This article examines two different missionary areas where the Society of Jesus was sent to evangelise the native population: the Andean territories previously under Inca domination and the remote Mariana Islands in the Pacific Rim. The gathering of “other barbarians” living outside “civilised” societies was a tool of early modern colonisers within Europe and beyond. The English did so in sixteenth-century Ireland and the Spanish began reducing the so-called American Indians to new settlements in New Spain and Peru. In this paper, I want to compare the methods used to concentrate the natives of the Viceroyalty of Peru, where the Jesuits actively collaborated, with the borderland mission of the Marianas, where the Jesuits worked as parishioners of a much less sophisticated people: the CHamoru.1 As I will demonstrate, this policy of gathering souls was not an isolated one, but part and parcel of a universalistic principle of spreading God's word that was irremediably embedded in colonial structures of coercion and political control in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.

This special issue focuses on the broader context and interconnectedness of different slave regimes in early modern Asia. Various transnational commercial and imperial projects influenced the waxing and waning of individual slave regimes, while internal and interpersonal conditions within polities also played important roles. The well-known European seaborne empires of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and England were major drivers of this early modern slavery, but they coexisted and competed with other groups of trader-raiders. These included merchants from the Islamicate world and Chinese coastal regions, which connected Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, and other regions. These extensive markets linked different regions together, such as the Malabar Coast with East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Red Sea. While the focus is on the Iberian expansion and its impact on the slave trade, this special issue acknowledges that slavery in Asia should be understood as a result of multiple overlapping and interacting regimes. Each article examines a particular regime while emphasizing its interactions with neighboring regions during the early modern period. The main focus is on the encounters between different slave regimes facilitated by early modern commercial networks. The history of slavery in early modern Asia involved clashes and cross-pollination between disparate slave systems. A further contribution relates to the terminology used to define and understand slavery in non-European contexts, which is still a subject of debate. The concept of “regimes of bondage” is adopted as an umbrella term to encompass the various forms of coerced, subaltern, and dependent labor in Asia during this period. Finally, by using local categories and sources, including European and non-European language materials, the special issue aims to recover marginalized perspectives and highlight the complexity and challenges of studying slavery in Asia.

The history of the indigenous militia and its role in consolidating the native elite's place in the seventeenth-century colonial Philippines is an understudied topic. This paper addresses that gap. Using lists of media anata payments gathered from the Contaduría section of the Archivo General de Indias for the province of Laguna, this paper examines the beginnings of the native militia and the positions that the native elite occupied. Based on the corresponding media anata tax that these positions required, the author has listed the military ranks that native Filipinos assumed from 1633 to 1700. The Spanish government relied heavily on native arms to support Spain's expansionary agenda, especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Moreover, foreign threats, the Spanish-Dutch wars, and the challenges posed by hostile indigenous groups in the Philippines left the Spaniards with no choice but to rely on native arms to defend their position. As the native militia developed and became a permanent feature of the seventeenth-century Philippines, it gave rise to a space for the indigenous elite to exercise their roles as soldiers, encomenderos, and conquistadores in territories which remained on the periphery of the Spanish empire in which they carved their niche.

Despite its greater extensiveness in comparison to the ferrying of their West African counterparts across the Atlantic Ocean into bondage in the New World, the history of the extraction of East Africans to serve as slaves in the various lands that ring the Indian Ocean is barely known to most of us. Particularly as Westerners, our knowledge of even the sketchiest outlines of the latter phenomenon pales before what we know intimately about the intricacies of the former. Furthermore, unknown altogether to too many is the fact that—from at least as early as the eighth century of the Common Era—these East African slaves were exported as distantly as China. Based principally on the pertinent Chinese sources, this study raises and investigates three fundamental questions concerning this conveyance of East Africans into China. First, who were the original enslavers of these East Africans and thus the prime purveyors of their entrance over the centuries into bondage in China? Second, how—that is, by land or by sea—and under what auspices were these East Africans typically transported from their homelands mainly along the eastern African coastline to a locale as far away as China? Third and finally, what was the probable fate of these East Africans once they had arrived in China? The essay concludes with a consideration of the consequentiality of this largely overlooked and therefore unheralded saga amidst the history of Chinese institutionalised servitude overall.

