The Union of the Iberian Crowns (1580–1640) promoted a wider cultural exchange between Portuguese and Spanish Asian settlements in Asia. This paper identifies the remarkable circulation of artisans and patrons and the development of new building techniques during this period, which allowed for a shared cultural dialogue that may be best described as forms of mestizage. So, it tries to address the mobility of patrons and architects, which helps explain the diffusion of techniques and models. The first case shows how cultural dialogue promoted new techniques from local traditions and materials, which were later used in neighbouring settlements. The second demonstrates the role these mixed solutions played in the creation of the image of a pure state, in the form of public palaces, a mestizo society, mainly in urban houses, and a local cultural resistance, keeping traditional housing forms in the native quarters. Thanks to this approach, the currently preserved built heritage can be seen not only as a European cultural transfer but also as the result of a fruitful global dialogue.

This essay advocates “refugee political thought” as an autonomous category which needs to be centre-staged in global intellectual history. I concretise this by studying Bengali Hindu refugees who migrated from Muslim-majority eastern Bengal (after the Partition of British India in 1947 part of Pakistan, and after 1971, the sovereign state of Bangladesh) to the Hindu-majority Indian state of West Bengal, and occasionally their descendants as well. By studying the transnational horizons of Bengali refugees from the late 1940s to today, I posit them as part of modern global intellectual history. Bengali refugees and their descendants connected their experiences with those of refugees elsewhere in the world, seeing themselves, for example, as “new Jews.” Later, some of them aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause. Refugee politics became enmeshed with Cold War revolutionary currents. European, Soviet, and Chinese Marxist theory—and latent Lockean assumptions—propelled the everyday politics of refugee land occupation. Marxism, sometimes with Hegelian inflection, nourished the East Bengali-–origin founders of Subaltern Studies theory and Dalit (lower-caste) thought. Ultimately, this essay shows how Bengali refugees instrumentalised transnational thinking to produce new models of democratic political thought and practice in postcolonial India. I describe this as “refugee democracy.”

Dutch colonialism has traditionally focused on the East Indies, rather than the West Indies. Thus when Queen Wilhelmina, while in exile in London, declared in 1942 that the colonies should become autonomous with the words ‘relying on one's own strength, with the will to support each other,’ she was thinking of the East and not so much about Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. Yet as it turned out, all constitutional plans, culminating into the Statuut or Charter of the Kingdom of 1954, even though conceived and drafted with the East in mind, was ultimately only applied to the West. The Netherlands East Indies, occupied by Japan during World War II, opted for independence after the War. The Hague did not accept this step and waged both hot and cold wars to fight against Indonesia's independence. This, for the Netherlands traumatic, experience left its traces in Dutch policy regarding its Caribbean territories.

The historiography of the decolonisation of the French overseas empire offers its students a highly mixed picture. While the atrocities committed during the independence wars in Indochina and Algeria belong to the black pages of contemporary French history, the decolonisation of the French sub-Saharan territories is presented in a much more positive light. In 1960, France ‘gracefully’ agreed to the independence of fourteen of its African territories, after which close relations with the regimes of nearly all those states were nurtured until at least the 1980s. This smooth transfer of power is all the more remarkable when one compares it to the much more problematic British and Portuguese decolonisations in black Africa. How did the French do it? Or should one say: how did the Africans in the French territories do it? In this paper, I will attempt to unveil some of the critical political processes that took place in Senegal at the end of the 1940s, because this period was crucial in the formulation of die relation between French policymakers and an upcoming African political elite. In many ways, die processes that took place in Senegal during this period would determine die course of French policy towards all of its African possessions. A study of this period seems therefore more than justified.

All over Southeast Asia, the perception that the European colonizers had of the Chinese was characterized by a fundamental ambiguity. On the one hand, the Chinese were recognized to be very useful, and even indispensable to the economic development/exploitation of the colonial territories, as they were hard-working labourers, possessed needed entrepreneurial, commercial and technical skills and had already established trade contacts with the indigenous populations. But, on the other hand, the Chinese were perceived as a potential political threat because of their strong communal organization and solidarity, their secret societies and their frequent clan fights.

I thank Professor Frank for his swift reaction. I have considered his critiques and reservations seriously and will attempt to use them constructively, just as he did mine. For the sake of convenience I answer his comments in the order in which he has presented them. Space does not permit me to go into all his remarks extensively.

The Swedish Africa Company (Svenska Afrikakompaniet, SAK) was a chartered trading company which conducted a limited and short-lived trade in the middle of the seventeenth century. Its political and economic significance for Sweden itself was negligible, and in West Africa the Company was one of the smallest and shortest lived of trading companies. At first glance, the SAK appears to be merely a historical curiosity and therefore outside the interest of scientific research. Yet closer examination reveals that the Company was actually quite profitable. An understanding of how t i achieved its success will surely add to our knowledge about European trade in West Africa.

Regularly, with the ships coming with the monsoon, the Governor-General and the councillors at Batavia received information from their subordinates from all over Asia. The Council of the Indies consisted of older members of the Company's bureaucracy, men who had served in several posts before being nominated to this ultimate position of honour. Together in council they constituted the best informed body on Asian affairs, in the East, as well as in the West. As a body they were responsible for the formulation of the generate missiven, the general letters in which the Heren Zeventien (Gentlemen Seventeen) were briefed on the state of affairs. The missiven had to be signed by all, dissent was not permissable. According to a a set pattern, all factories were dealt with in the same fashion. Any member of the council in principle would have been able to make an overview of the differing areas in which the Company was active. If any, they seem to have been the people able to make a comparison of the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago. The following is an attempt to show what insights might have been expected from an interview with an elder servant of the ‘honourable Company’.

Our joint work, like so much else in life, had its origin in an accident of fate. It would never have seen the light of day, at least in its published forms, had it not been for the chance that the authors both came to the University of Birmingham in the mid-1960s, from different backgrounds and with different interests, and then found that, by the mid-1970s, their research interests had converged to the point where co-operative work began to appear both logical and feasible. At that moment, like countless other scholars in all branches of research, we did not have a clear idea of what we were embarking on or, of course, how long it would take. But we made a conscious decision, at a time when we had built up a considerable amount of intellectual capital, to attack one of the big problems of modern history, namely the causes of imperial expansion, and to take a chance on the outcome.

A long time ago – longer than I care to remember – I proposed what an economist would call an equilibrium model of imperialism (1). Briefly stated, the argument went as follows:

-Imperialism is a response to disparities of power. The very existence of such disparity is an invitation and temptation to exploit it. Not everyone will respond to such invitation, but there will always be some who try to translate potential dominion into actual.

-Motivation is secondary: where a disparity of power exists, imperialism will never lack for reasons or justifications. These will vary from the crudest greed or will to dominance to the loftiest altruism.

-To understand the timing and extent of imperialist dominions, therefore, it is more important to study the character and distribution of power than the incentives to its exercise.