“Above all, we will put on record, that the Rechtsschool has not missed its target: the creation of independent (native) lawyers, who are aware of their position as independent judicial officers in the indigenous social relations.”

C.C. van Helsdingen,

Gedenkboek Rechtsschool 1929

When the Dutch introduced peace and order as the governing doctrine in the East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century, the network of colonial state institutions needed to project themselves as a unified, legitimate state with an authority to enforce justice. This state required a corps of jurists who embodied specific forms of subjectivity in order to maintain the projected authority. Educating natives as jurists offered the most economical means to staff the judiciary. This essay looks at legal education for Native elites as a colonial project of subject formation that was inseparable from colonial state formation. It does so by surveying three institutions in the Indies and the Netherlands between 1909 and 1939: the Batavia Rechtsschool, the Leiden United Faculty of Law and Letters, and the Batavia Rechtshoogeschool. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power and biopower in education and concepts from state theory, I argue that the pedagogical strategies and the legal education curricula in the Indies were deliberately designed to produce independent and critical Native jurists who were at the same time loyal to the Netherlands. The argument, thus, stands in contrast to literature that relies on early Foucault to construct education as a strictly normalising institution. I further suggest that although various state institutions did not unanimously agree on this ideal vision of Native jurists, they nevertheless tolerated it due to the urgent need to project the presence of a just state.

Using a variety of sources I focus my attention on two arenas of investigation: the vision of the ideal subjectivity to be embodied by Native jurists, and the technologies employed to achieve it. With this focus, I do not attempt to represent a comprehensive native point of view. Instead, I limit myself to examining the debates among Dutch educators and policy makers regarding proper legal education for the Native elites, the resulting policies as decreed in various ordinances, and the policies' implementation in the schools' curricula and pedagogy.

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.

Foreign/long-distance trade has been one of the most popular themes in socio-economic history. However, the perceptions that we have of the role played by international trade in economic development is highly dependent on the actors we are focussing on. The universal actors of trade include ship owners, captains, crews, cargo owners, investors, mediators, agents, dealers, and so on. These actors, however, tend to be treated much like “merchants.” In this study, we focus particularly on capital investors to clarify the practical institutions of foreign trade that came to be organised in pre-modern maritime East Asia.

In Japan, the pooling of capital seems to have started in the early stages of foreign trade, although it can be clearly observed only in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the advent of Sino–Japan trade on the ships authorised by the Ming dynasty. In this trade, merchants from Hakata and Sakai were particularly active in making investments, even though the nominal ship owners were the central government and/or powerful lords like the Ōuchi () and Hosokawa () family. This fact ensured that these two port cities emerged as the centres of capital pooling in Japan, and remained so till the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The form of investment, which is mainly associated with a particular part of Japan and which we try to clarify in this paper, has been called nagegane () in previous studies. The term nagegane usually refers to a type of investment wherein the payments are exempt in the case of a shipwreck; nagegane was utilised in the trades through Nagasaki during the seventeenth century. This exemption is very similar to cambio maritimo (bottomry), which was used in the medieval and pre-modern Mediterranean trade and transformed into prestamo à la gruesa (Spanish) or emprestimo ao risco (Portuguese), which was used in transoceanic Iberian trades.

