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.

This article analyses the physical and discursive displacement of Malay Muslim advocates of a cosmopolitan and multiracial form of Malayan citizenship from the arena of “legitimate” national politics between the Second World War and the mid-1950s. It discusses the trajectory of the Malayan Left during this period, with a special focus on the work of Abdullah C. D., a Malay Muslim leader of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Abdullah's work included helping to build the Malay Nationalist Party of Malaya (PKMM) under the MCP's United Front strategy from 1945, creating the MCP's Department of Malay Work in 1946, and establishing the Tenth Regiment of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) in 1949. This work was essential to the MCP's outreach to Malay Muslims after Malaya's failed national revolution, which collapsed into racial conflict without achieving independence for the British colony. The Malayan Emergency was declared in 1948, and its military and social campaigns eliminated or displaced the MCP's leadership and much of the MNLA, including Abdullah and the rest of the Tenth Regiment, to Thailand by 1954. Despite his continued engagement with political movements in Malaya, Abdullah's vision for a new politics for Malay Muslims was effectively displaced into the realm of nostalgia. His ideas, outlined in MNLA pamphlets and periodicals like Tauladan (Exemplar), never made significant inroads in Malaya, whose racial state the Emergency re-established, using race to manage the threat to its interests posed by leftist politics.

Feeding into current debates on ethnic identities in colonial South Asia, this article questions to what extent Dutch institutions articulated and impacted social categories of people living in coastal Sri Lanka during the eighteenth century. A thorough analysis of three spheres of Dutch bureaucracy (reporting, registering, and litigating) makes it clear that there was no uniform ideology that steered categorisation practices top-down throughout the studied colonial institutions. Rather, the rationale of the organisation as such affected the way people were classified, depending to a large extent on what level of bureaucracy individuals were dealing with, and what the possible negotiation strategies were for the people recorded. Future research should perhaps not ask “when” certain ethnicities were “made up,” but strive to understand the process in which they were created, the institutional contexts in which they were recorded, and how changing bureaucratic practices not only articulated, but also transformed, social categories in the long run.

The study of Islam and Muslims in relation to local non-Muslim population and their religious beliefs and social practices in medieval India has often tended to be conducted eventually along two lines, seemingly opposed to each other. On the one hand, there are communal historians who have reduced the history of medieval India into the conflict between Hindus and Muslims, which they have projected as having resulted from their divergent religious outlooks. The period was Islamic in their view, and the state a conversion machinery and an organ to bring Hindus under the hegemony of Islam. This was a mission in which the state could not succeed fully, largely because of ‘Hindu’ resistance. On the other hand, there are a large number of ‘liberal’ historians to whom the hallmark of medieval Indian society has been an amity between the two communities, the various tensions and encounters over economic and political matters notwithstanding. The medieval period, in the opinion of such historians, saw the evolution and efflorescence of a composite culture to which medieval rulers, nobles, sufis and Persian and Urdu poets contributed significantly. The later animosity between Hindus and Muslims and clashes over religious matters, they argued, were the handiwork of the British.

The history of slavery is by no means untouched, and there are now even ambitious global histories of the phenomenon in print. On the other hand, it is clear that much of the literature on this sombre side of human society has concentrated on the Transatlantic slave trade and non-free labour in the Americas. The relative wealth of documents in Western languages has presumably contributed to give the historiography of slavery a Western centre of gravity, coupled with the fact that the early modern Americas were restructured into settlement colonies. This made slavery a motor of socio-economic change in a more pronounced way than in Asian societies. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that the handling of slaves in an Asiatic context has been less thoroughly treated in the extant academic literature. It seems that aspects of Asian slavery have not fit well into the preconceptions of Asianists, or have at least been relegated to the margins of social history.

Decolonization influenced the rise of environmental activism and thought in Australia and South Africa in ways that have been overlooked by national histories of environmentalism and imperial histories of decolonization. Australia and South Africa’s political and cultural movement away from Britain and the Commonwealth during the 1960s is one important factor explaining why people in both countries created more, and more important, public indigenous botanic gardens than anywhere else in the world during that decade. Effective decolonization from Britain also influenced the rise of indigenous gardening and the growing popularity of native gardens at a critical period in gardening and environmental history. Most facets of contemporary gardening—using plants indigenous to the site or region, planting drought-tolerant species, and seeing gardens as sites to help conserve regional and national flora—can be dated to the 1960s and 1970s. The interpretation advanced here adds to historical research tracing how the former Commonwealth settler colonies experienced effective decolonization in the same era. This article expands the focus of research on decolonization to include environmentalism. The interpretation of the article also augments national environmental histories that have hitherto downplayed the influence of decolonization on the rise of environmentalism. Putting decolonization into the history of the rise of environmental thought and action sheds light on why people in contemporary Australia and South Africa are so passionate about protecting indigenous flora and fauna, and so worried about threats posed by non-native invasive species.

