In examining the process of modernization in Qajar Iran, modern scholarship has tended to focus either on the effects of Western exposure on Iranian intellectuals and educators, or on bureaucratic and military reforms initiated by the three major reformers of the nineteenth century, ‘Abbas Mirza, Mirza Taqi Khan (Amir Kabir), and Mirza Husayn Khan (Sipahsalar). This paper will address a different and equally important aspect of the modernization process, technological innovation, by discussing the introduction of mechanized coin production in Qajar Iran in the context of the country's prevailing social, political and economic structure.

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.

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.

Turning to the history of Indian industrial labour conditions from a first degree in British and European history, with their wealth of first class literature on the industrial revolution, was something of a disappointment. The majority of Indianist historical studies in this field concentrate on the more institutional sides of unionisation, or on economic aspects, while much of the sociology of industrialisation (especially the material produced in the 1960's) to which I turned appeared to consist largely of blueprints for the distortion of whole cultures in the name of modernity and progress.

When entering a foreign country, one usually fills out an immigration form asking for a set of personal details such as one's name, nationality, date of departure, destination, and the purpose of one's visit. In addition, one needs to answer several questions, for example, whether he has any banned substances or objects like drugs or weapons, whether he have a criminal record, and so on. Furthermore, one has to waive any rights to appeal an immigration officer's decision and finally declare and sign that all answers are true and correct.

While many assume that this familiar system is specific to the modern age, historical documents show us that this supposition is not valid. In fact, we can find a similar system in the early modern Ryukyu Kingdom, though little attention has been paid to it. To demonstrate this system, I will begin introducing a document left by a shipwrecked Chinese captain coming to Ryukyu in the late eighteenth century:

The captain Li Zhenchun states that: We received a permit for sailing from the government of Min prefecture in Fujian on December 24, 1770, loaded wood under the Nantai bridge on May 13 in the next year, sailed from Min'anzhen for Shandong on May 24, and arrived on June 24. Though we left for Fujian on December 2, after purchasing beans, on the next day, a storm broke our mast and halyards, which made it impossible for us to navigate and caused our ship to drift into Yaeyama Island in your country on the 22nd. Now we are living on board here. There is no Christian missionary, arsenic, Epicanta gorhami [, which is a terribly virulent insect including cantharis], or any other poison with us. None of us are disguised as Chinese people clothed in Chinese clothes. Also we have no weapons. If you find any violation as such, we should be tried by the national laws. There is no lie in this report.

In late 1874, the Colonial Government of the Gold Coast passed an abolition measure which was designed to end slavery, all other forms of compulsory labour, and slave trading in the colony. The measure took the form of two laws: the Gold Coast Slave-Dealing Abolition Ordinance (1874) and the Gold Coast Emancipation Ordinance (1874). The Gold Coast Legislative Council passed the laws on 17 December 1874 and they received the assent of the Governor on 28 December. On 30 December 1874, the measure was proclaimed. The first of the ordinances absolutely and immediately outlawed the importation of slaves into the Gold Coast, and abolished slave dealing and pawning. The other ordinance provided for the emancipation of slaves by abolishing the legal status of slavery and empowering slaves to leave their owners at will.

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.

Of all of France’s early modern colonial ventures, the least studied and most obscure are the French efforts to establish settlements, missions, and plantations in Guiana. Still, the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil, and their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the sixteenth-century ventures, the Guiana colonies were also prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Were they primarily missions to the Native peoples, plantations, or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? This paper examines the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana, in particular two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. I will the argue that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.

Virtually every account of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire identifies ‘Europe’ with Christian civilisation, echoing, consciously or otherwise, the universalist claims of the Byzantine emperors, the popes and the western Roman emperors. Yet it is also the case that Islam possessed a European presence from the eighth century onwards, first of all in Spain and the Mediterranean islands, and later, from the mid-fourteenth century, in the Balkans, where the Turks were able rapidly to establish an empire which directly threatened Hungary and Austria. The lands ruled by Islam on the European land mass have tended to be treated by historians as European only in geographical identity, but in human terms part of a victorious and alien ‘oriental’ civilisation, of which they were provincial dependencies, and from which medieval Spanish Christians or modern Greeks and Slavs had to liberate themselves. Yet this view is fallacious for several reasons. In the first place, there is a valid question about our use of the term ‘civilisation’, which Fred Halliday has expressed as follows:

‘Civilisations’ are like nations, traditions, communities – terms that claim a reality and authority which is itself open to question, and appeal to a tradition that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a contemporary creation.

