British private investors were not inclined to view the leaders of newly independent Indonesia with much confidence. In 1949, when the transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands to the Republic of Indonesia was imminent, the chairman of the United Serdang (Sumatra) Rubber Plantations disclosed the following opinion to the firm's shareholders at a gathering in London's Great Tower Street: “The Republican leaders are mainly ambitious men, whose records are well known, striving for personal aggrandizement. The measure of their interest in the welfare of the country is to be gauged by their policy of wanton destruction of life and physical assets, such as estate factories and ancillary buildings, which are essential for the restoration of the economy of the country once the political problem has been settled.” This article is about how a British enterprise dealt with the significant uncertainties prevailing in the business environment of Indonesia during the early independence period, in particular the 1950s.

The economic situation in newly independent Indonesia was a peculiar one. As a major exporter of primary products in high demand such as oil and rubber, prospects were generally bright for the Indonesian economy during and after the Korean War. Just as under colonialism, a modern, large-scale sector accounting for almost 25 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product) was still dominated by Dutch firms and British and American multinationals. Eight large Dutch trading companies handled 60 per cent of consumer goods imports. Nevertheless, the business climate had changed dramatically for foreign firms operating in Indonesia. The 1950s saw a gradual shift away from moderate policy-makers towards an increasingly vocal economic nationalism. The former were acutely aware of the country's dependence on foreign capital and know-how, whereas the latter relentlessly pushed for full decolonisation, that is not only in political but in economic terms. Nationalist sentiments gained the upper hand during the first cabinet of Ali Sastroamidjojo (July 1953–July 1955), culminating with the takeover of virtually all remaining Dutch-owned enterprises in Indonesia from December 1957 onwards, eventually followed by formal nationalisation in 1959. Although economic nationalism in the 1950s primarily targeted Dutch enterprises, British foreign firms were affected as well. At a later stage, in the context of the Indonesian military confrontation with Malaysia (1963–6), they were also seized, albeit not nationalised.

India's production of fine luxury and craft goods for world markets was discovered and exploited by Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Textile producers in Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast, and Bengal applied fine craft skills to European designs, colour codes, and textile lengths and widths. Through the intervention of the East India Companies and private traders as well as their intermediaries, brokers and local merchants, weavers, and printers produced the goods to satisfy Western markets just as they had done for Eastern and African markets in the centuries before.

Today Indian craftspeople are engaging in a new phase of production for global markets. They are using traditional techniques of the kind that attracted Western buyers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: hand weaving, hand block printing, and natural dyes. Accessing the niche national and international markets needed to provide a future for these crafts is a major challenge. This article focuses on the artisans, skills and markets in one area of India—the region of Kachchh in northern Gujarat, even now considered a remote part of the new global India. It sets this within a wider context of Gujarat and the earlier and more recent history of its textile industries. Douglas Haynes's recent book, Small Town Capitalism in Western India (2012) provides a framework for the study of small-scale industry, and the article will address his subject and methods. The new sources used are a collection of oral histories of craftspeople in a range of industries. These oral histories address skills and training across generations, and how these crafts have adapted and continue to adapt to the demands of national and world markets.

During the eighteenth century, the global environment of imperial competition and cooperation encouraged the circulation of highly qualified mapmaking personnel from the service of one ruler to the other, thus contributing to the dissemination of cartographic knowledge. This article examines the career of military engineer and mapmaker Michel Angelo de Blasco (1697-1772), whose life in the service of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Portuguese Empire illustrates the importance of trans-imperial approaches to the history of cartography. As Vienna and Lisbon sponsored large mapmaking enterprises, including border demarcations and military surveys, skilled cartographers became precious resources for these empires. However, in the case of de Blasco, the invaluable service done in Brazil for the Portuguese monarch, made him both sought-after as a potential information source for the Habsburg monarchs and unemployable due to the risk of a diplomatic conflict. The efforts of de Blasco to transition back into the service of Vienna included the unauthorised submission of cartographic material. Additionally, the details of the negotiations regarding this mapmaker's possible transfer reveal the processes of institutionalisation and centralisation Habsburg cartography underwent during the time of Maria Theresa (1740-80).