In the 1750s the Danish kingdom and the Moroccan Empire came into contact, and concluded a bilateral treaty. As part of the accord, a Danish chartered company was established. The company was short-lived and the “special relationship” between the two powers soon withered. A result of this episode was a handful of texts that sought to describe Morocco to a Danish audience—an adventure tale, a captive narrative, an orientalist chorography, and a biography of the emperor—which sought to produce truths about the Danish encounters with Morocco, but also truths about the place and the peoples of Morocco. The article discusses these texts, where they originated, to whom they circulated, and what they had to tell about Morocco.

In 1786, several hundred subjects of Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–99), ruler of the kingdom of Mysore in southern India, travelled to the Ottoman Empire on a diplomatic mission. This essay revisits the embassy's travels, and travails, across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean by drawing attention to a rich cache of administrative documents. I suggest that this collection, hitherto unexamined, can illuminate some significant aspects of diplomatic conduct and procedure in Islamicate Eurasia, yet underexplored. The essay accordingly highlights such overlooked themes as the bureaucratic complexities that were involved in long-distance ambassadorial tours, the role ceremonials played in elite intercourse, and the myriad ways in which material culture mediated interstate exchanges. While its significance lies also in how it decentres a dominant scholarly focus on encounters between Europe and its others, scrutiny of this collection, I additionally argue, can enhance historical understanding of how reciprocal relations between Islamicate polities transformed due to growing European influence. As contemporary configurations of imperial power changed in both South Asia and the Middle East, the Mysore-Ottoman embassy hence at once reflected and anticipated the advent of European—and more specifically, British—hegemony in non-European diplomatic contexts.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese purchased large numbers of people in China as slaves. Many of those people were children. This article considers where those children came from and why they were sold to the Portuguese. During the late Ming period, as social inequality intensified, poor farmers increasingly had to sell themselves and their offspring to rich landowners as bonded labourers. However, some farmers chose to break the law and sell to foreigners instead. Other farmers became bandits, and kidnapped other people's children to sell into bondage. Both of these criminal trends provided the Portuguese with young slaves.

In mid-1851 a civil war erupted in Chile following a presidential election in which Manuel Montt defeated José María de la Cruz. Many of Cruz's supporters were sent to the distant penal colony of Magallanes. In November 1851, Lieutenant Miguel José Cambiaso, who was part of the garrison, was jailed for insubordination and subsequently led a bloody mutiny disguised as a revolt by Cruz's supporters. The mutiny is familiar to historians of the period, but what is less well known is the key role played by the British in suppressing it. Contrary to previous historiography, the Chilean government pleaded for British intervention. Given the poor state of the Chilean navy and the precariousness of communications with the penal colony, the Chilean government had no option but to resort to British naval forces. This incident illustrates a new dimension of Anglo-Chilean relations during the mid-nineteenth century which cannot be defined solely as imperialistic; Chilean authorities actively sought cooperation from the British. It also highlights the fragility of the process of state formation in a republic long praised as an example of successful political transition from colony to republic, as well as the lack of commitment of the Chilean government to shoring up state power in Magallanes.

This article explores the dynamics behind global diplomacy and knowledge in Asian maritime empires in the late eighteenth century. The short-lived diplomatic exchange between the Kingdom of Mysore and the Spanish Philippines in 1776–7 provides a rich resource for an analysis of how global diplomatic agents coproduced material objects, images, and written records which in turn impacted politics and trade relations. The article makes at least four important interventions in the burgeoning field of new diplomatic history. First, it sheds light on certain aspects of growing research on Asian diplomatic encounters connecting the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia; second, it offers insights into the manifold actors involved in creating and negotiating knowledge; third, it highlights the epistemological importance of the visual and material archives for the study of global diplomacy in the early modern period; and fourth, it challenges narratives of cross-cultural foreign relations which tend to overemphasise asymmetrical and confessional explanations.

