In 1917 the three main protestant mission societies in the Netherlands, the Nederlandsch Zendelings-genootschap, the Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging and (in 1919) the Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging started a training school for future missionaries in a new building in Oegstgeest and amalgamated their archives and libraries. Later the Sangi- en Talaud Zending and the Java Comité joined too, adding their archives and libraries to the existing ones.

The archives have approximately the same origin as the library of the Hendrik Kraemer Instituut, i.e. the various missionary societies in the Netherlands whose activities have been taken over by the Board of Mission of the Netherlands Reformed Church in 1951. These are: the Dutch Missionary Society (Nederlands Zendelinggenootschap, founded in 1797), the Dutch Mission Union (Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging, 1858), the Utrecht Mission Union (Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging, 1859), the Java-Comité (1855), the Sangien Talaud-Comité (1887), the Centraal Comité Depok (1870), and, later, the Cooperating Mission Societies (Samenwerken.de Zendingscorporaties).

The Catholic Documentation Centre (KDC) was set up in 1969 by the Catholic University of Nijmegen. Its task is to collect, order and describe documentation on the Catholic life of the Netherlands in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and so to make it available for research. The Centre has three departments: an archive, a library and a so-called categorical documentation department.

The Interuniversity Institute for Missiological and Ecumenical Research (IIMO) is a Dutch cooperative venture for missiological and ecumenical studies. It was founded in 1969 and is officially recognized by the Minister of Education and Sciences as one of the thirteen interuniversity institutes in the Netherlands.

Dependency theory, which places responsibility for the underdevelopment of the peripheral zones of the world economy upon the North Atlantic core, might well be called a Latin American invention. It goes back, after all, to an article published in 1949 by the Argentine economist Raul Prebisch. Since that time, acceptance of the basic argument — which emphasizes intercontinental trade — has grown, also among historians. Economic dependence with respect to the North Atlantic world began during the colonial era, and forms the principal legacy of that period of Latin American history, according to Stanley and Barbara Stein's The Colonial Heritage of Latin America, first published in 1970 and now in its tenth printing.1 This view has it that economic dependence grew out of Spanish exploitation of American gold and silver, + maritime commerce in tropical plantation products. The entire Spanish colonial world in America would appear to have rested on these two pillars.

A couple of generations ago the historical process known as “the expansion of Europe” was regarded as a blessing for the whole human race. This, at least, was the majority view. Nationalists in the colonies held contrary opinions, hut what they said carried little weight in Europe. For four hundred years, the historians of the age of classical imperialism believed, Europe had been the giver, the colonial world the receiver. The mother-lands had “wrestled with the task of sharing their own civilization with the backward races of the globe”. A good start had been made, but there was much still to be done, and the duty of the colonized peoples was plain: they must continue to serve their apprenticeship until such time as they were ready to join the family of nations. Europe alone held the keys to law and order, advanced technology, efficiency in government, and the potential for progress. In its hand lay the future of the world. In the imperial age, few European historians, even those opposed to imperialism, doubted that the colonies would be ruled for a long time, perhaps indefinitely, by Europe.

It is often claimed that the absence, or bias, of sources makes the writing of a balanced history of women impossible. This kind of reasoning is not new. The same has been propounded about the writing of the history of the proletariat, colonized peoples and other downtrodden groups. When invited to contribute a paper on the women of ancient regime Batavia I was initially strongly reminded of this complaint1. Travel accounts that have come down to us in printed sources yield quite a substantial amount of information, as generations of visitors to early Batavia witnessed and described with astonishment the behaviour of the dark-skinned Portuguesespeaking consorts that made up the female side of Dutch colonial society in Batavia. Without exception their verdict was harsh. Chewing betel nuts, associating with their slavegirls and devoid of any intelligent conversation, not to speak of acceptable table manners, the Batavian daughters formed a laughing stock to European writers. Nothing would be easier than to present an anthology of these, often quite entertaining anecdotes. The dilemma of course that such an account would be one-sided and coloured if it were merely based on descriptions and explanations by males, outsiders who obviously did not belong to the world of women that we intend to study.

When it came to innovating ad hoc imperial structures in what the late John H. Parry called ‘The Age of Reconnaissance’, no European power could hold a candle to Portugal. It had one arrangement for the Atlantic islands, a modification of this pattern for Brazil; then it had another scheme for the African west coast and a different one for the Estado da India Oriental (which included the African east coast). Finally, as is known well enough, its relations with Macao and the Portuguese stations in Japan were again unique. Thus it was not particularly surprising to me when I discovered recently that besides all these, there was still another variant which nobody appears to have realized, one which fell somewhere between semi-rule and no rule at all. This was in the Bay of Bengal, and I only became aware of its special nature three years ago when I read of runaway soldados from Goa escaping to that region in the Reformação da Milicia e Governo da India of Francisco Rodrigues da Sil-veira. Later I visited Mylapore and became interested in the Indian east coast. Slowly, I began piecing the remarkable story together of how the entire bay area must be classified as a separate Portuguese colonial genus.

In this article a survey will be presented of the protestant mission activity of Dutch men and women, and of foreigners in the service of Dutch societies. It will concentrate on the missionaries themselves, not on the life of the Christian communities that have come into being through their work.

At the time of conquest, one of the major problems facing the French colonial administration was the massive number of slaves in West Africa. In some districts, they were as much as three fourths of the population. Early on, the slave trade was restricted. Slavery itself was a more complex problem. The administration wanted to ignore or, at best, regulate it, but from the first, the issue threatened embarrassment at home and social conflict in the colonies. The French depended on slave-owning elites to govern West Africa. The desire to protect their control over their slaves often tied these elites to the French. Slavery could not exist without the support of the state, but few colonial administrations dependent on metropolitan parliaments for their budgets could admit that openly. Local administrators were very hostile to any proposal to act against slavery, probably because they feared for their own safety. Both continuing enslavement and the frequent flight of slaves posed problems.

Historical studies of Christian missionaries in Africa have not prospered in recent years. The Journal of African History, which printed six articles on missionaries during the first ten years of its existence, has only printed two articles on the subject in the course of the last ten years. Only one book on missionaries has been published by a major university press in Britain or America since 1972. Very occasionally articles about missionaries appear in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and African Affairs but never in the Canadian Journal of African Studies or the Journal of Modern African Studies.