When judicial department officials at Bombay began to enforce the British East India Company’s (EIC) authority over the production and authentication of certain types of legal documents in the late 1830s, qāẓīs (Islamic judges) like Sayyid Aḥmad Ḥusain of Bharuch, objected to their loss of authority. In petitions sent to the Governor in Council from the edges of empire, these legal intermediaries objected to the Company’s interference with their livelihoods. Although the qazis’ complaints did not yield the desired results, by demonstrating the utility of their record-keeping abilities, qazis were able to retain discrete rights. The effects of these negotiations demonstrate the ways in which the intersections of expanding Company policies and local legal activity contributed to the growth of imperial power. Attending to the particularities of local legal practice, captured in the writings of these qazis, this article highlights the material mechanisms by which the EIC co-opted existing documentary cultures to extend state surveillance over local populations and challenges prevailing histories of legal translation and codification by focusing on the social ramifications of changing legal definitions at the moment such relations were first articulated in writing.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, remarkable developments in the realm of law were witnessed throughout the world. They expressed and paved the way for a new type of dispensation. For those parts of Asia and the Middle East with a substantial European presence, the legitimate rules, principles, and procedures for resolving disputes were progressively assimilated into systems of state-sanctioned legal pluralism. The process—at once gradual, charged, and punctuated—coincided with the initial consolidation of European imperial dominance and the emergence of Europe's modern global empires.

Though these changes in the realm of law date from the nineteenth century, the European presence there had long preceded them. This was perhaps most notable in maritime Asia. The Europeans in this region tended to cluster in their factories or in certain quarters of the towns and cities dotting the Indian Ocean rim. Notwithstanding differences between, say, a Mocha and an Aceh in size, location, and form of government, all these settlements had one quality in common: each was able to profit from the traffic conducted along the coast or across the high seas. As for the sovereign justice on offer, the dispensation that governed it in early modern times was far removed from its later analogue. This stemmed in large part from the rationale and basis for the European presence. In particular, Europeans could not dominate maritime Asia's provincial and imperial powers, especially those located inland, and the great majority of those arriving from western Europe intended to return as soon as possible; despite some involvement in racketeering and other forms of surplus extraction—famously in attempts to introduce and enforce a system of passports in maritime transport and travel—their interests were mainly commercial, oriented towards trade and shipping; the indigenous populations remained on the whole large and resilient; and many of the skills and techniques vested in livelihoods long associated with the region retained their primacy. As a result, the only realistic option for Europeans in maritime Asia was to reconcile themselves to the prevailing order. And this they did, with most of the region's fundamentals, not least in the realm of law, continuing to develop along what were essentially indigenous lines.

Reflecting broader trends in the study of colonial British America, historians have increasingly recognised the transatlantic nature of Protestant mission work. Both homeland and colonial participants shared a common worldview and goal when it came to the conversion of Native Americans. However, historians frequently present a bifurcated process: British-based mission boards and agencies provided funding and broad parameters, while colonial agents, ministers, and officials dictated the ways in which the missionaries themselves operated. In general, this is an accurate reflection of the reality of the Atlantic world, given the communication times and the normal inability of British sponsors to visit any work in progress. These limitations often led to a disconnect between goals laid out in Britain and practices on the ground in the colonies. An exception to this practice can be found in the early attempts of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) to establish a mission presence in New England.

In a collection of essays concerning the inevitably diverse vicissitudes of the representatives of that phenomenon collectively known as ‘the Company's servants,’ the inclusion of Nicolaas Witsen may come as a surprise. In our democratic age, he undoubtedly would have termed himself a ‘servant’ of the Dutch East India Company; in his own, more hierarchical times, he will have considered himself one of the Company's masters, as indeed he was. Whatever the powers of the Heren XVII may actually have been, Witsen for many years was one of the directors of the Amsterdam Chamber, the Company's most powerful division, and one of Amsterdam representatives to the bi-annual assembly which actually directed the Company's affairs at home, and tried to do so abroad, in its far-flung commercial empire, where other servants often held far greater, and less controlable power.

Has Europe grown rich because it expanded overseas? According to recent scholarship the answer must be no. During the period between 1500 and 1750 Europe's economy did not provide its inhabitants with a per capita income that was significantly higher than that in other parts of the world. Europe – and only the Western part of it – started to become richer after the Industrial Revolution from 1750 onwards. This far most attempts at linking the expansion of Europe to the Industrial Revolution have failed.

This article uses the records of the Bombay Mayor’s Court (1728–1798) to explore the ways in which an ostensibly English court of law attempted to administer law in a way that was acceptable to a cosmopolitan cast of litigants. I show how, due to the Court’s popularity with Indian litigants, and the difficulties of its hybrid jurisprudence, the Court eventually moved to a model of formalised arbitration. In this arrangement, local Indian elites exercised considerable autonomy, while British judges gained an illicit commission. As such, the evidence from the Mayor’s Court points to a novel iteration of legal pluralism in which ill-defined legal regimes came to blur and blend with each other in a single forum. I argue that this forces us to reconceptualise solely jurisdictional definitions of legal pluralism, which must be complimented with the study of a court’s ‘jurispractice’.

