You have reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 and gave your farewell lecture on 6 June last. High time to have an interview with you! After Itinerario was founded by George Winius and you in 1976, you yourself did many of the interviews. Interviews were and still are rather uncommon in scholarly journals. Why did you start them?

It was a mixture of egoism and curiosity. We meant the journal to be a research journal, so apart from publishing articles we had two things in mind: to speak with prominent people active in the field and also to do special reports on archives and research institutions. George and I loved to ask colleagues about their backgrounds, their personal interests and their approaches to teaching and research. The interviews worked out well, but it turned out to be very difficult to find people who were willing to write about their experiences in foreign archives.

On December 15th last, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Professor of Russian Studies at Brock University in Ontario, visited Leiden for a lecture on the applicability of Edward Said's theories on Orientalism to Russian images of Asia. He kindly consented to a lunchtime conversation with fellow Russianist Henk Kern and Carolien Stolte to talk about his life, his work and his most recent book. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye teaches courses in Russian and Inner Asian history. His research interests focus on Imperial Russian intellectual, cultural and diplomatic issues. He has written two books, Toward the Rising Sun: Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), and Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

It is well-known that in 1763 the French presence in India was reduced by the treaty of Paris to five trading posts, or comptoirs, whose names—Pondichéry, Yanaon, Karikal, Mahé and Chandernagor—were erstwhile learned by heart by the French schoolchildren. French India lasted until 1954 and sparked a wide scientific interest in France at least until the beginning of the 1970s. Since that time, along with the history of French colonial policy during the early modern period as a whole, the study of French India has largely gone out of fashion. The last decades of the Ancien Regime have especially been concerned by this disaffection. The best current French specialists of these parts of the world, like Philippe Haudrère, have focused on the activities of the Compagnie françaises des Indes, which was suspended in 1769, or, like Jacques Weber, devoted themselves to the history of the French presence in India during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Even if the period of Dupleix is more studied, the history of French India during the eighteenth century does not seem to tempt many researchers nowadays.

In July of 1633, Captain Sussex Camock set sail from London with around 50 men to establish an English outpost on the mainland of Central America. His voyage was sponsored by members of the Providence Island Company, recent founders of a Puritan colony on two small islands 150 miles off the coast of Nicaragua (fig. 1). Company adventurers—so called because they ventured their capital—instructed Captain Camock to establish a “Colony upon the Mayne” and to start a trade with local Indians. The group was directed to “carry themselves wislie and modestlie towards the Indyans, for the honor of our Religion and nation”. They were to endear themselves “to the Indyans…and by some reasonable guise to winn their Friendship”. In case the Indians did not have sufficient commodities to trade, Camock's men were implored to investigate the region for any and all potential resources, “or to give ye full Intelligence of the possibilities of that designe”. The adventurers specifically sought information about:

The period between 1780 and 1840, which is often called the age of revolutions in the West, witnessed significant change in the Lusitanian space in India, due to radical alterations in the politico-economic activities and socio-ecclesiastical institutions. On the one hand, the commercial ventures that the Portuguese had officially maintained as their major economic activity for more than two centuries were relegated to the background or handed over to the Saraswat Brahmins of Goa and some private entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the Portuguese state in India began to focus more on agriculture as a means of sustaining itself against the backdrop of intensified threats from the British encroaching on their peripheral commerce. The agrarian policy of the Portuguese Prime Minister Marques de Pombal to acquire new cultivable territories and expand agriculture had already brought several neighbouring areas of Goa, under the Portuguese control during the period between 1763 and 1783, which were named New Conquests. This was followed by the establishment of a Department of Agriculture in 1776 to supervise cultivation and to introduce new crops, such as pepper, cotton and areca-nuts in Goa and in the newly conquered territories. At the same time that the king of Portugal fled from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro and began to rule the metropolis and its colonies from Brazil, following severe threats from Napoleonic wars, the Portuguese possessions in India—particularly in Goa—were moving towards increasing ruralisation. The Department of Agriculture even clamoured for the closure of the municipal councils of Goa, and also for the liquidation of the gaonkar system (communal ownership of land) that would facilitate distribution of land to enterprising individuals to increase production and to make Goa self-sustaining.

