This article investigates the narrative of Islamic nationalism in twentieth-century Indonesia, focussing on the experience of, and discourse surrounding, the self-identified Islamist Darul Islam movement and its leader, S. M. Kartosuwiryo (1905–1962). I offer a narrative of the independence struggle that counters the one advanced by Indonesia's Pancasila state, and allows us to capture subtleties that old discussions of separatism—with their assumption of fixed centres and peripheries—cannot illuminate.

The article unfolds three historical threads connected to ideas of exile and displacement (physical and intellectual), and the reconstitution (successful or failed) that followed from those processes. Starting from the political circumstances under which Kartosuwiryo retreated to West Java after the Dutch reinvasion of 1947—in a form of physical exile and political displacement from the centre of politics to the periphery, from a position of political centrality to one of marginality and opposition—I then transition to an elaboration of Kartosuwiryo's ideology. His political strategy emerges as a form of voluntary intellectual displacement that bounced between local visions of authority, nationalist projects, and transregional imaginations in order to establish the political platform he envisioned for postcolonial Indonesia. Lastly, I argue that the elision of Islam from the reconstructed narrative of Kartosuwiryo's intentions, characterised as separatist and anti-nationalist, was a key aspect of Indonesia's nation-building process. It is my final contention that official Indonesian history's displacement of Kartosuwiryo's goals away from Islam and into the realm of separatism allowed for two reconstitutive processes, one pertaining to political Islam as a negative political force, and the other to Kartosuwiryo as a martyr for Islam.

It seems no exaggeration to say that the Caribbean used to ‘eat’ people. The autochthonous inhabitants of the region, the Amerindians, estimated to have numbered about one million before Columbus, quickly embarked on a course of rapid demographic decline after the intrusion of the Europeans. Around 1700 all Amerindians had virtually disappeared from the islands and only a fraction of them remained in the hinterland of the Guianas.

A growing literature explores the varying role of print media in the colonial world and the new types of publics such newspapers and periodicals produced. However, this literature has tended to focus on specific regions, and has often sidestepped the larger question of how to conceptualise the relationship between print media and colonial rule. While some have used the term ‘colonial public sphere’ or ‘colonial publics,’ others have preferred to avoid these terms and instead thought in terms of multiple and overlapping publics. What this literature has shown is that a single analytic model for analysing public spaces of discourse is not usable. In this Introduction to our Special Issue we propose a new framework for studying the publics created through print media in the colonial world. We outline a set of four factors – addressivity, performativity, materiality and periodicity – that can be applied to specific historical case studies. We then explain how the issue as a whole models this methodology as a means to analyse how print media (as one medium within the public sphere) functioned in specific colonial and semi-colonial spaces around the world.

When Indonesia finally received de jure independence in December 1949, the infant republic faced a range of serious problems, but nowhere were the problems more pressing than in the field of economic policy. In contrast with the Philippines and India, where the USA and Britain had honoured previous commitments and granted independence in 1946 and 1947 respectively, the refusal of the Netherlands to recognise the 1945 declaration of independence had led to four years of bitter and destructive fighting. Infrastructure on Java and elsewhere, already damaged during the Japanese occupation, deteriorated further after 1945, and by the end of the decade most of the important export industries were producing only a small fraction of their pre-1942 output. Smallholder agricultural output in Java was also well below pre-1942 levels. De Vries observed that many seed farms had been destroyed, irrigation systems had not been maintained and “vast areas of hill country” had been damaged by soil erosion. In the final years of the Japanese occupation, the Japanese army commandeered large amounts of rice, while the widespread issue of Japanese banknotes caused mounting inflation. Food was scarce everywhere and those with little or no land were most severely hit; most demographers concur that the population actually declined in Java after 1943, indicating a sharp increase in mortality.

In 1978 a hefty monograph, entitled Orientalism, appeared that would, in its own way, come to constitute a landmark in the history of Asian studies - to the satisfaction of some and the resentment of others. The author of this work, American-Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said, appealed to a wide intellectual circle, which was also shown by the sheer number of reviews in Anglo-Saxon papers and periodicals: there were at least sixty of them in the period following publication.

This paper explores the Danish East India Company's slave trade practice in Tranquebar in the first half of the seventeenth century. In particular it focuses on a practice of acquiring black Morianer (Moors) as prestigious servants for aristocratic homes. The court of the Danish king Christian IV was familiar with the exotic inlay of Morians as represented in pictures, theatre, carrousels, and other artistic manifestations of the upper classes of that time. In this sense, I suggest that Hans Hansson Skonning's Geographia historica Orientalis (1641) provides seminal clues about ideology justifying slavery and representations of Africa and Asia in Scandinavian countries before they entered the slave trade.

