The aim of this article is to analyse the on-the-spot interaction between agents of the Dutch West India Company and Danish African Company and African rulers on the Gold Coast from 1657 to 1662. The region saw a surge in European activity and rivalry in this period. The Scandinavian trading companies have received less scholarly attention compared to the Dutch and the English. The Danish African Company was an undercover Dutch enterprise, and has traditionally been studied from a purely Dutch or Danish standpoint. However, by combining Dutch and Danish sources and focusing on Dutch opposition to “Danish” activity on the Gold Coast, which incorporated local rulers, the author has challenged nationalistic and Eurocentric approaches in the historiography. Moreover, by concentrating on the forgotten but nonetheless strategically important site of Akong, the author identifies how local dynamics influenced the evolution of the Dutch and Danish maritime empires.

Facing the crisis of a colony at war, Harriet Gore Browne experienced a crisis of mind as the wife of a governor heavily criticized for acting unjustly and illegally in provoking a racial conflict. Analysing the intimacies of power, the article depicts the doubts, pain and haunting pressure of violence on those proximate to as well as subject to imperial authority. Harriet Gore Browne’s intense scrutiny of her own and her husband’s actions expose an interior questioning of the legitimate use of force against indigenous resistance. The pain running through Harriet Gore Browne’s journals, tormenting her days and nights, speaks to the centrality of race, emotion and the intimate in colonial rule.

This article examines the illustrated pamphlet Ongeluckige voyagie, van’t schip Batavia (Unlucky voyage of the ship Batavia) and its representation of a 1629 shipwreck off the coast of western Australia, followed by mutiny and the massacre of many survivors. The pamphlet was published in Amsterdam in 1647, and included fifteen (six full-page) fine copper engravings. It was very popular, helping to shape a new genre of shipwreck narrative and expressing the preoccupations of contemporary visual culture. The pamphlet’s illustrations translated new conceptualisations of space emerging from the period’s unique collaboration between cartography and art into popular form within a booming Dutch print culture. Through innovative techniques of montage and vignette these engraved images conveyed the narrative’s drama and affirmed principles of morality, honour, and order. While the era’s spectacular violence now seems very far away, these historical images effectively communicate the contemporary relish of the disaster to modern audiences. This “earliest of Australian books” is sometimes offered as an alternative Australian foundation myth, and the Batavia disaster continues to grow in cultural significance. Now as then, these illustrations provide a vivid counterpoint to its audience’s comfortable lives.

This article uses the 1898 manslaughter trial of two Indian medical practitioners in Victoria, Australia, as a lens to explore the settler colonial politics of medicine. Whereas imperial and colonial historians have long recognised the close and complex interrelationship of medicine and race, the emotional dimensions to care-giving have been under-appreciated – as has the place of the emotions within wider histories of sickness and health. Yet, this case studies shows, grief, vulnerability, catharsis and pride shaped the practice of medicine in fin-de-siecle Victoria. In particular, I argue that, like other emotions, grief does racial work.

This article takes a single moment—a court case that took place in Zanzibar in 1910—and uses it to explore the legal imaginaries that circulated around the Western Indian Ocean at the height of British imperialism. It stitches together the actions of litigants, the utterances of qadis, and the proclamations of jurists, reading them alongside the silences in the legal material itself to bring to life a world of law, mobility, and imagination. More broadly, it suggests that through the exploration of parallel but never fully intersecting legal encounters in South Arabia and East Africa that emerged from a single moment, historians might use micro-level discourses and actions to make claims about macro-level phenomena.

Catechisms, Bibles, and other printed works were critical for the successful plantation and growth of Dutch religion and culture in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. This essay examines the provision, regulation, and various controversies surrounding religious books and pamphlets in that period. Under the joint supervision of the West India Company and the Dutch Reformed churches of the Netherlands, colonial clergy were supposed to teach everyone from Company soldiers and officers to European settlers, from Africans and African slaves to Native Americans. And the clergy certainly had some missionary achievements, especially where the Company’s power was greatest. However, colonial clergy and churches also faced tremendous difficulties and fell short of their original plans and goals. Studying the different tools they had at their disposal—studying the creation (and destruction) of their printed materials—helps us see the church’s own culpability in these difficulties and failures. Early seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism was restrictive enough and the churches of the Netherlands worried enough about deviance and heterodoxy that they unintentionally undermined their own mission and reduced the Dutch footprint overseas.

