In May 1934 Nehru and Sukarno were both in detention. Nehru was in Dehra Dun jail sentenced to two years after having been found guilty of making a seditious speech. Sukarno, also arrested for sedition, was in exile on the island of Flores. For both men it was a period of reflection and analysis, a time to review the progress of the nationalist movement and make some assessment of their own contributions to it. Nehru, more given to introspection than Sukarno, composed his autobiography during this time, and continued with the historical studies he had commenced during earlier prison terms. Sukarno in exile spent much of his time getting to grips with Islam, primarily, it would appear, to prepare arguments to convince the leaders of the Islamic movements in Indonesia of the compatibility of Islam with modernization and progressive political action. In this respect, like Jinnah, he was attracted to the figure of Kemal Attaturk whose general outlook on the relationship between state and religion he endorsed.

India's national day is 26 January; Indonesia's 17 August. They point to a difference. 26 January derives from the Indian National Congress' decision at its Lahore Congress in December 1929 to launch a Civil Disobedience movement against the British Government in India. Jawaharlal Nehru as Congress' President arranged that the first step would be for thousands of Congress rank and file to join together on 26 January 1930 to take the Independence Pledge. This declared that since ‘it is the inalienable right of the Indian people […] to have freedom, […] if any government deprives a people of those rights […] the people have a […] right to […] abolish it […]. We recognise, however, that the most effective way of gaining freedom is not through violence. We will, therefore, prepare ourselves by withdrawing, so far as we can, all voluntary association from the British Government and will prepare for Civil Disobedience.’ From that moment onwards 26 January has been India's Independence Day, though when it was first held India's independence still stood 17 years away. The celebrations have thus come to link post-independent India with the feats of the Indian national movement which for so many years pursued the strategy of civil disobedience, and which, despite a series of intervening fits and starts, is seen to have been crucial to its success. For India the heroics of its freedom struggle lie, that is, in its elon-gated pre-independence past, of long years of humiliating harassment and costly commitment. They are not much associated with the final run up to independence. With the emphasis rather upon the earlier, principally Gandhian years, of protests and processions, of proscriptions and prison, the final transfer of power is not seen, moreover, as comprising a traumatic break with the past, but as the logical climax to all that had gone before. The direct continuities between the pre- and post-independence periodes in India in these respects are accepted as a central part of its national heritage.

The James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis has among its various holdings on the history ol European expansion a collection ol papers that emanated Irom the prominent Dutch DeMey van Streefkerk family. The papers were obtained by curator John Parker from the Amsterdam antiquarian firm B.M. Israel in 1958. The documents are all in Dutch and they pertain primarily to plantation affairs ol the Dutch colony of Surinam for the years 1717–1830. Due to the language barrier and the lack of a suitable inventory of the documents, little use has been made ol the papers thus far. Recently, this author has prepared a comprehensive inventory of the collection, which can be obtained from the James Ford Bell Library. The inventory is fourteen pages in length, in condensed print; and, thanks to modern computer techniques, is available in both a catalogue and a chronological listing.

Discussing the issue of foreign investment in colonial economies, such as those of India and Indonesia, in the first half of the twentieth century gives rise to a number of problems. In addition to the obvious difficulties of data collection there are also complex conceptual and definitional issues. The aim of this paper is to set out what we know about the quantities and performance of foreign investment in the two economies, and to use this information to draw more general conclusions about the economic history of the two areas. In analysing the material only those lines which seem to offer a genuinem comparative perspective will be followed. We are interested in those aspects of the history of foreign investment in India which can tell us something about the history of foreign investment in Indonesia, and vice versa. It is convenient to split the subject into two time periods, 1920-38 and 1945-60.

This essay attempts to analyse the differential effects of the Great Depression on two very dissimilar economies bound only by the commonality of colonial overlordship. Though the motivation was noble enough, the quality and quantity of research that went into making this article has been well below par. For the Indonesian section, I was particularly hamstrung by my total ignorance of the Dutch language and also of the subtle intersectoral nuances of the economy. What I say about the archipelago is, therefore, much in the nature of broad, indicative statements culled from the data and interpretations available in English. Even these I say with all manners of qualification. This exercise in comparative economic history was thrust upon me in order to broaden my knowledge of other things in the universe. Perhaps, at the end of it all, I have become a trifle more knowledgeable. Nevertheless, writing this essay constantly reminded me of Daniel as he faced the lions: he was doing an extremely foolhardy thing under severe duress and with prayers on his lips.

