The period from the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the creation, expansion, contraction, and fall of empires, enhanced and expanded communications, creation and growth – as measured by volume, range and intensity – of trading diasporas, diffusion of major religions far beyond their points of origin, intercontinental and transoceanic dissemination of flora and fauna, major movements – both coerced and voluntary – of population, growing technological sophistication, and advanced in humankind's knowledge of natural, earth, and planetary sciences. It also witnessed religious strife, conquest and war, decimation of populations through disease and hunger, and continued subjugation and oppression of groups of people. Taken by themselves, none of these aspects had been absent before this period and many had manifested themselves, albeit in vastly differing degrees of intensity on a very broad spectrum, on the major landmasses of the world.

Beside the records of the Dutch East India Company (or VOC) stored at the Netherlands National Archives in The Hague, there are various VOC collections kept in Asia that pertain to India and Ceylon. Some of these are relatively well-known: the “Dutch Records” in the Tamil Nadu Archives (Chennai); the records of the VOC government of Ceylon in the Sri Lanka National Archives (Colombo); the records of the Dutch Reformed Church of Ceylon at the Wolvendaal Church (Colombo); and the records of the Asian VOC headquarters at Batavia in the National Archives of Indonesia (Jakarta).

This article examines the decision-making process for a new fort which the Dutch West India Company proposed to build near Takoradi in present-day Ghana in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. By closely following the process of design, evaluation, and redesign of the fort, this article argues that the WIC was institutionally incapable of coordinating and carrying out such a complex project. The original design for the new fort was made in 1774 by Johan Frederik Trenks, a Silesian-born engineer who, as it turned out, was not current with modern design practices and used Dutch examples from the first half of the seventeenth century. The design was sent to the Netherlands for evaluation and returned with scathing criticism. The long, drawn-out process of design, evaluation, and redesign of what was after all a relatively small fort show the institutional paralysis of the WIC in the years leading up to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–84). Though the fort would never be completed, construction did begin shortly before the war. The conflict, followed shortly thereafter by the dissolution of the WIC, meant the project would never be completed.

In 1909, in a public lecture on German colonial politics, author and colonial activist Clara Brockmann emphasised the crucial role of female emigration to the colonies of the Kaiserreich (German empire). With special reference to German Southwest Africa, she argued:

The immigration of the German woman in our colony is much talked about and much is done for it. The aim is quite obvious: the prevention of mixed marriages, which are the mental and economic ruin of the settler, the achievement of a profitable farm business, which cannot be fully developed without the assistance of the housewife, and the establishment of German manners and mores, of German family life, which is created foremost by the presence of the woman.

Brockmann was one of many women who were committed to “the colonial cause” during the Kaiserreich. Most of these activists were organised in the Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft (Women's League of the German Colonial Society). Its central aim was to support and organise the emigration of German women to the colonies of the German Empire. This paper takes a closer look at the rhetoric and politics of the Frauenbund, its claims for the decisive role women were to play in the colonial project, its emigration scheme, organised to provide German settlers with racially “appropriate” wives, and its underlying assumption that Germanness itself was under threat in colonial space. The Kaiserreich's female colonial activists have been the object of numerous studies so far. None of these studies, however, reflects on the issue within the larger context of nineteenth-century global white mass migration or white diasporic movements as described, for instance, by Jürgen Osterhammel.

In Latin America, where British imperial expansion had left little administrative trace, Argentina was nonetheless profoundly affected by British investment and imported British technical expertise. Among the more modest examples of British expansionism in Argentina was the arrival, from 1865 onwards, of Welsh immigrants eager to establish a colony in Patagonia isolated from the seemingly unstoppable progress of Anglicisation by an overwhelmingly hegemonic Victorian England. By the time of the First World War, however, the Celtic character of the colony could no longer be taken for granted: Argentine government pressures had already meant that the Welsh-speaking colony was now more firmly integrated into the nation-building process. Friction which then developed between the Welsh community and the Argentine government acted as one of the push factors which sent Welsh Patagonians back to Wales and on to Australia, for example…To this process of integration the Great War added new pressures in the form of the question of loyalty to Britain during the conflict. Those who stayed in Patagonia during the war often expressed views which were pro-British and the Argentine province became a source of recruitment for the British armed services…Using a range of sources, this paper attempts to show that the Welshness of the Patagonian colonists had not destroyed their British patriotism: the latter survived and even came to the fore during the conflict of 1914-18.

