Fukuyama's thesis of the end of history evoked a great deal of attention because it seemed to provide the ideological foundation for a new round of US hegemony, the ideological gloss for a new American assertiveness. The mood in US debates at the time had been pessimistic, while global political realities, in particular the weakening of the Soviet Union, provided opportunities for a new American assertiveness. Setting forth an ideological stance for the post-Cold War political dispensation, Fukuyama's essay filled the ideology gap.

Regularly, with the ships coming with the monsoon, the Governor-General and the councillors at Batavia received information from their subordinates from all over Asia. The Council of the Indies consisted of older members of the Company's bureaucracy, men who had served in several posts before being nominated to this ultimate position of honour. Together in council they constituted the best informed body on Asian affairs, in the East, as well as in the West. As a body they were responsible for the formulation of the generate missiven, the general letters in which the Heren Zeventien (Gentlemen Seventeen) were briefed on the state of affairs. The missiven had to be signed by all, dissent was not permissable. According to a a set pattern, all factories were dealt with in the same fashion. Any member of the council in principle would have been able to make an overview of the differing areas in which the Company was active. If any, they seem to have been the people able to make a comparison of the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago. The following is an attempt to show what insights might have been expected from an interview with an elder servant of the ‘honourable Company’.

The discovery of an official report, so far unpublished, about coolie scandals on the plantations on Sumatra's East Coast around the year 1900, motivated me to produce a full-length book on this theme. My original intention had been merely to write a short introduction to the publication of a shocking historical document. However, I changed my mind when it became obvious that proper understanding of the source required more background information on the social and policy framework within which the plantation system operated. This applied both to conditions on the estates themselves and to the evaluation of those affairs by official and non-official outsiders. The main aim of my study is to contribute to the historiography of industrial labour in Southeast Asia. However, it also analyses die linkage that came about between capitalist industry and colonial policy in a region that formed part of the so-called Outer Provinces of die Netherlands Indies.

In the Summer of 1492 Christopher Columbus, a Genovese navigator, looks at the contracts he has just concluded with the queen of Castile. On first reading, these documents seem to be ordinary commercial contracts. The navigator agrees to explore, in the service of his contracting partners, new trade routes on the vast and uncharted waters of the Atlantic. His contracting partners will finance the venture. In return for his services the navigator will get a fair share of the future profits and extensive privileges over the unknown lands that he might discover on his voyage. Similar contracts are known, yet none would have such far reaching consequences as the contracts between the navigator Christopher Columbus and his contracting partners, the Catholic Kings Isabel of Castile and Leon and Fernando of Aragon.

Most of the historians of medieval India have been interested in the political, administrative and economic aspect of the period, while some have exhibited fondness for religious and cultural history, albeit in a limited sense. Of late, new sectors of study have been explored: for example, the development of technology during the medieval period.

Our knowledge of colonial Brazilian demography is appallingly low. European migration to Brazil remains a particularly neglected topic. It is no small irony that the migration of African slaves to Portuguese America is better documented than free white immigration. Surprisingly, reliable information is perhaps scarcest for the eighteenth-century gold-rush period when immigration to Brazil preoccupied Crown and treasure seekers alike. The manner of social and physical conditions which pushed individuals and families from their homes, the numerical ebb and flow of settlement patterns, even the simple mechanics of transport to the colony, remain caught inside a nebulous swirl of mythology, conjecture, and impressionistic conclusions. After two and a half centuries historians have scarcely gone beyond Antonil's oft quoted comment that ‘lured by the insatiable thirst for gold, a large quantity of Portuguese and foreigners arrive each year on the fleet heading to the mines […] the mixture is of every condition of people: men and women, young and old, poor and rich, nobles and plebeians, laymen and clerics, and friars from various orders, many of whom possess neither house nor convent in Brazil’.

The motto I wrote at the top of this address and that I quoted just now is quite ordinary. But what else would a British civil servant, unmarried, note in his diary at a quiet post at the foot of the Himalayas? What fascinating details for that matter does one expect to find in the papers left behind about British Indian colonial relations in this century and the last? What indeed should a newly appointed professor tell you about them which is more than just curious or half exotic, and which, buried in the past as they have been for decades, would moreover only be appropriate at a Dutch university that refuses to withdraw into a hedgehog position called ‘Europe’?

Recent decades have witnessed a growing awareness of the need to study the impact of the New World on the Old, instead of the other way about. Yet surprisingly little is known about the whereabouts of books on America, or of atlasses and maps of this new world, in the libraries of European intellectuals from, say, 1500 until 1700 (the same holds true, incidentally, for texts about Asia). A possible explanation for this state of affairs might be that it is easier, although difficult enough, to compile a reliable bibliography of printed sources on America, as the splendid European Americana amply proves, than to ascertain what books figured in private libraries which are no longer intact. Furthermore, research into the private libraries of the past is still a somewhat modest sector of the province of intellectual history, in spite of the fact that Mario Schiff's brilliant study of the Marqués de Santillana's library dates from 1905 and that Henri-Jean Martin's seminal works have been published since 1958.