On 4 January 1836, less than two and a half years after Parliament abolished slavery in British colonies, John Gladstone, Liverpool merchant and father of William Ewart Gladstone, dictated a letter to his nephew at the Calcutta shipping agency Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co. Gladstone explained that he had heard that the firm had recently sent ‘a considerable number of a certain class of Bengalees, to be employed as labourers, to the Mauritius’, and that he was interested in exploring the possibility of making similar arrangements for certain colonies in the West Indies, where he himself owned sugar plantations.

In 1637 Hans Putmans, having just retired as governor of the Dutch East India Company's Taiwan comptoir, set out from the East Indies to return to Holland. During the long voyage home he composed a report about his last year as governor, describing how he had expanded the Company's control over large parts of the island's hinterlands. He himself had led Dutch troops against the town of Mattau, one of the most powerful aboriginal towns of Taiwan, and against the towns of Soulang and Taccareangh. The results of his expeditions were, he wrote, spectacular: ‘Through the […] guidance and will of God, [the conquest] was easily accomplished, and, since they had never before seen such a manner of war, our authority and respect among these blind heathen was extended and raised to such a point that not only the towns of Soulangh, Backeluan, […] Taccareijangh, […] and Mattau presented their lands to the Dutch state, but also Pangsoia, Tapouliang, and many other towns in the area’. In all some twenty aboriginal towns sought peace with the Company after Putmans' expeditions, a huge increase in the Company's holdings on Taiwan. When, in 1929, Putmans had taken his oath of office, his job had been to run a small trading factory on the island's coast, a base from which the Company could profit from the rich China trade. The subjugation of these twenty towns abruptly changed his job, and changed the Company's mission on Taiwan: How were these towns to be administered?

Once recommended by A.G. Hopkins as a ‘profitable subject of future research’, the European liquor trade in West Africa has since then received considerable attention from scholars. While Lynn Pan examined the region in a broad survey of the African liquor trade, other scholars have focused on more specific aspects of the topic. To be sure, much of the literature has concentrated on the ideological controversy between the defenders and opponents of the European liquor traffic. Other aspects of the subject, however, such as the significance of the liquor traffic in the Anglo-German commercial rivalry in West Africa liquor prohibition as colonial policy in largely-Muslim territories, and the fiscal importance of liquor – both spirits and beer – in the colonial and post-independence states, have been examined in various studies.

The founding of a coastal trading factory at Kayalpatnam in south-eastern India in 1645 initiated a period of nearly a century of cross-cultural contacts between representatives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Nayaka state of Madurai. Traditionally this area has received little attention in both Dutch and Indian colonial historiography. While Company historians have tended to focus on either Coromandel or Ceylon, the main centres of VOC activity in the region, their Indian counterparts have concentrated on the epic struggle of the Mughals with the Deccan sultanates, and subsequently the Marathas, during this time period. In the true spirit of the great chartered companies, one historian has held a virtual monopoly in the field for more than two decades, from the late fifties to the early eighties. Only recently have other (ethno)historians, anthropologists, indologists, and sociologists turned their attention to the area south of the Kollidam (Coleroon) River and east of the Western Ghats.

In surveying the negative effects of the expansion of Europe it seems difficult to find an area which was worse affected than the Caribbean. The autochthonous population of Amerindians had been decimated on a scale unknown elsewhere. Rather than becoming an attractive refuge for migrant Europeans, the Caribbean became the home of plantation agriculture, which ruthlessly destroyed the existing environment and small scale farming. To top it all, the Caribbean plantations needed a constant influx of labourers. The success of Caribbean exports created a paradox: the region was in constant and increasing need of manpower while at the same time the number European migrants was decreasing rapidly

Taiwan is strategically situated within East Asia, but little is known of it until the sixteenth century. The Chinese spread far and wide throughout Asia even before the Christian era, but allowed this large and fertile island lying so close to the Mainland to remain in relative obscurity until the middle of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The cause of this isolation is that Taiwan had no large quantities of marketable products to attract traders and that the island still lay outside the network of Asian trade routes of the time.

