Plans of eighteenth-century Indian houses, papers concerning the Dutch hospital at Cochin, Tamil texts inscribed on palm leaves, documents of Dutch institutions in India functioning under British rule, and numerous proclamations each drawn up in Dutch, Portuguese as well as Malayalam, reminding one of hundreds of Rosetta Stones, these are just a few examples of the largely unique documents that are referred to as the Dutch Records and are kept at the Tamil Nadu Archives in the South Indian city of Chennai (formerly known as Madras). These materials seem to comprise virtually all that remains of the archives that were left by the Dutch in India to be taken over by the British. (A large part of the original archives must have been lost in the course of time.) They consist of about 1,800 volumes and a couple of bundles (numbered 1 to 1763), stretch 64 metres, and date from the period between 1643 and 1852. The Dutch Records at Chennai in fact encompass the remnants of the archives of four factories set up by the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company), which all functioned as the headquarters of a kantoor (regional establishment): Cochin (headquarters of Malabar, modern-day Kerala), Nagapatnam and later Pulicat (Coromandel, present-day Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh), Surat (Surat, modern-day Gujarat), and Chinsura or Hooghly (Bengal). These four archives have different custodial histories and were apparently put together just because they were all created by VOC institutions and their legal successors.

The uniqueness of Siam in being the only independent Southeast Asian country in the age of nineteenth-century colonialism is a mantra that persists largely to this day. It held that it was the calibre of the Siamese monarchs in particular King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910), the fifth reign of the present regnant dynasty, which saved the country from succumbing to the powerful and predatory west. By continuing his father King Mongkut's (1851–1868) foresight in adopting an open door policy by signing the Bowring Treaty (1855) and reforming the country's administration in conformity to their model of government, the king gained the recognition by the Europeans of Siam as a civilised country. As a tribute to the king's greatness, in particular for his benevolent rule and pivotal reforms, the ‘colloquial, affectionate, yet awesome’ title ‘Lord of Life’ (chao chiwit) was used by his subjects especially around this period, according to the royal family historian writing in 1960 who was a grandson of King Chulalongkorn. In 2003, another direct descendant of the king wrote that it was no less the ‘Lord of Life, Lord of the Realm, the fountain and embodiment of moral and spiritual power itself who recognised that survival in the face of colonialism necessitated engagement in diplomacy and internal reforms. By dint of such enlightened measures, the Siamese polity was transformed and strengthened. in political history, the emphasis has been on the efficiency and good governance made possible by the modernising administrative system.

In Steinkopf, a former coloured Reserve in the Northern Cape Province, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingkerk (NGS; Dutch Reformed Mission Church), a former sub-branch of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK; Dutch Reformed Church) forged a legitimate public space for the expression of Nama identity in the 1960s. The legitimisation of aboriginal identity was not accidental, but very much an expression of apartheid policies of the day. I hope to demonstrate both the content and the consequences of this particular episode in Steinkopf, and thereby contribute to an understanding of the links between a crumbling capitalist infrastructure and the ideological efforts to reinforce that infrastructure through processes of ethnic strengthening. My claim is that the NGK played an ideological role supporting the capitalist interests as it strengthened the super-structural pillars of the segregation and apartheid eras.

The politics of coloured people in twentieth-century South Africa have generally been characterised as marginal from mainstream South African events. Correspondingly, attempts to initiate political developments along cultural or ethnic lines - emphasising Mama or Griqua identity, for example - have been noted primarily for their divisive and factional composition. Such writings focus on overt political action. They highlight either leaders’ involvement with, or opposition to, state structures; or the internal, often petty and frustrated conflicts between leaders, but fail to explain the marginalisation of coloured politics. But this emphasis on ‘the political’ removes from our gaze other, more productive avenues for understanding the identity of mixed-race people in South Africa. Political activity, for the Griqua, cannot be evaluated except through the lens of Christianity. Since religion promises to fulfil people's ambitions through redemption in the afterlife, Griqua-Christian ideas about overt political quests and active campaigning against discrimination - on either an individual or societal level - tended to be deemed unnecessary. As it was God who ultimately meted out punishments or rewards, Griqua people's energies were better used worshipping him. Nonetheless, these same Griqua people lived in the profane world in which - at least during the apartheid era - they were officially classified as ‘coloured’. Their struggles, based primarily on the need for official ethnic recognition as Griqua, were, in effect, political struggles. This partly Griqua, partly coloured identity enabled them considerable political flexibility and produced the complex social patterns explored below. A further distinction underpinning the Griqua-coloured ambiguity was that between inkommers (newcomers) and boorlings (people born to Griqua-town).

In 1983, a year which some might view as the high watermark of apartheid, a strange thing happened in Roodepoort, a town in the West Rand mining area, near Johannesburg. A Mrs van Rensburg, visiting a local, all-white school, realised that some of the children were starving. She gave them food. When she returned the next day, the childrens’ parents were sitting on the pavement in front of the school, waiting for a meal. Van Rensburg's husband, Leon, took on the task of feeding the parents and children on a regular basis. He was a man of extreme right wing sympathies and was to become active on the West Rand as a follower of Eugene Terreblanche's neo-Fascist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). By 1985, the AWB had initiated a nation-wide Volkshulpskema (People's Help Scheme). By 1988 the scheme was providing 14,000 meals a day for white children. On the West Rand, where Leon van Rensburg became organiser for the scheme, 2,000 children a day were being fed. The scheme was explicitly aimed at fostering racial solidarity. Leon van Rensburg told a journalist: These people need not be members of the AWB. They are Afrikaners. We help any white person, in spite of their political beliefs.’

As part of its attempt to understand ‘an apartheid of souls’, this volume is concerned to show how mission activity, particularly that of European-based churches with close links to the expansion of Dutch/Calvinist influence, may have nurtured the local construction of race or ethnic difference in Indonesian and South African society. One well-known account of Christianity in South Africa shows how the interaction between mission and missionised produced a sharply dichotomised sense - experienced by the Tshidi Tswana as the contrast between setsivana and segoa - of difference between indigenous and imported culture. While this shows how processes devoted to undermining it may paradoxically strengthen a sense of cultural identity, what it does not yield is a sense of how Christianity, appropriated within Tswana and other African societies, furnished a means of marking internal distinctions of social class, dovetailing in unexpected ways with ethnic difference. It is such divisions - potently fusing class with ethnicity and having crucial implications for the ownership, reclaiming, and use of land - with which the present paper is concerned.

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.