After some decades of historical debate about the early modern Atlantic, it has become a truism that the Atlantic may better be understood as a world of connections rather than as a collection of isolated national sub-empires. Likewise, it is commonly accepted that the study of this interconnected Atlantic world should be interdisciplinary, going beyond traditional economic and political history to include the study of the circulation of people and cultures. This view was espoused and expanded upon in the issue of Itinerario on the nature of Atlantic history published thirteen years ago—the same issue in which Pieter Emmer and Wim Klooster famously asserted that there was no Dutch Atlantic empire. Since this controversial article appeared, there has been a resurgence of interest among scholars about the role of the Dutch in the Atlantic. With Atlantic history continuing to occupy a prominent place in Anglo-American university history departments, it seems high time to appraise the output of this resurgence of interest with an historiographical essay reviewing the major works and trends in the study of the Dutch in the Atlantic.

It has been over a hundred years since the U.S. took control of Puerto Rico. In that time, the way in which the U.S. perceived Puerto Rico has changed from a colony requiring Americanisation to, in the 1950s, its showcase of democracy in the Caribbean, to today, an island that still retains geopolitical importance for the U.S., but represents an increasing economic burden. The failure of Operation Bootstrap, as the Puerto Rican industrialization program was known, resulted in permanent large-scale unemployment, with a population dependent on federal transfers for a living, and a constant source of migration to the mainland, where over half of Puerto Ricans now live. I shall trace the outline of these three stages in U.S. hegemony over Puerto Rico, and argue that throughout the U.S. Congress was reluctant to fully incorporate Puerto Rico, because its population was deemed racially and socially inferior to that of the mainland. Though the removal of Spain from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines was considered part of the its ‘manifest destiny’, the United States never intended to incorporate these people so different from the U.S. as part of the American nation, as was done with its earlier acquisitions in Texas, Alaska or even Hawaii.

In the formation of ethnicity the interaction between the views of outside observers and insiders themselves is an important process. The Minangkabau, whose homeland is located in the uplands of central Sumatra, have been a popular source of study because of their matrilineal social organisation and the practice of the merantau, where young Minangkabau men leave the homeland to seek knowledge and fortune abroad. Since the 1970s as a result of the women's movement, there has been a growing number of works focusing on the matrilineal principles which underlie Minangkabau society. The merantau, too, has often been cited for the dynamism in Minangkabau society which has led to its considerable contributions to the Indonesian state in a number of fields. It is not surprising, therefore, that today the Minangkabau themselves see matriliny and the merantau as primary components in their identity. While these components were present in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they did not play the central role in ethnic identity as they do today. As I hope to show in this paper, there were different historical circumstances in those years which required another approach to ethnic identity.

It would be hard to find a more fundamental question in economic history than the one professor Landes asks in his latest book: why are some nations so rich and some so poor? To every economist and economic historian analysing this problem is an immense intellectual challenge. Landes however does not merely tackle it from a strictly intellectual perspective. He also hopes that by writing the book under review he can contribute to an answer and thereby help the poor to become healthier and wealthier. He approaches his subject historically. He does so not just because he is a historian, but also because he thinks the best way to understand a problem is to ask: How and why did we get where we are?

India and the island world of Southeast Asia were in close cultural andcommercial contact for many centuries before both came under the influence, and ultimately the domination, of the European colonial powers. In spite ofthe fact that the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago were the chief colonial possessions of two of the most advanced and wealthiest countries in West Europe, both emerged into independence in the aftermath of the second world war as extremely poor, technologically backward countries.But in both countries an indigenous political leadership had assumed power, which was determined to accelerate the pace of economic progress, and achieve a high level of development, in the shortest possible time. It is thus interesting to make a pairwise comparison of these two countries, both in respect of the colonial legacy they inherited, and in respect of their post-independence economic policy-making, in order to indicate the specific contributions of two different colonial systems to subsequent economic policy efforts and achievements. We begin with a brief discussion of the economic legacy bequeathed by the two colonial powers to independent India and Indonesia.

In 1974-5 I had the opportunity to travel throughout South Sulawesi to read historical documents and to record oral traditions from different areas. During this period I was continually impressed by the openness of the people and the pride with which they discussed their history, customs and culture. Even the smallest village possessed its own unique history and traditions which have been jealously preserved by the elders of the community as a heritage of the ancestors. For these people to neglect their history is tantamount to disregarding their ancestors and surrendering their identity.

Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory, and attachments to community, place, and particular literary cultures. In my essay I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story of the letters’ creation, to think about cultural and religious transformations, the relationship of foreign to local, and the powerful hold certain texts have on the imagination.

In the years after its foundation in 1814, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands witnessed the emergence of several new sites where natural history—the study of naming, describing and classifying plants, animals and minerals—was carried out. These new sites, such as the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (National Museum for Natural History), founded in 1820, the Rijksherbarium (National Herbarium) and the colonial site Nederlands-Indië (Netherlands Indies) had not existed in that form and in that combination before. The Rijksmuseum and the Rijksherbarium, established in Brussels in 1829, were the first national and fully state-funded natural historical institutions in the Dutch kingdom. In the course of the nineteenth century, both institutions rapidly developed into well-known centres for natural historical research in Europe. Significant parts of their collections derived from the Malay Archipelago, a region the Dutch kingdom regained from the British for strategic reasons in 1814. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Malay Archipelago, which had remained a terra incognita to European naturalists and colonial administrators, witnessed an unprecedented run on its natural wealth—initiated and propelled by both the emerging Dutch colonial state and the natural historical institutions in the Netherlands.

To nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship, the early modern expansion of powers like Spain, Portugal, England and Holland, was a necessary preliminary step towards Europe's ultimate domination of the Asian and African continents. Moreover, the relative ease with which colonial powers manhandled regions like North Africa and the Indo-Pak subcontinent suggested that their early modern ‘pioneering’ counterparts must have shared similar experiences. While some historians highlighted superior business concepts (joint-stock companies, profit-sharing) or superior shipbuilding and navigation techniques as the means with which trading powers like the Estado da India and the English East India Company penetrated and overwhelmed Indian Ocean commerce, other scholars boiled it down to the European affinity for using ‘men-of-war, gun, and shot’. The critical underlying assumption of any of these teleological explanations s i that ‘encountered’ cultures were unable to adequately respond to European technology, of course hinting at some deeper and more profound deficiency. Scholarship in recent decades has shorn such confidence and begun to scrutinise this seedling period of interaction between Europe and non-Europe, suggesting that the initial playing ground between ‘encounterer’ and ‘encountered’ was perhaps more level than previously portrayed.

Orthodox viewpoints on the formation and transformation of states in early modern (or late pre-colonial) South and Southeast Asia fall broadly into two strands. On the one hand, there are those who see the state as ephemeral, and essentially divorced from society in general.

In 1637 Hans Putmans, having just retired as governor of the Dutch East India Company's Taiwan comptoir, set out from the East Indies to return to Holland. During the long voyage home he composed a report about his last year as governor, describing how he had expanded the Company's control over large parts of the island's hinterlands. He himself had led Dutch troops against the town of Mattau, one of the most powerful aboriginal towns of Taiwan, and against the towns of Soulang and Taccareangh. The results of his expeditions were, he wrote, spectacular: ‘Through the […] guidance and will of God, [the conquest] was easily accomplished, and, since they had never before seen such a manner of war, our authority and respect among these blind heathen was extended and raised to such a point that not only the towns of Soulangh, Backeluan, […] Taccareijangh, […] and Mattau presented their lands to the Dutch state, but also Pangsoia, Tapouliang, and many other towns in the area’. In all some twenty aboriginal towns sought peace with the Company after Putmans' expeditions, a huge increase in the Company's holdings on Taiwan. When, in 1929, Putmans had taken his oath of office, his job had been to run a small trading factory on the island's coast, a base from which the Company could profit from the rich China trade. The subjugation of these twenty towns abruptly changed his job, and changed the Company's mission on Taiwan: How were these towns to be administered?

The setting is 25 February 1603. At dawn the three ships under the supreme command of Jakob van Heemskerk spot a Portuguese carrack in anchor off the Eastern shores of Singapore Island. She was richly laden with wares from China and Japan. The battle for the carrack lasted for most hours of daylight, and as night was about to fall, the Portuguese captain, crew, soldiers and passengers surrendered. They forfeited ship and cargo for having their lives spared.