In 1958, Unesco and the International Council on Archives (ICA) decided to anticipate the needs of historical research in the newly emancipated Third World by creating the Guide to the Sources for the History of the Nations. This was intended to make accessible the documentary sources for the history of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania preserved in Europe and the United States. An International Technical Committee was set up, consisting of representatives from the various national archives. This Committee formulated specifications for the preparation of the guides. In each national volume, sources were to be described according to the individual repository, and, within each repository, by grouping or series. According to the nature of each group, descriptions will concentrate on the speciality and functions of the organisation producing the records or on the subjects which can be studied with their help. To this are added data about the size of the archives, the available inventories or other entries and their value. The guides will also include privately-owned archives (family and business archives), manuscript collections in libraries, maps and plans, iconographic materials, sound archives and microfilms. In describing maps and iconographic materials, emphasis will be laid on MSS and printed material from before 1700. It is not intended to replace the existing inventories, catalogues or indexes (printed or not), but to provide a first entry to the sources, with a maximum of information in a condensed and usable form. In several cases, however, summary listing of source material will be unavoidable, for instance when relevant material in a collection of individual documents or in a map collection has never been adequately described.

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.

Scattered as it was over thousands of miles of African and Asian coastline, the Portuguese empire in the East had a peculiar shape when compared to the Spanish one in the New World. As one author of the early seventeenth century put it, ‘the king our lord does not have more than twenty leagues of land in all Asia, from Macao to the Cape of Good Hope’. Portugal was a small country with a population of one and a half million people, and it is no surprise that the Portuguese presence in Asia - a ‘network’ rather than an ‘empire’, as some authors claim - had to rely heavily on diplomacy. The wholesale ‘conquest’ (conquista) of the East was perceived as a theoretical right of the Portuguese crown, but in practice most relations with Eastern polities rested on a complex set of negotiated links of ‘friendship’ (amizade) or indirect submission (uassalagem).

A central feature of Scottish Enlightenment thought was the emergence of stadial or “conjectural” theories of history, in which the development of all human societies, from those in Europe, to the Seminole Indians in Florida and the Tongans of the South Pacific, could be understood and compared according to the same universal historical criteria. This paper argues that central to this tradition was an account of the relationship between “useful knowledge” and social development. This article argues that we can map the circulation of a discourse about useful knowledge, nature, and civilisation through a network of Scottish-trained physicians and naturalists that spread to the Atlantic and to the Pacific. In the Atlantic world, physicians and naturalists used the vocabulary and categories of stadial theory to classify indigenous societies: they made comparisons between the illnesses that they thought “naturally” afflicted savage cultures, as opposed to those of civilized Europeans. In the Pacific, the Edinburgh-trained surgeons and naturalists compared Tahitians, Maoris, and Australian Aborigines to black Africans and Europeans, and they commented on the presence or absence of useful knowledge as a marker of the degree of development of each civilisation.

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’.

“Above all, we will put on record, that the Rechtsschool has not missed its target: the creation of independent (native) lawyers, who are aware of their position as independent judicial officers in the indigenous social relations.”

C.C. van Helsdingen,

Gedenkboek Rechtsschool 1929

When the Dutch introduced peace and order as the governing doctrine in the East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century, the network of colonial state institutions needed to project themselves as a unified, legitimate state with an authority to enforce justice. This state required a corps of jurists who embodied specific forms of subjectivity in order to maintain the projected authority. Educating natives as jurists offered the most economical means to staff the judiciary. This essay looks at legal education for Native elites as a colonial project of subject formation that was inseparable from colonial state formation. It does so by surveying three institutions in the Indies and the Netherlands between 1909 and 1939: the Batavia Rechtsschool, the Leiden United Faculty of Law and Letters, and the Batavia Rechtshoogeschool. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power and biopower in education and concepts from state theory, I argue that the pedagogical strategies and the legal education curricula in the Indies were deliberately designed to produce independent and critical Native jurists who were at the same time loyal to the Netherlands. The argument, thus, stands in contrast to literature that relies on early Foucault to construct education as a strictly normalising institution. I further suggest that although various state institutions did not unanimously agree on this ideal vision of Native jurists, they nevertheless tolerated it due to the urgent need to project the presence of a just state.

Using a variety of sources I focus my attention on two arenas of investigation: the vision of the ideal subjectivity to be embodied by Native jurists, and the technologies employed to achieve it. With this focus, I do not attempt to represent a comprehensive native point of view. Instead, I limit myself to examining the debates among Dutch educators and policy makers regarding proper legal education for the Native elites, the resulting policies as decreed in various ordinances, and the policies' implementation in the schools' curricula and pedagogy.