Between 1905 and 1914, tens of thousands of Ukrainians from East Galicia worked legally as seasonal labourers in Germany each year. This channelling of labour was a reflection of both global trends and local East Galician national and socioeconomic relations. On the communal stage, this movement was a carefully organised operation led by the biggest Ukrainian political party before World War I, the National-Democratic Party (Natsionalno-Demokratychna Partiia, NDP). This article looks at the role of Ukrainian seasonal labour migration to Germany within the Ukrainian nationalist project in Austrian East Galicia. Specifically, it focuses on the information campaign run in the populist-conservative daily newspaper titled Dilo (Deed). Dilo was a primary source of advertisements offering the possibility of seasonal work in Germany. At the centre of this investigation is how this NDP daily reported on the progress of the migration and how it furnished an ideological justification for this shift of the labour force. Of particular interest are both the nationalist-moral and socioeconomic arguments used by Dilo to persuade Ukrainian peasants to go and seek seasonal jobs in Germany. It will be argued that the NDP's drive to send local Ukrainian peasants to Germany as seasonal labourers was presented to them as a way to further the Ukrainian cause, with the campaign itself being seen as a routine extension of nationalist concern and mobilisation. The article thus contributes to the analysis of Ukrainian nationalist economic agitation by drawing attention to the largely unexplored German imperial influence on the shaping of the Ukrainian identity before 1914.

Emigration from the German states was a mass phenomenon in the “long” nineteenth century. Much of this migration was of course labour migration, and German workers were very much on the move during the nineteenth century: in addition to the traditional Wanderschaft (travels) of journeymen, the century saw increasing internal migration within and between German-speaking lands, migration from rural areas to cities, and the participation of working people in emigration to destinations outside Europe. Over five million Germans left the German states from 1820 to 1914, with a large majority choosing the United States as their destination, especially in the earliest waves of migration. By comparison with the mass migration to North America, the flow of German migrants to the British colonies in Australia (which federated to form a single Commonwealth in 1901) was a relative trickle, but the numbers were still significant in the Australian context, with Germans counted as the second-largest national group among European settlers after the “British-born” (which included the Irish) in the nineteenth century, albeit a long way behind the British. After the influx of Old Lutheran religious dissidents from Prussia to South Australia in the late 1830s, there was a wave of German emigrants in the 1840s and 1850s, driven by the “push” factor of agrarian and economic crisis in the German states in the 1840s followed by the attraction of the Australian gold rushes and other opportunities, such as land-ownership incentives. While the majority of German settlers were economic migrants, this latter period also saw the arrival in the Australian colonies of a few “Forty-Eighters,” radicals and liberals who had been active in the political upheavals of 1848–9, some of whom became active in politics and the press in Australia. The 1891 census counted over 45,000 German-born residents in the Australian colonies.

Ayutthaya was a key transit port and a centre for the intra-Asian maritime trade in the early modern period. Consequently, Siam's international trade must have been transformed once the maritime trade in Asia changed on a large scale. This essay aims to offer a systematic picture of the changing trend in the maritime trade in the China Sea region, with particular emphasis on Ayutthaya's trade with Japan and China. To this end, the transition of the Siamese trade will be examined from the point of view of regional trade patterns and how these changed from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century.

This essay has two general purposes. First, it provides a multinational perspective for a comparative study of Japan and China's foreign trade. The second is to use this case study of the Siamese trade to examine the hypothesis posed by Leonard Blussé that the eighteenth century should be regarded as a “Chinese century.”

Keeping these aims in mind, I shall analyse the Siamese trade with Japan and China in the long run and after detailed investigation, propose a model for the triangular trade between Japan, China, and Siam.

With the expansion of Western power from the seventeenth century onward, many Asian countries were confronted with difficult political and economic problems in their relations with Europe. In several countries in Asia, in order to suppress Western cultural influences within their own nations, governments often employed foreigners as interpreters for their own diplomacy and trade with Europeans, with some governments even prohibiting their people from learning foreign languages.

But, in the case of Japan, interpreters played a crucial role in both the study of the Dutch language and the integration of Western knowledge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It seems that early-modern Japanese interpreters were quite different from the interpreters of Western languages in other countries in Asia, as in Nagasaki interpreters of the Dutch language were shogunate-appointed Japanese nationals.

Here I will examine and compare several aspects of the Chinese pidgin-English interpreters at Canton and the Japanese Dutch-language interpreters at Nagasaki, in particular their origins, incomes, duties, learning, and businesses. Through this examination I will demonstrate how the so-called Westernisation processes adopted in China and Japan were actually reflected in and represented by the different models of foreign trade at the ports of Canton and Nagasaki.