While looking at the world’s politics and ideologies for a vision of the future nation state, India’s anti-British freedom activists and intellectuals remained deeply ambivalent about drawing lessons from Europe’s experience of Fascism and National Socialism. Indian nationalists cautiously admired elements of National Socialist and Fascist ideology and expressed their distress with imperialist expansionism, racism, and anti-Semitism that accompanied the two regimes. This article draws on the exemplary “global biography” of one such Indian internationalist thinker, Taraknath Das, to investigate interwar Indian preoccupation with Fascism and National Socialism in articulating the discursive ground of Indian nationalism.

Portuguese perceptions of nature in the new worlds they encountered in Southeast Asia from the turn of the sixteenth century were a complex amalgam of inherited frameworks and the forging of a new gaze or vision. Grand claims that the Portuguese discoveries amount to the “construction of space” and the “invention of humanity” have been trumpeted, but are too overblown. From another perspective, Portuguese scholars have recently engaged in a philosophical debate around experiencialismo—the distinction between “scientific experience” and the supposedly pre- or non-scientific “lived” experience of the senses (experiência vivencial), suggesting that the Portuguese Discoveries fall at a critical juncture between these two hermeneutic paradigms. But what did this amount to in concrete terms?

I would prefer to turn to other scholars like the Belgian historian Albert Deman, who has stipulated that the perception of Indian nature in the European imaginary, was locked in three unchanging tropes that even first-hand experience could not easily undo. These tropes were exuberance, superabundance and luxury, and go right back to the first encounters between East and West in antiquity, notably Alexander the Great's adventures of the fourth century B.C., which impressed upon Westerners the East's “superior forms of life” and what Pliny, for example, dutifully acknowledged as “the wonder of the victorious expedition of Alexander the Great, when that part of the world was first revealed.” Why wonder, and what does Deman allude to when he writes of “superior forms of life”? The common impression was that everything grew more forcefully, and in greater profusion in the East. There were, for example, two flowerings a year of some plants; the colours and tastes were stronger; the smells were beguiling. What the Portuguese noted as “the fumos da India” merely drew on biblical reference in the Book of Proverbs to the “spicy breezes of the East”. From these basic conceptions had sprung compilations of all the fabulous stories of the East, texts such as those produced by Ktesias the Knidian and Megasthenes whose ideas were passed down through Pliny into the genre of the marvellous, or mirabilia, fanciful speculations and fables developed along the lines of half-truths reported by returning merchants and travellers, and sometimes fictions spread by Arab middlemen keen to retain their long-standing monopoly of purveyance to Christian consumers.

Through an institutional approach and by focusing on long-term developments, this article offers a genealogy of the pluralistic character of the landraad (regional colonial court) in colonial Java. It argues that the pluralistic landraden—consisting of a Dutch president, Javanese judges, a local prosecutor, and Islamic and Chinese advisers—were crucial to the process of colonial state formation. This long-term process reflects continuities rather than rupture and change between the era of the VOC and the nineteenth-century developing colonial state. The spatial sites of the landraden reveal not only the conflicts between several layers, institutions, and individuals in the process of colonial state formation but also the importance of local actors in this process. Local dynamics as well as tensions between the various layers of the colonial state, which were striving either for uniformity or for the maintenance of local pluralities, provide insights into the complex formation processes of dual rule from below.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the first Muslim rulers of Mysore—Haidar ‘Ali (c. 1720-82) and his son Tipu Sultan (c. 1750-99)—were amongst the first South and West Asian rulers to unleash a process of administrative, socio-economic and military protomodernisation. Haidar, a rather cautious and pragmatic autocrat who could neither read nor write, ruled within the framework of the traditional Mughal system of governance. Highly skilled in administrative, military and diplomatic realms, he initiated the proto-modernisation of the army and took some important measures towards the establishment of a central state. In turn, Tipu was an educated autocrat, fond of administrative, socio-economic, military, and technological inventions and innovations which he intended to use in the struggle against the British occupying forces in South India. In the extant literature, Tipu is either being idealised as an “enlightened” ruler or described as a pre-modern despot. Few scholars have given a balanced account of his rule by depicting both his autocratic style of leadership, as well as the pragmatic features and proto-modernising aspects of his rule. This article is concerned with the biographic and historical background of Haidar ‘Ali and Tipu Sultan and aims to furnish a concerted account of their rule by consulting fresh printed and unprinted primary sources in English, French and German.