This article uses a legal case from the French Indian Ocean empire during the American Revolutionary War (ca. 1778–1780) to explore the operation of mobile legal spaces: that is, law-filled spaces that moved (such as ships) or which were highly shaped by movement in and out of them (ports). These types of spaces, characteristic of early modern seaborne European empires, created distinctive problems and opportunities for those navigating imperial rule, both rulers and ruled. In particular, the essay argues that the mobility of legal spaces added significant spatial and temporal dimensions to the well-known legal diversity and pluralism of the early modern world. In mobile spaces, legal regimes might overlap or conflict temporarily, be relevant for only a fixed period of time, or come into force when a ship reached a particular location. Recognising the ubiquity of these mobile legal spaces and the powerful effects that they had can change how we understand the functioning of law in colonial empires.

This article argues that while immigration exclusions of those considered undesirable were clearly set out by legislation, the subjectivity of the immigration officer was an important aspect of implementation. Drawing on the diaries and personal letters of the officer based at Cape Town, the article focuses on his emotions as he went about his daily life and moved between different intimate city spaces – home, church, docks and office. Bringing together his social world with his world of work, the article argues that what the immigration officer considered desirable in his personal life influenced how he conducted his work at the port.

This article examines the claims of Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials in the mid-eighteenth century regarding the Islamic source of a legal code prepared for the local population in Semarang, northeast Java. Although the VOC had encountered local legal cultures in Indonesia since the mid-seventeenth century, it preferred to circumvent those in favour of European laws whenever possible. But in the eighteenth century, VOC officials addressed indigenous legal systems more directly when the company sought possibilities for direct control. This resulted in the production of many codes on the legal status of Muslim and Chinese subjects of Indonesia. In the process of codification, some officials claimed to have consulted Islamic legal texts and Muslim jurists. One criminal code that came out of the effort supposedly took its rulings accurately from the Mugharrar, which is possibly the Muḥarrar written by the Islamic jurist ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1226). I argue that this assertion is baseless, and demonstrate that the very pretense is part of a larger colonial project that sought legitimacy from the indigenous subjects at a time of political and economic crises.

This essay revisits the events surrounding one of the most emblematic instances of colonial violence, namely the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, through the diary of an Englishwoman, Mrs. Melicent Wathen. Where most histories of the Amritsar Massacre emphasize British brutality and Indian suffering, Melicent’s experience was instead characterized by fear and the uncertainty of what became a headlong flight from Empire. Her diary thus offers an intimate account of colonial crisis. If we are to engage comprehensively with the lived experience of empire, the forms and functions of colonial fears and anxieties must be acknowledged; not because colonial panics were caused by real threats, which often they were not, but because they played such a crucial role in shaping colonial policies and in framing the relationship between rulers and ruled.

The Portuguese Empire was the stage for one of the largest movements of enslaved people during early modern times. Almost two millions enslaved humans were violently carried from Africa in Portuguese vessels in the eighteenth century alone. Yet, in contrast to British or French slave traders based in Europe, for which a vast literature is available, little is known about the Lisbon traders. This paper aims at filling this gap by paying attention to the trajectory of two Lisbon slave traders: Domingos Dias da Silva and José António Pereira. In recounting their biographies and their business in Africa, Brazil, and Asia, we draw attention to the active role Lisbon-based slave traders played in the financing, organisation, and carrying of slave traffic, as well as the different institutional conditions they confronted when profiting from the commerce in humans. Domingos Dias da Silva became a key state contractor in spite of his poor origins, while Pereira featured as a global broker, connecting different markets in four continents. These two agents and their diverse characteristics help shed light on the slave trade, the context in which it expanded, and on the people who conducted this infamous commerce.