On 21 March 1956, the French Overseas Minister, Gaston Defferre, addressed the Assemblée Rationale, presenting a project with especially far-reaching implications. A loi-cadre was planned in order to enable a greater degree of participation by the indigenous populations in the sub-Saharan African overseas territories. The responsibility of the local Assemblées Territoriales was to be increased in various fields. Conseils de Gouuemement were proposed, with the objective to allow Black African politicians to have a role in the territorial executive. Defferre exhorted the deputies to prevent by their vote a development of the tropical African territories in the style of the Maghreb or Indochina. His speech seemed to impress the members of the chamber. At the occasion of two ballots, on 23 March and on 23 June 1956, his bill passed with a comfortable majority.

Ever since its publication in 1966, Tussen Neutraliteit en Imperialisme (‘Between Neutrality and Imperialism’) has been the standard work on Dutch policy towards China between 1863 and 1901. In this study the author, F. van Dongen, stresses the adherence to neutrality towards the strong European neighbour states as the fundamental guideline for Dutch foreign policy, not only within Europe but also in the Far East. This policy stemmed from the fact that the European balance-of-power system had been extended to China in the late nineteenth century, through the participation of most European states in imperialist policies concerning that country. According to Van Dongen this adherence to neutrality slowed down imperialist tendencies, as the Netherlands were anxious to avoid entering in conflicts between the great powers, but at the same time the Dutch were forced to ‘play a modest part in the common Western policy towards China’. Whenever the great powers took a united stand the Netherlands must follow suit. So as a result of its European policy the Netherlands joined the imperialist powers in China, although usually careful not to take the initiative. The Netherlands were, therefore, classified by Van Dongen as a reluctant and generally passive element of imperialism in China: ‘the Dutch were at worst accessories after the fact’. Finally he concluded that whenever Dutch actions concerning China ‘savoured of imperialism, this was not the result of a deliberate policy to exercise control over the empire or to obtain Chinese territory, but an almost accidental by-product of the general aim of promoting the Netherlands’ economic interest'.

The European overseas enterprises that began to push into Asian waters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were maritime organisations geared towards commerce and seaborne warfare. As such, they looked very different from the powerful territorial states like Mughal India that traditionally dominated early modern Asia, and they were able to create a new kind of empire consisting of a network of fortified ports and trading centres connected by long sea routes. The construction of these empires was initially driven and subsequently sustained by maritime technology. To borrow Carlo Cipolla's words, guns, sails, and empire were always bound tightly together in this period. European vessels held a significant advantage over local shipping; neither the wealthiest groups of merchants nor the most formidable Asian states were in a position to field maritime forces that could challenge them on the open ocean. In virtually every encounter at sea, ships from Europe were able to inflict overwhelming defeats on the fleets assembled to oppose them. Since it represented their most significant advantage, Europeans made frequent use of maritime violence: against competing merchant groups (in order to disrupt commercial networks and to gain a dominant position), and against Asian states (to pry open port cities and improve trading conditions). This article explores the role played by maritime violence in the relationship between European overseas enterprises and two powerful territorial states, Mughal India (1526-1757) and Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), in the first half of the seventeenth century.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature of Dutch colonial policy at the turn of the twentieth century in what was then the Netherlands East Indies.’ Referred to in the historiography of this period as ‘the ethical policy’, it is usually characterized as a welfare or developmentalist government. More recent comparisons have drawn attention to similarities between twentieth-century colony policy and the New Order Indonesian policy with a focus on economic growth and the lack of individual ‘development’. ‘Ethical policy’ is not usually a term applied to the politics of other imperialist powers, which begs the question that somehow Dutch colonialism was different. Recent comparative research by M. Kuitenbrouwer, A. Stoler and J. Breman has questioned this assumption.

The emergence of modern capitalism in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries has been a major topic of historical research and interpretation for many years. Among the current generation of historians there has been an ex,-plosion of interest in the relationship between the growth of capitalism and the expansion of Europe in the early modern era. The interpretive work of Wallerstein and Braudel and the detailed research of a host of others have added immensely to our knowledge of this relationship. They have led many historians to break away from the conceptual frameworks traditionally employed to explain both pre-industrial capitalism and European expansion.

Our essay will critically survey and attempt to offer an overall interpretation of a growing volume of publications by historians who have attempted to evaluate the costs and benefits for Europe's domestic economies flowing from some five centuries of involvement with empires overseas. That involvement began with the conquest of Ceuta by the Portuguese in 1417 and passed through two epochs: 1417-1825 and 1825-1974. After a first conjuncture marked by the French Revolution, a quarter of a century of global warfare and movements for independence in Southern America, Britain emerged as the hegemonic imperial power in Europe. Its major rivals for commerce and dominion in Africa, Asia and the Americas (Portugal, Spain, France and Holland) ceded control over parts of their possessions overseas to Britain or (in the cases of Spain and Portugal), lost sovereignty over their colonies in Latin America.