This article examines the Swiss anti-slavery movement during the last third of the nineteenth century. Despite being a country without colonies, Switzerland actively participated in international anti-slavery networks, often linked to the armed conquest of Central Africa.

Through an analysis of the socio-political affiliations of the leaders of these abolitionist campaigns in Switzerland, the authors show how the Swiss conservative protestant elite, whose role in international philanthropy had become more important after the founding of the Red Cross, relied on the anti-slavery movement, not only to reinforce its position in international networks, but also to pursue political and social objectives on a domestic level, in particular the “social regeneration” of the country.

The founding of a coastal trading factory at Kayalpatnam in south-eastern India in 1645 initiated a period of nearly a century of cross-cultural contacts between representatives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Nayaka state of Madurai. Traditionally this area has received little attention in both Dutch and Indian colonial historiography. While Company historians have tended to focus on either Coromandel or Ceylon, the main centres of VOC activity in the region, their Indian counterparts have concentrated on the epic struggle of the Mughals with the Deccan sultanates, and subsequently the Marathas, during this time period. In the true spirit of the great chartered companies, one historian has held a virtual monopoly in the field for more than two decades, from the late fifties to the early eighties. Only recently have other (ethno)historians, anthropologists, indologists, and sociologists turned their attention to the area south of the Kollidam (Coleroon) River and east of the Western Ghats.

In the introduction to her work on ‘colonial practice’ in the Ne Indies, the Dutch-American historian Frances Gouda quotes from sation in Harvard between Christopher Hitchens and Simon Schama the latter a renowned historian of the Dutch past. Hitchens posed a to Schama: how was it possible that Dutch culture, though reprc a ‘model of highly evolved religious tolerance and political plurali rently gave birth to a diaspora (he has Indonesia, Surinam and So1 in mind) that is ‘so disfigured by violence and bigotry’? Schama pointed out that Dutch political and religious tolerance was actually predicated on the need to foster profitable trade: it was a practical consideration rather than an idealism. We could add here that so much is almostcommon-sense in the Netherlands. However, Schama pointed out a tendencyof Dutch ‘self-invention’ that first expressed itself in the rise of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century and then in the rise of Afrikanerdom Africa. As Gouda rightly points out, following Schama's own work, the Dutch Republic rose from a ‘Protean feat of self-creation’ out ofan ‘amorphous assemblage of towns and villages’, in an act resembling parthenogenesis. She then adds that this ‘unique Dutch habit of self-invention may have also taken place elsewhere in the world.

In this study, I examine how ‘ethnic’ trading networks are created and recreated, but may also fracture and fall apart. This occurred among some Indian groups in East Africa, who initially strengthened their economic and cultural ties with India by maintaining intensive trade relations and taking brides from the homeland. However, after just one generation, their economic focus was on East Africa, Japan and the UK. Many of today's well-off Indian businessmen in East Africa show little economic interest in India. In fact, Gujarati businessmen in East Africa created new, rather negative images of their counterparts in Gujarat. During the last century, their overall image of Indians in India was transformed from one of a ‘reliable family or community members’ to one of ‘unreliable, corrupt and, untrustworthy ‘others’.

The intention of this paper is to fill a gap in a rich yet underrepresented aspect of Indian Ocean slave history. I have elected to found this study on a close reading of a journal from a slave-trading vessel that sought slaves for the Cape in Madagascar in the mid-1770s. This vessel, De Zon, conducted a slave-trading operation on behalf of the VOC along the west coast of Madagascar from May 1775 to January 1776. I have undertaken a close reading of the journal maintained by the merchant of De Zon, so as to write a history sensitive to the daily experiences of the slave traders in Madagascar, as well as to the codes and discourse through which this experience was filtered.

This paper is primarily concerned with the experience of negotiation and trading as it was recorded by the VOC merchants on the vessels, and is drawn predominantly from the first trading encounter of the crew of De Zon when they arrived in Madagascar in 1775. In contrast to the surveys that comprise the majority of the English-language scholarship on slave trading in Madagascar, this paper is founded on a close reading of particular episodes; it thus represents an attempt at a micronarrative that illustrates and details the historical experience of VOC slave trading on the island at a particular juncture.

This article analyses the causes and consequences of the sociocultural discrimination and exclusion of Equatoguinean women in Spain. The starting premise is that a notable familiarity with Spanish culture (language and religion) as a former African colony and a long period of settlement in Spain that dates back to the 1940s should have favoured greater social advancement of this group. However, the fieldwork shows that they have been held back by the marginalised position of Equatorial Guinea in Spain's current collective imaginary of its colonial past, as well as by the socio-laboural precariousness they have experienced since their arrival. Based on the body of thought of postcolonial theory, and from a predominantly anthropological and historical standpoint, this article analyses the heavy burden of social invisibility and unequal economic opportunities that these women carry. The paper concludes that migrant memories must be incorporated into the Hispano-African narrative to create a more trustworthy account of the shared Spanish and Equatorial Guinean past, and that there is an urgent need to implement policies in Spain that promote equality regardless of ethnicity, race, and gender.