This article contains a sweeping summary of Indonesia's macro-economic growth and development experience since 1880, largely on the basis of quantitative data from published research. It sets the scene for some of the other papers in this special issue. The paper identifies phases of economic expansion and contraction and some of the broad factors relevant to understanding the phasing of the development process that spans 120 years. Despite the halting progress in the country's development experience, the article underlines the continuity of economic change in Indonesia, beyond the years that demarcate the end of the colonial era. It also addresses the fact that in comparative terms Indonesia's growth experience during the twentieth century was remarkably fast.

The Portuguese Empire was the stage for one of the largest movements of enslaved people during early modern times. Almost two millions enslaved humans were violently carried from Africa in Portuguese vessels in the eighteenth century alone. Yet, in contrast to British or French slave traders based in Europe, for which a vast literature is available, little is known about the Lisbon traders. This paper aims at filling this gap by paying attention to the trajectory of two Lisbon slave traders: Domingos Dias da Silva and José António Pereira. In recounting their biographies and their business in Africa, Brazil, and Asia, we draw attention to the active role Lisbon-based slave traders played in the financing, organisation, and carrying of slave traffic, as well as the different institutional conditions they confronted when profiting from the commerce in humans. Domingos Dias da Silva became a key state contractor in spite of his poor origins, while Pereira featured as a global broker, connecting different markets in four continents. These two agents and their diverse characteristics help shed light on the slave trade, the context in which it expanded, and on the people who conducted this infamous commerce.

When we intone the words ‘Unity in Diversity’, we know we are faced with a problem. At best these words express an aspiration rather than a reality — otherwise it would hardly be worthwhile to utter them. But most of all they seem to be an incantation meant to exorcize the threat of both disruptive diversity and oppressive unity. It is, in other words, a mantra that owes its expressiveness to the neatly concise formulation of an unresolved paradox. It is concerned with the cosmogonic conundrum of the One-and-the-Many that has exercised the mythopoeic imagination of the Vedic seers and their likes as well as the rational mind of present-day physicists. Our mantra, then, evokes the riddle of the cosmic order which must encompass its opposite, disorder, so as to be truly universal. It is not surprising, therefore, that we should encounter the same paradox on the more mundane level of the political order. The manyfold diversities undermine the integrity of the whole. Unity, in its turn, threatens to extinguish diversity and to replace it with deadening sameness. Between them, unity and diversity provide for an unpredictable dynamic, and it is a fitting tribute to the dangers involved that our mantra has been enshrined in its Indonesian form in the Republic's armorial motto: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.

Through its focus on the question of circulation, world history attained a central position amongst the historical configurations in the last decade. Indicative of our fundamentally changing world, the past thereby reveals itself to have been shaped by commercial, human and intellectual flows of global dimension. The history of science has been particularly receptive to such methodological developments, especially with regard to works influenced by a markedly social approach to science and knowledge, which has focused for some time on the analysis of intellectual networks. From the French provincial Enlightenment to Athansius Kircher's circles—including the relationships of patronage of mathematicians and court philosophers—social, intellectual and epistemological configurations have been designed, allowing us to consider different scales in the circulation of knowledge.

Let us begin with a drawing, depicting the river mouth of Batavia. We see a lively scene. Europeans and Asians are fishing, peddling, rowing, riding, walking, and sitting along the waterway. A small prauw on the left appears to be manned by Javanese and Chinese. Behind the Waterkasteel, on the right, large numbers of oceangoing vessels are anchored before Batavia. In the middle of the drawing, we see three men on the path along the waterway, the “jaagpad,” pulling a flat cargo boat. The clothing indicates that these are “Moor” sailors. On the boat, we see three other sailors with turbans.

This scene, drawn by Johannes Rach in 1764, places the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in its Asian context. In previous decades, increasing attention has been paid to the structure of the “Asian” or overseas organisation of the VOC. Even more so, research has shown the importance of the Company's participation in the intra-Asian trade. From 1500 onwards, European trading companies not only became important in intercontinental European–Asian trade, but they came to dominate maritime trade within Asia as well. The VOC was one of the largest merchants active in intra-Asian shipping for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the VOC, however, it was not only its presence overseas that built the link between the Company and its Asian context. The VOC and its Asian context became intrinsically interwoven. Leonard Blussé, for example, emphasises the character of Batavia, the headquarters of the VOC in Asia, as a “Chinese colonial town.”

Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black meet Natalie Zemon Davis outside the University Library in Leiden for lunch and an interview. Although Davis is eager to study a Sranan-German dictionary she retrieved from the library, the three of them sit down for an engaging conversation on the historian’s craft, its societal relevance and the future of early modern studies.