In 1905–1906 the Dutch colonial state ended the autonomy of the inland of West Timor, hitherto home to the prestigious but crumbling Sonba’i Dynasty. The article addresses the problems and possibilities of writing the history of this traumatic event, which is described in several colonial reports and memorandums, while the Timorese did not leave written texts. A number of oral accounts were recorded in the 1960s by local historian F. H. Fobia, some six decades after the event. The article discusses the possibilities of an oral history approach against a backdrop of recent research about such methods. The contemporary and near-contemporary Dutch reports are systematically compared with the recordings of oral versions. It is argued that the latter destabilize the colonial version in a number of ways regarding the causes of the conflict, the conduct of the colonial troops, and the circumstances of the capture of the Sonba’i lord. At the same time, the oral versions are likely to have been processed over the decades into a meaningful set of decisive events that make sense to “traditional” Timorese discourses as well as modern Indonesian ones.

Among historians, Southeast Asia's Overseas Chinese have never enjoyed much popularity. They are in many respects a “People without a History,” having left behind no substantial deposit of experience and having failed to produce a school of historians to write their own history from an insider's perspective. Apart from their ethnic and cultural background, what distinguishes the hua-chiao from the indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia is the intermediary role that these immigrants have continued to play within the different territories, colonies or states of the area over the last few centuries. Acting as middlemen and brokers – and therefore necessarily discreet in the handling of personal relations – they have traditionally hidden their own aims and motives from the “outer world”, and thus eluded the understanding of their contemporaries.

This article will analyze some of the images of Indonesia as expressed in the Dutch press in the period between December 1949 and August 1962 from the granting of independence to the handing over of die last remnant of the former colony, Western New Guinea. It will focus on two aspects. First, how did the press report about Indonesia and second, what role did it play in the deterioration of the Dutch-Indonesian relationship? To what extent can the press be held responsible for the negative image of the Dutch with regard to Indonesia after 1949?

In recent years two high quality overviews of the economic history of Indonesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been published that testify of the growing maturity of the field. The two books – The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A History of Missed Opportunities by Anne Booth (1998), and The Emergence of a National Economy. An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000 by a team of authors (Howard Dick, Vincent Houben, Thomas Lindblad and Thee Kian Wie) (2002) – are written by distinguished experts in the field. Both books also aim to be comprehensive, but interestingly, they do this in very different ways. But let me focus on the similarities first: apart from the obvious fact that they want to present an economic history of Indonesia over the past twohundred years, they also have in common that they stress the links between economic and political history. Both try ‘to bring the state back in’, by focussing on the process of state formation – in particular in the colonial period – and, even more importantly, by analysing the consequences of government policies for economic development. The leading theme of the The Emergence (TE), as formulated in the programmatic opening chapter by Howard Dick, are the links between state-formation, the nation state, and the national economy. Similarly, The Indonesian Economy (TIE) contains a detailed analysis of government policy, and in the final analysis of the ‘missed opportunities’ of Indonesia's past, the state plays a crucial role. This also brings me to the other obvious striking similarity: both books try to explain the failure of Indonesian economic development in this period (or at least until the second half of the 1960s), and discuss the reasons why economic development was relatively slow.

Through the framework of “friendship” defined by Judith Butler, Leela Gandhi, and Vanessa Smith, this essay tracks the relationship between Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, a Bengali revolutionary terrorist who spent three decades in British jails in colonial India and Francis Lowman, a police officer who was responsible for his imprisonment. Informed by Chakrabarty’s autobiography, the essay shows that terrorism and intimacy were closely linked. Even though the revolutionary terrorist and jailor opposed one another in violent ways, these relationships were grounded in mutual recognition and built on what (following Butler) is called the “fundamental sociality of colonialism.”

Protocolos or notarial acts are one of those historical sources that everyone talks about but few use. A few social historians such as James Lockhardt and Ruth Pike have assayed the rich ores of these documents (for Lima and Seville, respectively). Art historians have used them with profit, but only a few of an older generation of French historians and Louis-André Vigneras have done much with them for voyages of exploration. Yet they are the last truly rich source of historical information still awaiting study by students of the Expansion (1).

Almost everyone living in the Dutch Republic or its territories in the East in the eighteenth century, who did not belong to a patrician family or to the upper middle class, could be considered ‘poor’ according to modern standards. In these societies, however, there was one group of people who could be singled out as extremely poor. These people, representing the lowest stratum of society, were the clientele of the poorhouses and poor relief.