Based on bankruptcy and inheritance files and on population and business registers from Ruanda-Urundi, this paper reconstructs the local and long-distance professional and affective relations of Indian and Arab merchants operating in and around Bujumbura in the two decades before and after the Great Depression (1920s–1930s). The story complements the historiography on Asian diasporas in East Africa by going beyond the Indian Ocean coast, beyond the precolonial period, and beyond British-governed territories. Looking at different spheres of life and scales of action and assessing both commercial success and failure, this article makes a case for the importance of local dynamics and the relevance of cross-community relations within the relatively small foreign trade sector in the region. The reliance on “home” and kin remained important as mutual insurance at times of arrival and misfortune: firmly established first-comers assisted their relatives upon arrival, while at times of bankruptcy, death, or old age, long-distance family ties proved vital as well. However, facing discriminatory colonial measures, the Arab and Indian merchants were gradually relegated to the role of intermediaries in long-distance trade. Consequently, day-to-day business relations were increasingly a local, cross-community, and above all, precarious affair.

While there are large literatures on both Islamic slave soldiers and the phenomenon of “arming slaves” in the Atlantic world, military slavery in early modern Asia is still poorly understood. Using a variety of Chinese, Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese sources, this article will argue that enslaved labour was frequently directed towards violence across early modern Asia, colonial or otherwise. At the same time, the phenomenon was far from uniform in the vast expanse of land and sea between East Africa and Japan. Rather, it is better to speak of a series of analogous regimes of bondage that interacted with each other across large distances, with the line between enslaved soldiers, mercenaries, and run-of-the-mill trader-raiders being vanishingly thin at times. Finally, all this existed within the context of military infrastructure in the broadest sense of the word that included fortresses, factories, and even war elephants.

The coffee plantations of late nineteenth-century Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) were rocked by a series of crises, including the appearance of numerous insect pests. Scholars have demonstrated that nineteenth-century plantations were both ecologically vulnerable and reliant on exploited labour, with entomology deployed in their defence across the British Empire. Yet this paper argues that, despite its global reach, colonial entomology was sometimes conducted by individuals in pursuit of such parochial concerns as their local reputation and social standing. This case study examines the beetles of Ceylon through the eyes of Scottish plantation owner and amateur naturalist Robert Camperdown Haldane. His 1881 tract All About Grub erroneously identified the island's beetles as relatives of the European cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha). Although Haldane was a well-travelled individual who adopted a global science, he was also a product of Ceylon's plantation society: touchy about his social status and dismissive of his Indian labourers. The insular priorities of individuals or tight-knit communities could direct an enterprise with superficially global characteristics.

Based on Japanese and Portuguese sources, this paper aims at recovering local categories of bondage in order to identify mechanisms by which people were subjected to bonded labour in early modern Japan. The analysis focuses on crossing local forms of bondage, here referred to as genin, and the processes of subjecting individuals to this condition, the so-called called geninka, with the European notion of slavery and enslavement. Local forms of subjection to bondage are drawn from the analysis of early seventeenth-century Tokugawa legislation dedicated to the suppression of human trafficking networks. These documents use a number of labels such as genin, hōkōnin, wakatō, chūgen, hikan, and komono, all references to people subjected to various forms of bondage. At the same time, a crucial debate among members of the Society of Jesus in India offers the opportunity to scrutinise the application of the historical and legal European concept of slavery and enslavement to Japan, a region beyond the secular authority of colonial empires. Ultimately, slavery reveals itself as one of the many categories used by early modern actors to interpret and regulate labour arrangements in the budding Christian communities created by missionaries in the Iberian world.

By focusing on the individual trajectory of Albert Charton (1893–1980), a French educationalist and civil servant who was active in West Africa and Indochina during the 1930s and 1940s, this article offers an original approach to the analysis of knowledge production and circulation in relation to the colonial world. More specifically, the study of Charton's involvement in several imperial, international, and interimperial bodies allows for a new understanding of the evolution of discussions concerning the content and aims of colonial education, including its growing importance within development paradigms. Such a micro-historical perspective also reveals the mechanisms and sometimes contrasting (political) rationales of the process of internationalisation of educational knowledge, thus providing new insights into the interconnections between imperialism and internationalism.