For forty years much of the research on Britain's relationship with Latin America has been dominated by a rather narrow agenda, the boundaries of which were established by radical and conservative writers in the middle third of the twentieth century, just when Britain's role in Latin America was rapidly declining. Essentially this was a debate about power, that of British governments and businessmen on the one hand and Latin American governments and elites on the other. More recently, however, younger historians have begun to break free of the confines established by those writing in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result there is some hope that new research on this topic may offer more of interest to non-specialists and contribute to other historical debates, both in British and Latin American history. The purpose of this historiographical essay, which is based primarily, but not entirely, on the research undertaken in Britain during the last twenty years, is to review the recent literature on British investment in Latin America, and to investigate some of the implications of what we now know about the subject for our understanding of the evolution of Latin American societies.

This paper deals with transformations in local political thinking in Northern Mali. It describes how concepts from what can be called ‘formal’ politics, or administration, have gradually seeped into local settings, where they have been taken up by local political actors. The transformation central to this paper is the movement from a political organisation essentially based on lineage, (fictive) kinship ties and a clan system, into a system in which territory, hitherto only important in the economic realm, takes a more central place. The society described is that of the Tuareg in Northern Mali, especially those inhabiting or bordering the so-called Tamesna plain. Influences in territorial thinking date back to the colonial conquest of the area, and were developed further during the late colonial period, when a system of indirect rule gradually became more direct. The developments then set in motion were taken over by the post-colonial nation-state of Mali which, after three decades of central administration (or absence of it), underwent a process of decentralisation in the 1990s. In describing these developments, the paper aims to provide a detailed case study of how both colonial and post-colonial administration have influenced local political views on territory, borders and land tenure, and the ways of dealing with conflicts over these issues. Finally, I intend to discuss the impact of decentralisation in Mali on territorial thinking and conflicts. Two Tuareg concepts regarding territory will be central in this paper: ihenzuzagh — economic geographical space, and akal — political geographical space.

This article draws attention to the case of Aceh to analyse the mechanisms through which ideologically driven geographic imaginings obscured the role of place and class in colonial and anti-colonial violence in Indonesia. Its main perspective is the region's West Coast. In the course of the long and brutal Dutch-Acehnese war (1873–1942), the West Coast of Sumatra was transformed from a dynamic centre of trade, commerce, and religious renewal into a colonial frontier. Violent resistance persisted in this area as the Dutch involved themselves in and exacerbated local contestations for authority and resources. Colonial discourse worked to conceal these complexities, foregrounding an image of the West Coast as a remote, backwards, and inherently dangerous place, prone to a violent Muslim millenarianism.

The uniqueness of Siam in being the only independent Southeast Asian country in the age of nineteenth-century colonialism is a mantra that persists largely to this day. It held that it was the calibre of the Siamese monarchs in particular King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910), the fifth reign of the present regnant dynasty, which saved the country from succumbing to the powerful and predatory west. By continuing his father King Mongkut's (1851–1868) foresight in adopting an open door policy by signing the Bowring Treaty (1855) and reforming the country's administration in conformity to their model of government, the king gained the recognition by the Europeans of Siam as a civilised country. As a tribute to the king's greatness, in particular for his benevolent rule and pivotal reforms, the ‘colloquial, affectionate, yet awesome’ title ‘Lord of Life’ (chao chiwit) was used by his subjects especially around this period, according to the royal family historian writing in 1960 who was a grandson of King Chulalongkorn. In 2003, another direct descendant of the king wrote that it was no less the ‘Lord of Life, Lord of the Realm, the fountain and embodiment of moral and spiritual power itself who recognised that survival in the face of colonialism necessitated engagement in diplomacy and internal reforms. By dint of such enlightened measures, the Siamese polity was transformed and strengthened. in political history, the emphasis has been on the efficiency and good governance made possible by the modernising administrative system.

In 1675, William Dampier set sail from Jamaica for the Bay of Campeche on Mexico's Yucatán coast to trade for logwood. Dampier, who would later become famous as a naturalist, a buccaneer, and one of the foremost chroniclers of the Golden Age of English buccaneering, recorded his experiences over the course of a year spent in English logwood communities near this Spanish settlement. The author's account gives a fascinating portrayal of a society beyond the margins of imperial control. In Laguna de Términos, an inlet just west of the town of Campeche (in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula), English sailors cut logwood, a popular dyestuff used in Europe for red, purple, and black clothing dyes and ink, that grew throughout the swampy tropical lowlands of the area. They traded their harvest with merchants who would ship it to ports as far away as Boston, London, and Amsterdam. Seeking an independent life separate from the arbitrary power of shipboard hierarchy, the loggers lived communally. They worked, hunted, and drank on their own schedule.