This article surveys the diasporic life and legacy of the Ethiopian ecclesiastic Täsfa Ṣeyon. After examining his origins in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and the circumstances of his arrival in mid-sixteenth-century Rome, the article outlines his contributions to the evolving Latin Catholic understanding of Ethiopia. Täsfa Ṣeyon was a librarian, copyist, teacher, translator, author, and community leader, as well as a prominent adviser to European humanist scholars and Church authorities concerned with orientalist philologia sacra as it pertained to Ethiopian Orthodox (täwaḥedo) Christianity. As such, he was a key extra-European agent in the Tridentine project of Ethiopianist and Eastern Christian knowledge production. The article also surveys the complex modern legacy of Täsfa Ṣeyon's career, documenting his posthumous influence in the fields of Ethiopianist Semitic studies and Ethiopian vernacular historiography.

‘One does not write history with value judgements.’ Van Leur made this remark, countering the ‘Dutch refrain’ sung by Godée Molsbergen, which indicted the corruption of the VOC-servants as a cause of the Company's downfall. Van Leur explained that the standard for a modern officialdom was only created with the Napoleonic state and ‘it was therefore anachronistic to apply this standard to the 18th century’. Criticism of the integrity of the Company servants in this century is a post facto criticism. But if history cannot be written with value judgements, it cannot do without any judgements at all. Van Leur judged ‘the achievements of a Hartingh, a Von Hohendorff, a Mossel, a Van der Parra, and, on the Indonesian side, of a Mangkubumi, a Mas Sahid, a Cakraningrat certainly on par with those of Speelman, a Van Goens, and a Aru Palakka’.

In July 1796, Johannes Albertyn, a well-respected burgher of Stellenbosch, requested permission from Ryno van der Riet, landdrost of Stellenbosch, the chief administrative and legal officer of the district, to indenture four Khoikhoi children. He claimed that their mother, Catryn Paerl, had died recently and that before her demise, she had requested him in the presence of witnesses to raise her children and deny their biological father Jan Paerl any future role in their lives. Faced with the prospect of losing custody of his four children and having exhausted all possible avenues in seeking legal redress, including a visit to landdrost Van der Riet, the seemingly incomparable Jan Paerl hit the road and walked several kilometres from Stellenbosch to Cape Town. His destination: the Castle, in particular the office of the fiscal, otherwise known as the public prosecutor. In Cape Town, he urged the fiscal to intervene in the dispute and deny Albertyn the right to indenture his children. As their father, Paerl insisted that he, and not Albertyn, be granted sole custody of his offspring. By Paerl's demanding legal intervention at the highest level, the following encounter between Paerl, Albertyn and the Cape authorities exemplifies not only a classic struggle between master and servant, but highlights simultaneously the significance of ‘equality’ before the law in Cape society, at a time when burghers increasingly feared the possibility of gelykstelling at the end of the eighteenth century.

On 20 February 1637/38, the Virginia House of Burgesses, ‘called by his Majesty's appointment’, convened to consider five ‘Propositions’ offered by Charles 1 for the reformation of their colony's tobacco trade. An investigation into the career and context of this ‘Assembly’ better informs us of the character of that monarch's government and, correspondingly, on English ‘state formation’ and empire in the first half of the seventeenth century. We learn that, as in its three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the Crown and its officers experienced little joy in their efforts to clear the lines of authority connecting Whitehall with the rest of the king's domains.

As we pass the Quincentennial of the founding of the Spanish empire we stand within two years of marking the centennial of its demise in Asia and the New World in 1998. In recent years, much research has focused on the changes wrought on indigenous populations at the time of initial contact, but little consideration has been given to the material legacy of this empire. This study will examine the material aspects of two Spanish colonies, the Philippines and Puerto Rico at the end of nearly four centuries of Spanish colonization. Archaeological evidence from the two colonies is compared and contextualised within the economic order of the nineteenth century in order to better evaluate the nature of the physical manifestation of late Spanish colonialism.

In an essay of extraordinary range and depth, which it is difficult to summarise without distortion, Jacob van Leur is above all making an appeal for the autonomy of Asian history in relation to that of Europe. He was reviewing volume IV by Godée Molsbergen of Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië, which dealt with the eighteenth century. To Molsbergen the activities of the V.O.C. in Asia in the eighteenth century had characteristics distinct from those of the seventeenth-century Company or from what was to follow in Indonesia in the nineteenth century. These characteristics essentially reflected those of the Netherlands during the eighteenth century. Assuming that eighteenth-century European history has unifying characteristics (an assumption that he was inclined to question), Van Leur asked: ‘Is it possible to write the history of Indonesia in the eighteenth century as the history of the Company?’ His answer was a resounding ‘no’. In giving his answer he widened the issue from Indonesia to Asia as a whole. ‘A general view of the whole can only lead to the conclusion that any talk of a European Asia in the eighteenth century is out of the question, that a few European centres of power had been consolidated on a very limited scale, that in general – and here the emphasis should lie – the oriental lands continued to form active factors in the course of events as valid entities, militarily, economically and politically.’ He concluded that diere was an ‘unbroken unity’ of Asian history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Until well into the nineteenth century Europe and Asia were ‘two equal civilisations developing separately of each other’.