The largest “multinational” employers (avant la letter) were European India companies and colonial armies. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, they recruited millions of mercenaries and soldiers from all over Europe, mostly from lower social classes. Beginning in the nineteenth century, they offered certain welfare-state services to these men and their legitimate and illegitimate families in Europe and the colonies. To maintain these systems, colonial states depended on cooperation with local, regional, and national administrations throughout Europe. However, the economic and welfare-state dimensions of violent European expansion have hitherto hardly been studied. This article uses the example of the Dutch colonial army to show for the first time how much money flowed from the colonies to lower-class European families. It analyses the transimperial networks of the Dutch colonial bureaucracy, and shows why men, women, and children in Europe and Asia, from diverse social backgrounds and subjected to dissimilar racial regimes, were affected quite differently by this global military labour market.

As soon as the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was formed in 1953, disgruntled white settler politicians in the new polity pushed for the reconfiguration of its borders. Driven by decolonisation struggles across Africa and a surge of anti-colonial nationalism in Nyasaland in particular, these debates were particularly vibrant among the political establishment in Southern Rhodesia, the Federation's dominant constituent. The question of Southern Rhodesia's relationship to the Federation became divisive in right-wing circles as African decolonisation unfolded. However, as the pattern of imperial retreat solidified, the right wing abandoned interest in a reconstructed Federation and unified around a “Southern Rhodesia First” mantra. The “centrist” ruling party, entangled by the Federation's extant scaffolding, was forced to eventually embrace a partition plan which closely resembled the ideas traditionally espoused by the opposition. The process of this ideological realignment had important ramifications for Southern Rhodesian politics. In particular, it facilitated the reunification of the right wing and the embrace of unilateralism that manifested most dramatically in Southern Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965.

This paper departs from the preoccupation in the literature with the pressure group activity of single chambers of commerce by examining an influential but previously neglected federated business pressure group, the British Imperial Council of Commerce (BICC). Set within interlocking dynamics of British Imperial and global history and the clamour for imperial preference, it focuses on BICC's interface with the British government and its overseas dependencies in the context and vortex of Imperial economic policy, the First World War, interimperial competition, especially Anglo–German rivalry, and the vagaries of the world political economy. This essay provides insights into the internal affairs of the BICC, business–government relations in the British Empire, and the political economy of the Empire between 1911 and 1925. It demonstrates how the BICC, focused on Imperial economic governance, navigated the conflict between the prevailing ideology of laissez faire (free trade) and the clamour for xenophobic protectionism during the First World War and its aftermath. The paper highlights the limits of business pressure group activity, and the impact of the war and its aftermath on the BICC.

Over the last twenty years, global history has experienced a considerable boom, breaking with traditional historical approaches that privileged the national framework and very often adopted a Eurocentric perspective. This triumphalist discourse about the field of global history should not, however, obscure the local and national specificities of this field of research, be they epistemological, institutional, thematic, or historiographical, nor the disciplinary, political, and economic obstacles with which researchers are confronted. This conversation explores the intellectual and structural specificities and constraints of global history.

Museums which display all of their colonial collections are rare, and those which offer clear information on collection provenances and colonial histories in displays are rarer still. Absence and silence surrounding the colonial past in Europe's museums places them at odds with international pressure to account for the custodianship of colonial-era collections. This is examined here through investigating the silent heritage of the Ruxton Nigeria Collection, held at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London. Ruxton collected as a military official during Britain's conquest of Nigeria. His collection is typical of assemblages throughout European ethnographic museums, dominated by “everyday” material heritage, not the “treasures” of elites which monopolise restitution discourse. How can provenance research be conducted upon quieter collections dating from the colonial era with little accompanying documentation? What are the potential impacts of such research upon restitution debates? From the available evidence around the Ruxton collection, it is clear that silences are more fundamental than just a matter of archival gaps, and if silences remain even after provenance research (which many museums are unable to conduct on all of their collections), then we need to question not only why and how collections are displayed, but how museums justify having them at all.