In order to “describe world history from a new angle,” Professor Haneda Masashi has set up the framework of “Comparative Studies on the Cross-cultural Contacts in Asian Port Cities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” One of the proposed points of comparison concerned communications between Europeans and local people and the indispensable role of interpreters, on whose work “the Dutch trade representatives relied utterly in their business and daily life” in Canton as well as Nagasaki.

Whereas Professor Yao Keisuke, elsewhere in this special issue, has emphasised the different roles of the interpreters in both port cities, Professor Haneda is more in favour of pointing out the similarities. He has identified state control of foreign trade, motivated by concerns over “security, social stability, and the prosperity of the state,” as a fundamental feature common to both countries in this period. Because of a clear distinction between the local people as “insiders” and Europeans as “outsiders,” the foreigners' activities were strictly controlled and contacts between locals and Westerners restricted to a minimum. The interpreters stood between both parties as mediators and were intentionally used by the authorities as “tools of control,” sometimes functioning as spies reporting on suspicious activities, but also acting as safety shields against direct Dutch confrontations or breaches of etiquette and protocol. Mechanisms to control the interpreters themselves were built in as well.

The Dutch East India Company was forced to move its factory in Japan from Hirado to Nagasaki by the order of the bakufu in 1641. Following that move, the Dutch were no longer allowed to freely go out into the city or to trade with city people. In order to have any contact with the people outside Deshima, they needed proper mediation of the Japanese officials. The interpreters (tolken, Oranda-tsūji, ) are well known as the intermediaries between the Japanese authorities and the Dutch residents of Deshima, but they were not the only ones who worked between the two sides. In this paper, I would like to deal with the Deshima Otona as the official responsible for the Dutch compound, and the compradoors, suppliers of the daily necessities for the Dutch factory, and to consider these officials within the context of the Nagasaki city system in order to compare this situation with that prevailing in Canton.

Otona literally means “head” or “chief” and indicates a prominent member who is in charge of a certain group. In the cities of Edo-period Japan, the townspeople were controlled through their organisation in groups, which were given a considerable amount of autonomy. These groups consisted, in their turn, of members who were officially recognised by both the group organisation itself and the lord of the domain in which the city was located, because they owned a house, ran a family business, and performed some kind of public service (kuyaku, ).

These few words were entered from time to time in the dagregisters, the official diaries kept by the heads of the Dutch East India Company trade in Canton and Nagasaki during their stay there. Fortunately, they do not occur too often, otherwise we would know far less about the lives and circumstances of the Dutch in China and Japan than we do. As it is, the dagregisters provide us with a wealth of information on a wide range of topics ranging from commercial matters, social and trade relations between Europeans and East Asians, political matters, the importation and use of Western technology and medicine in Japan, natural disasters, crimes, and, very important, the weather. The entries in the dagregisters recorded what happened on the day and they give us descriptions, sometimes in great detail, of the activities of the Dutch and their fellow Europeans in Canton and Nagasaki and of their interactions with their Chinese and Japanese hosts. They are the best sources for an understanding of the patterns of everyday life of the Dutchmen in the foreign settlements in the port cities of Canton and Nagasaki.

The instruction to keep dagregisters (diaries) dates back as far as 1621, when the Heren Zeventien (the Gentlemen Seventeen, the board of governors of the Dutch East India Company in the Netherlands) wrote to the governor-general and councillors of the Indies in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), the VOC headquarters in Asia: “We think it necessary that not only in the General Comptoir [Office] in Batavia, but also in those in the Moluccas, Amboina, Banda, Patani, Japan, Jambi, Paliacatta, and Surat, in sum, in all those places where we have offices, our people keep a daily journal of everything that happens there and concerns our people, both in regard to the English, as to any other people, whoever it may be, in any way.