Decolonization has finished. It definitely belongs to the past, but somehow it has refused to become history. A great deal has already been written on this subject, and yet it seems that there is little to say about it. After the Second World War, the colonized countries wanted to become independent, struggled with their oppressors and threw off the yoke of colonial rule. Within a few years they all achieved their aim. That is the song that has now already been sung for about thirty years, in various keys, it is true, but with a remarkable consistency of tune and melody. The entire colonial history seems to have been no more than a prologue to an inevitable and triumphant independence. A new Whig interpretation of history has come into being.

The writer, poet and dramatist Sergei Tret'iakov was a central figure of the early Soviet literary and artistic avant-garde. Born in 1892 in Kuldiga, a town in what is now Latvia and was then the Governorate of Courland, one of the three Baltic provinces of the Russian empire, he was educated in prerevolutionary Riga and Moscow. Fluent also in Latvian and German, he started out as a poet in Russian and came under the influence of futurism when living in Vladivostok in 1919. During the Russian Civil War, Tret'iakov spent several months in Harbin, Tianjin, and Beijing in 1920 and 1921, and he returned to China as a teacher of Russian at Peking University between 1924 and 1925. The mid-1920s were also his most productive period as a writer for the theatre. Back in the Soviet Union, he went on to write experimental documentary prose, reportage and film scenarios while making radical statements in literary theory. He collaborated closely with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), the cinema director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), and as a translator and critic he brought the plays and poetry of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) to Soviet readers.

[T] he Paravas [are] a maritime people, seated on this Pearle Coast, whose greatest livelihood is Natures bounty, which she in that kind annually bestowes and which art qualifies them in like manner to receive… This nation about one hundred and thirty yeares agoe was a limb of heathenisme, out of which roughquarry it was hewen by papall industry and so became a Jewell of the Triple Crown. The Jesuites, who at first converted them, for a long time after govern'd them in a way both ecclestiasticall andcivill. This latter yoake weares of and delivers up civill concernments into the hands of the civill power, the corruption of one kindof government being the generation of the other. In this state matters rested when, about five yeares agoe (the Portugall greatnesse being then far declin'd from its zenith) the Dutch possesse[d] themselves of this coast, which ever since, they have govern'd by way of judicature and awed by their power. This gave occasion for the persons above mentioned [certaine persons of quality, natives of Tutticorrim and heads of their nation] to recede [into the interior]… This [loss of Cochin in early 1663] involves them in fresh cares, and those send them in great quest of other props to stay themselves upon… Their desires therefore are that themselves, together with their adherents, may be taken into the protection of the English; that they with their padre (who is the hinge whereon they turne) may have their dwellings at Cale Velha [Palaiyakkayal], the seate of our factorie, free from violence; and their boates, by virtue of our passeports, to navigate the seas void of all disturbances.

Like other decorative and aromatic woods, sandalwood has been in continuous and apparently insatiable demand throughout Asia since the earliest times of which there is any written record and especially in India and in China, where, during periods of prosperity, the consumption of exotic woods reached enormous proportions. Sandalwood was used as a cosmetic and perfume and in medicinal preparations, for the making of all manner of objects from fans, boxes and religious images to beds, couches and chests, and, above all, for burning as incense. It was exported to China and India from several Indonesian islands, includingjava, Borneo, Sulawesi and the Lesser Sunda Islands, especially Sumba, which was known to the Portuguese as the Island of Sandalwood, and Timor, where it was believed that the finest and most fragrant sandalwood was to be found.

If the average person was asked what the name New Netherland brought to mind, quite likely the response would be the fur trade. And to a great degree they would be right in making that association. In the years following Henry Hudson's exploration in 1609 of the river that eventually bore his name and before the founding of the West India Company in 1621, Dutch trading companies and private traders sailed to the New World for the sole purpose of exploiting the fur trade.

My interest in this period of imperial history arose first from attempts to find a more general context within which to understand the British conquest of India between 1790 and 1820 and second from an uneasy feeling that our overseas history in Cambridge before 1880 was simply disappearing, and that this would result in the fatal weakening of much of the rest. By ‘overseas history’ I mean: finding a broader context of debate and comparison within which to set more detailed work on particular regions. It is perhaps the very success of such generalising and comparison for the later 19th century — the partition of Africa debate — and the twentieth century debates on the ‘crisis of empires’, ‘depression to independence’ and the new nation states which has had this effect on foreshortening.