The author of the following paper is not an economic historian. As a general modern historian when teaching history under more global perspective, he became increasingly aware of the importance of the intercontinental longdistance trade by his interests in African history and the history of European expansion overseas. When working on a more elementary, but systematic introduction into world history for undergraduate students and high school pupils (‘Geschichte griffbereit.’ 6 vols. Reinbek b. Hamburg 1979/1983), he was struck by the frequent occurrence of long-distance trade in general, of what is here called ‘intercontinental long-distance trade’ in particular: even in the most superficial treatment of many regions, countries, places of historical importance (cities, ports, straits, isthmuses, rivers, isles and peninsulas) longdistance trade played a central role. If examined closely, it emerges that surprisingly much is known about long-distance trade in general. Direct and indirect consequences of the intercontinental long-distance trade are so manifold and complex in many spheres of history — economic, of course, but also political, naval, military history, history of ideas and religions — that it should become useful to make it a major theme of its own.

The dawn of the twentieth century witnessed a significant development in Indonesian social history in that urban centers replaced the role of rural communities as the loci of change. As much as the colonial demand of land and labour in the nineteenth century had changed the structure of the countryside, the development of commerce and industry inthe twentieth century resulted in the reconstruction of the social life in the centers of those activities Urban population, especially in the large cities of over 100,000, increased rapidly. Basing himself on the 1930 census data, Wertheim noted that in 1930 8 51 percent of the population of Java and Madura lived in 102 urban centers. In the course of a decade from 1920 to 1930 urban population percentage to the total population had increased 1 percent Only in East Java was the development less impressive. There the cities of 25,000 to 50,000 were stagnating, and there was sharp relative and absolute regression in the cities with a 10,000 to 25,000 population. What is more important, according to Wertheim, is the ‘mental climate’ of the urban centers that signified a new era in history

The Columbian legacy also involved catastrophic demographic collapse and brutal exploitation. Within fifty years of Spanish occupation, native populations of the Caribbean archipelago verged on extinction; after eighty years, demographic decline in Mexico and Central America may have reached ninety percent. Although epidemiological transfers devastated American Indians, other aspects of inter-hemispheric biological exchange substantially enhanced the world's capacity to support human life. Eurasian grazing stock (goats, cattle, pigs, sheep) as well as animals of burden (horses and oxen) were introduced to the Americas while native American plants — not least, the potato, maize, tomato, various beans, and squash — were transferred to the Eastern Hemisphere. Precious metals were also conveyed to the Old World with effects that continue to be debated upon European economic growth, the distribution of wealth, the organization of power, and the conduct of war. Africa's portion of the Columbian legacy was to supply 5/6ths of the human migrants from the Eastern to the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1775 and to experience the domestic transformations dictated by the Atlantic slave trade. Taken together, the convergence of continents in the age of discovery would appear to have shaped the modern world, as Abbe Raynal implied. But did it? From Raynal's time to our own, how have historians related these developments to the advent of modernity or to the establishment of Europe's global economic paramountcy? Did the development of the Old World hinge upon the discovery of the New?

Numerous writings on intellectuals as learned or professional middle class have been published since the sixties for the obvious reason that this social group played a central role in the struggle for independence from which they emerged as the new leaders or ralers of new nations. Furthermore, being protagonist of change the intelligentsia showed their pre-eminence in giving their society a modern shape. Those studies show clearly the striking similarities of the characteristics of the intelligentsia from various developing countries. Their emergence was closely related to the expansion of western education, their marginal socio-historical location created the propensity to protagonize modernization, their oppositional role was inherent in their being a counter-elite in the colonial power structure. More similarities or parallel development can be brought up in our comparative study between India and Indonesia by asking the following questions: (1) Within the frame-work of the colonial setting what kind of factors were at work in creating the intelligentsia; (2) To what extend did endogenous factors impede the mobility and dynamics of the intelligentsia; (3) Did the intelligentsia's social origin put constraints on their capacity to accommodate themselves to new situations; (4) In fulfilling their function as intellectuals did they succeed in playing their leadership role in the nationalist movement; (5) Which structural conduciveness was necessary in order to provide a leverage to antagonize the establishment; etc. What kind of political commitment one came across among the intelligentsia? Were new ideologies quite instrumental in endorsing the intelligentsia's political role? Did they succeed in realizing political modernization?

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.

The publication of Africa and the Victorians in 1961 challenged the prevaling orthodoxy regarding the European scramble for territory during the last decades of the nineteenth century. In it, Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher argued that what had been traditionally viewed as qualitatively new was merely a difference ol degree and not kind. Subsequent studies, especially the work of David Fieldhouse, effectively laid to rest the assumption that new developments in Europe were the cause of the rush for colonies after 1880. And yet historians generally have been reluctant to abandon the ‘age of imperialism’ as an appropriate epithet for late-Victorian Europe. The sheer amount of territory conquered by Europeans in so short a span ol time seemingly compels teachers ol modern history survey courses to view the period 1880–1914 from a traditional perspective and with resort to established nomenclature. Does the historical rubric, ‘age of imperialism’, still have pedagogic value? The answer is a qualified affirmative, provided that its chronological moorings are anchored elsewhere.