Western historiography has both turned its back on the Portuguese in the East after their ascendancy during the sixteenth century, and largely misunderstood the changed seventeenth-century realities of that presence. While scholars recognize how the missionary blueprint overtook the military one, the Portuguese population, particularly in areas outside official Crown control, in fact had very little to do with Europe, nowhere more so than in its racial composition. One might think of this entity as a “clan” or “tribe”. The internal social structure of this entity, and the reasons it was able to gain mass allegiance on the part of native populations, remains to be ascertained. This article examines how the “tribe” responded to two successive displacements as a result of the Dutch conquests of Melaka in 1641 and Makassar in the 1660s, considering why it moved to mainland South-East Asia and what this movement tells us about the group's dynamics.

This article describes the transformation of the Philippine currency system from a gold exchange standard to a dollar exchange standard during the first half of the twentieth century. During the American colonial period, Philippine foreign trade was closely bound to the United States. In terms of domestic investment, however, it was domestic Filipino or Spanish entrepreneurs and landowners who dominated primary commodity production in the Philippines, rather than American investors. How were both this US-dependent trade structure and the unique production structure of domestic primary commodities reflected in the management of the Philippine currency system? To answer this question, this article first discusses the introduction of the gold standard system in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. Second, the de facto conversion of the Philippine currency system from the gold standard to the dollar exchange standard in the 1920s is described, together with the mismanagement of the currency reserves and the debacle of the Philippine National Bank that functioned as the government depository of the currency reserves in the United States. Third, the formal introduction of the dollar exchange standard during the Great Depression is outlined, a clear example of the dependency of the Philippine currency system on the US in the 1930s.

Until a few decades ago, most labour histories did not bother to address women as workers in the domestic or public domain who contributed to a household income or the overall economy. Patriarchal spaces of historical discourse rendered women invisible (or effected distortions) that can only be contested by a rigorous study of women's unrecorded presence in the economy of the household and the broader domain of production. This article is an effort to understand the “being” and “doing” of women, and to map the interrelations of women and work over a vast historical span of time, beginning with women's writings on the theme of women and work and going on to plot women's agency historically in labour processes. In order to make the historical evidence more cohesive, it has been written with special reference to Peninsular India, while also drawing comparisons from the regions to the north of the Vindhya mountains that geographically and culturally mark the north–south divide.