This article examines diverse practices in the establishment of marriage partnerships in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka,1 parts of which were controlled by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Family law was an area in which the attempt to transform local practices was conspicuously present, but not fully achieved. Lawful marriage was linked to conversion to Dutch Protestantism and to inheritance of property. In the authoritative space of the provincial board that heard the matrimonial disputes examined in this article, the Company did not proactively attempt to reform family life, an area where it could not easily dictate terms. It made a significant dent as the requirement for marriage registration was recognised by natives. But the limited reach of the introduced law is evident in the Company’s reluctant recognition that its two-step process of reading the banns and subsequent marriage ceremony created confusion and that locals still followed customary practices for forging unions. The VOC faced a normative order in the villages that was characterised by ritual underpinnings. Such local features went unrecognised in official law rules, but their perseverance is testimony to the pluralities in practice in an early colonial encounter in the Indian Ocean world.

Whereas seventeenth-century piracy has been recognised as an integrated component of the developing European Atlantic world, eighteenth-century pirates have been marginalised as an isolated group with few ties to landed communities. Such evaluations have stressed the heightened extension of state authority to the colonial theatre in the eighteenth century and, by doing so, have overlooked how pirates continued to interact with colonial actors operating in contested and unclaimed regions throughout the Atlantic commons. It is imperative that the Atlantic commons is given full consideration in any discussion of Atlantic maritime activity as it was within these expanses that inter-imperial, inter-colonial, and cross-border colonial actors converged. This article utilises the piratical voyage captained by Howell Davies (and later Bartholomew Roberts) to demonstrate that it was within this commons that eighteenth-century piratical voyages were sustained and facilitated through the forced acquisition of supplies, through markets for plundered goods, and through the opportunities available for dispersing amongst landed communities at the end of expeditions. Continued connections between colonial denizens and pirates in the eighteenth century compels a reassessment of pirates’ isolation to instead place them within the wider population of coastal traders, sojourning mariners, and marginal colonial settlers who existed both within and outside of the imperial framework espoused by state and colonial centres. Ultimately, this questions the overall ability of European states to regulate maritime traffic when vessels sailed out of sight of established colonial ports, and beyond the practical reach of imperial authority.

This essay examines letters of petition sent by failed white settlers in South Africa to the British Governor General. These letters comprise a particular discursive genre that combine aspects of both private and public. The key to their success was controlled emotion: petitioners had to present their distress in such a way as to excite the exercise of compassion. Allowing subversive or stray emotions to enter a letter was bound to undermine a petitioner’s appeal. Reading this epistolary corpus critically allows us to understand the discursive strategies by which colonials claimed a sentimental attachment to Britain, the empire and, indeed, the Governor General himself.

Through an institutional approach and by focusing on long-term developments, this article offers a genealogy of the pluralistic character of the landraad (regional colonial court) in colonial Java. It argues that the pluralistic landraden—consisting of a Dutch president, Javanese judges, a local prosecutor, and Islamic and Chinese advisers—were crucial to the process of colonial state formation. This long-term process reflects continuities rather than rupture and change between the era of the VOC and the nineteenth-century developing colonial state. The spatial sites of the landraden reveal not only the conflicts between several layers, institutions, and individuals in the process of colonial state formation but also the importance of local actors in this process. Local dynamics as well as tensions between the various layers of the colonial state, which were striving either for uniformity or for the maintenance of local pluralities, provide insights into the complex formation processes of dual rule from below.

The article builds on a succession of visually disturbing events that occurred in Goa—the capital city of Portuguese India—during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From the early years of the Portuguese conquest (1510), Goa went through a redefinition of its urban space, which implied the appropriation and re-semantization of buildings and other key sites of the old Muslim city. This process included the spread of images and symbols related to several Portuguese viceroys, soon-to-be targets of acts of political insult and even political iconoclasm performed by their Portuguese opponents in a context of growing factionalism. We speak namely of episodes of protest against places of memory associated to different clans, encompassing statues (both official and bogus), textual inscriptions, and viceroys’ portraits. These were European phenomena to a large extent, but coloured by significant local and native elements. The article engages with a grid of questions that places real statues, satirical effigies, and erased faces (and the diverse reactions they have aroused) in dialogue with current debates on popular politics; high and low vis-à-vis the colonial social fabric; the uses of public space; verbal, written, and visual insult; political languages; and disputed authority in an imperial setting.