the sixteenth century were more particular than their North-European counter-parts in the following centuries in providing information on seafaring and shipbuilding. Shipbuilding on the west coast has been discussed more than that on the eastern coast of India, particularly the coast of Bengal. Though Bengal had a long tradition of shipbuilding, direct evidence of shipbuilding in the region is rare. Many changes were brought about in the history of India and the Indian Ocean trade of the eighteenth century, especially after the 1750s. When the English became the largest carriers of Bengal's trade with other parts of Asia, this had an impact on the shipbuilding in Bengal. It was in their interest that the British in Bengal had their ships built in that province.

The organization of the Dutch Wast India Company (Verenigde Oostinische Compagnie, VOC) is in many respects comparable with the government bureaucracies of the 17th and 18th century. Like the officials in the administration of the state, the servants of the Company used their position to enrich themselves in a way that nowadays would be called corrupt. But it has been stressed that it would be incorrect to apply modern moral standards on the bureaucracy of the ancien regime. It is in fact impossible to draw a sharp line between what was allowed to the Company's servants overseas and what was forbidden to them. The directors or bewindhebbers of the VOC themselves were not very consistent in these matters. On the one hand, they appointed members of their families and their clients to honourable positions in order to provide them with a moderate salary and a well-spread “free” table during their stay in Asia. On the other hand, the directors tried to keep the monopoly of the VOC intact, which meant that no other Dutch merchants, not even Company's officials, were allowed to carry any trade in Asia on their own account.

One may not always agree with the term used as the title of the book, but in his already classic study on ancient Southeast Asia, Coedès has shown that despite local differences and regional variations, this region shares similar sense of unity. Hinduisation or, rather, Indianisation in statecraft and religion was the basis of this sense of unity. Not only were Sanskrit and Pali the official languages of the original texts of the religion, Hinduisation also provided commonly shared high cultural symbols. In other words, despite political instability in inter-state relations and trading competition that continued to disturb whatever type of stability had been attained, the world of Southeast Asia, and particularly the historic Indonesian archipelago, shared a number of cultural traits, that were clearly manifested in the conduct of political affairs and religion.

This could be considered as the ‘swan song’ of a French colonial administrator in Tropical Africa. Between 1958 and 1961, most of these colonial administrators had to leave what was soon to be considered one of the major sins committed by France in the twentieth century: the Empire. For some of them it was a real shock, from which they never recovered. Of course, it was the normal outcome of the very process they had prepared: to teach the African peoples how to rule themselves. But: ‘Did it not come too early leaving the new African elite insufficiently prepared?’ If this were so, was ‘the great sin of France not to colonise but to decolonise too quickly?’