The importance of the Atlantic Ocean during the Early Modern period has been stressed in a growing number of studies since the 1960s. However, some aspects of the contacts between different cultures and continents have enjoyed little attention. One of these is the role of individuals behind the Atlantic economic system: merchants, businessmen and entrepreneurs.

Pidgins—their development, disappearance, or subsequent creolisation—are a fascinating phenomenon in the parts of the world that experienced long-term foreign intrusion and its consequences, one of which was contact between two or more linguistic groups, usually of unequal power. Colonisers did not learn the language of the colonised, who often were perceived as inferior, while the colonised people did not or could not master a foreign language in their own country. In most cases, pidgins were a telltale sign of colonialism. Linguists classify these contact languages, which have no native speakers, into major groups named after the dominant base, such as English-, Portuguese-, Spanish-, Dutch-, French-, or Russian-, as well as African-, Asian-, and Austronesian-based.

On a cold October day a leaky yacht sailed into an unknown bay. It was 1661, and the two low-level Dutch bureaucrats who rowed ashore thought they'd return to their ship the same night. Instead they were swept up on a weeks-long journey into China, until finally they found themselves bowing before one of the most powerful men in the imperium: the Jingnan Prince Geng Jimao. Their clothes were tattered, they had no gifts to give, their translator was incompetent, and they were hopelessly out of their league, yet their audience with Geng led to one of the most unlikely alliances in world history, between the Calvinist merchants of the Dutch East India Company and the Buddhist Qing Dynasty, which was struggling to extend its rule over all of China.

With the eighteenth century drawing to a close, Anglo-French hostilities were rapidly escalating in Europe. Besides competing for power on the continent, both the British and the French were concerned with expanding their influence in the East, where the once mighty trading empire of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had been in steady decline for some decades. By the end of 1794, conflicts on the continent were turning firmly in France's favour and in January 1795 French troops invaded the Netherlands, forcing the ruling Prince of Orange to seek refuge in England. Members of the Dutch Patriot movement—the democratically-minded opponents of the Dutch monarchy and the old order in general—were sympathetic towards French revolutionary ideals and welcomed the French presence in their country. Meanwhile, the occupation of the Netherlands was of great concern to the British government, who suspected that the French would waste no time in also taking control of strategically-located Dutch colonies.

The Zelenyi [Green] Bazaar is like a self-contained village, where each house is a small shop. The Chinese traded and lived here. They represented ninety percent [of the bazaar population]; the rest of the territory was inhabited by the poorer Russian emigrants, who were only able to buy small, cheap houses and only lived in these, without trading in them. At the other ends of the city these people were referred to as the Zelenobazarskie [the people from Zelenyi Bazaar], which was not exactly a compliment. The small house-shops were closely packed together—God forbid a fire was to break out—when this happened, the flames were carried from house to house with unbelievable speed and destroyed the wooden constructions. And when it had rained, the ground was thick with mud. The bazaar itself was abundant with all possible products, with meat and fish as well as many kinds of textiles. There were two or three photographic studios and even several small tailors. The bazaar was generally seen as the place where it was practical to have a look at all possible goods.

On December 23, 1965, the president of newly-independent Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, wrote a letter to the prime minister of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar. Kaunda—an outspoken opponent of continued Portuguese rule over the African colonies of Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea—found himself in the awkward position of asking for Salazar's help. Zambia needed Portuguese support, Kaunda wrote, in “confronting the present difficulties provoked by the retaliations of Rhodesia owing to the punitive economic measures of England”

“The stigma of piracy,” writes Sugata Bose, “has provoked heated historical and political debate without always shedding much new light on its meaning and substance.” As a stigma, it has not only misrepresented the morality and motives of so-called pirates, but has also succeeded in ascribing an air of criminality to their activities, in an absence of any law that would actually have made it so. Moreover, recounting the spectacles of piracy in world history once nourished a faltering vision of imperial triumph, in which the maritime violence of empires, particularly the British Empire, was seen to be a wonderful thing. Since then, naval history has run aground, while other historians have begun to confront some of the questions head on: what is a “pirate,” and what made its violence illegitimate relative to the power of sovereign states? Most important to the present article is questioning how piracy developed into a central pillar of maritime-imperial expansion. Was it, as Bose suggests, part of a wider “extraterritorial and universalist anticolonialism” within the Indian Ocean arena, or was it merely an oppositional fantasy that legitimised sea power against a ubiquitous and ill-defined foe?