Conventional accounts of economic links between the North Atlantic nations (USA/Europe) and Mexico state that the Europeans clearly dominated Mexican foreign trade in the first decades after national independence while the United States only achieved significance in Mexico's import-export trade in the Porfiriato during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Such studies suggest that the United States only gradually discovered an interest in Mexico so that in previous decades the Europeans ruled the field unchallenged. It is generally overlooked that from quite early on Mexico was a part of North American foreign and trade policy because of geopolitical and economic considerations. The geopolitical component was the result of the geographic proximity of Mexico to its northern neighbour; the economic ties due to Mexico's silver mines, the intensive smuggling between North and South from the outset, and the constant increase in trade volume.

In the two final decades of the nineteenth century, Spain introduced a number of measures promoting Spanish economic interests in the Philippines which culminated in a protectionist tariff established in 1891. As a consequence, Spain's trade with the archipelago rose unprecedentedly, particularly evident in the import of textiles and other manufactured goods. Through their neo-mercantilist policies, ‘the Spanish were able to recover something of their former economic position in their own colony’, that they in the course of the nineteenth century had lost to foreign, particularly British, competitors.

Even before the abolition of slavery on 1 February 1835, planters on Mauritius had begun to look for free agricultural labourers to work their estates. By the early 1830s, it had become apparent that the local slave population was inadequate to meet the labour needs of the colony's rapidly expanding sugar industry, and the long-term availability of this soon-to-be emancipated work force was also increasingly open to question as the decade progressed. The Act of Abolition promised owners the services of their former slaves, now transformed into ‘apprentices’, as agricultural labourers, but only for a period of six years. Some planters no doubt suspected that the apprenticeship system might come to an end earlier than scheduled, as indeed was to happen in 1839. Others had good reason to suspect that many, if not most, of their apprentices would leave the plantations upon their final emancipation, as indeed they subsequently did. Faced with these realities, Mauritian planters dispatched their agents as far afield as China, Singapore, Ethiopia and Madagascar to search out supplies of inexpensive labour. Their gaze returned continually, however, to the relative close and seemingly inexhaustible manpower of India.

In the languages of the Iberian Peninsula, there is a word unknown to other Romance languages: arbitrista. This term denotes a person who invents often impractical plans and projects to improve the general financial, political or social situation in his country, presenting them unsolicitedly to his government. The species was particularly prolific in the seventeenth century, when the term arbitrista became more or less synonymous to day-dreamer. In this field Spanish historiography even boasts of a specific bibliography of over seven hundred pages, composed by Evaristo Correa Calderón, entitled: Registro de arbitristas, economistas y reformadores españoles, 1500–1936: Catälogo de impresos y manuscritos (Madrid 1981). There even existed the sub-species of colonial arbitristas, with well known authors like Francisco Rodrigues Silveira (Reformaçao da Milícia e Governo do Estado da Índia Oriental), and Jacques de Coutre (Como Remediar o Estado da Índia?).

Travel in search of a better future is an essential part of human history. This paper will examine one aspect of this phenomenon, that of migrating labourers, focusing on the migration and mortality of Javanese and Chinese labourers to the East Coast of Sumatra from 1869 to 1930. One of the goals of this investigation will be to better understand the condition in which they lived. The rate of mortality among Javanese and Chinese labourers is still based on appropriations, because previous scholarship focussed primarily on labour conditions on the plantations and not on the real evidence of mortality of the labourers. Perhaps this is because documentation in the early part of the period is incomplete and hard to come by. It is obvious, however, that from the outset of the plantation society, mortality was high. In Koelies, Planters en Koloniale Politiek, Jan Breman estimated that on Sumatra's East Coast one out of three or four coolies died before his contract had ended. However, reports of hospitals in the area are a source for new evidence about the mortality of the labourers in the early years of their recruitment. This paper will present this evidence.

During the past few decades, many scholars have studied the various demographic consequences of European overseas expansion. One focus of attention has been the fatal impact of European expansion on the native populations of the New World. Before contact with Europeans, the native populations of the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific were generally free of infectious diseases, and so lacked immunity to diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, which were introduced by Europeans. A second focus of attention has been the mortality among Europeans when they went overseas and encountered new diseases, such as malaria, yellow fever, and cholera, to which they had no immunity. And a third focus of attention has been the mortality among various African, Asian, and Pacific Islander labourers when they were procured as slaves or indentured servants for work on European plantations in various parts of the world.