Fetish. Perhaps few words are more redolent of the negative outlook of “enlightened” Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries towards the “superstitions” embraced by the supposedly benighted inhabitants of the Dark Continent of Africa. This intellectual snobbery on the part of such European intellectual luminaries as Hume, Voltaire, Kant, and Marx led to fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of African religious beliefs and practices. In particular, it obscured the ways in which European visitors to the African coast made use of the concept of the fetish for their commercial purposes. In the process, they introduced European ideas about physical objects of supernatural power into the complex of beliefs that Enlightenment thinkers later came to deride as uniquely emblematic of African backwardness. The conception of the fetish as both a European and an African invention re-emerges in reading the documentary evidence left behind by European travellers and traders of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These sources present the fetish—and in particular the practice of sealing agreements by swearing oaths on fetish objects—as an intermediary between European and African systems of economic and spiritual value, thus fostering the modicum of trust necessary for trade to proceed.

This paper deals with several themes central to recent debate about Dutch colonial society in Java, the key island of the erstwhile Netherlands Indies. Primarily, these themes relate to the colonial-metropolitan nexus, and my discussion seeks to illuminate these themes with particular reference to the documented experiences of three women who were either on their way to the Indies—or making their way back from there—early in the 1830s. The paper's fundamental argument concerns the importance of the concept of “Empire Families” to an understanding of Dutch colonial communities in the Indies. It is an understanding that serves to correct some misconceptions about the dynamics of those societies in the early to mid-nineteenth-century period. Among other things, building on the work of others and drawing on unpublished documentation, it seeks to locate some aspects of colonial “discourse,” particularly those relating to “colonial women,” in the broader framework of social history.

In the interwar period, a system for the movement of men, arms, and printed matter developed into a political network that in imperial sources came to be called the “lascar system.” Lascars were Indian seamen who worked for British and international merchant shipping companies and had contacts with trade unionists, communists, anarchists, and other politically active parties across the world—in particular in port towns such as Hamburg, Antwerp and Marseilles. They became key players in the politics of the interwar world, and especially in a still-colonised India, which was subject to various censorship regulations and a panoply of repressive legislation. A number of lascars became crucial in the emerging communist movement and in trade union politics. In a world of increasingly stringent border controls, restrictions on the movement of people, and paranoia about political radicalism and its ability to “infect” new areas, the lascars' mobility became an asset to political movements and a source of anxiety for states.

Given this, it is surprising that the literature on lascars seldom, if ever, addresses the question of their political activities. This essay takes some steps in that direction, focusing on the 1920s, when the “lascar system” took shape. “Lascar” is of course a name given to a profession, not an identity or a political ideology; and yet the importance of this profession in the politics of the early twentieth century, and of the interwar period in particular, is far too important to ignore or treat as mere coincidence.

In early 1959, Luiz Rendall Silva, Cape Verdean administrator of the concelho (district) of Fogo, on the volcano island of that name in the Sotavento group (Leeward Islands), wrote a very energetic report to his Portuguese superiors. He complained to the Governor of Cape Verde about the lack of decisiveness in Portugal's colonial welfare policy, and about the absence of clear programmes for the future of the islands. In his words, he wished “for the improvement of the Cape Verdean land and for the benefit of its populations, and for a more visible advancement of the civilising mission.”

The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of knowledge about the transatlantic slave trade, both through research on specific sections of this traffic and through the consolidation of datasets into a single online resource: Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (hereafter Voyages Database). This collective project has elucidated in great detail the slave trading routes across the Atlantic and the broad African origins of captives, at least from their ports of embarkation. However, this multi-source database tells us little about the slave trading routes within the Americas, as slaves were shipped through various ports of disembarkation, sometimes by crossing imperial borders in the New World. This gap complicates our understanding of the slave trade to Spanish America, which depended on foreign slavers to acquire captives through a rigid system of contracts (asientos and licencias) overseen by the Crown up to 1789. These foreign merchants often shipped captives from their own American territories such as Jamaica, Curaçao, and Brazil. Thus, the slave trade connected the Spanish colonies with interlopers from England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal (within the Spanish domain from 1580 to 1640), and eventually the United States. The importance of the intra-American slave trade is particularly evident in Venezuela: while the Voyages Database shows only 11,500 enslaved Africans arriving in Venezuela directly from Africa, I estimate that 101,000 captives were disembarked there, mostly from other colonies. This article illuminates the volume of this traffic, the slave trading routes, and the origins of slaves arriving in Venezuela by exploring the connections of this Spanish colony with the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French Atlantics. Imperial conflicts and commercial networks shaped the number and sources of slaves arriving in Venezuela. As supplies of captives passed from Portuguese to Dutch, and then to English hands, the colony absorbed captives from different African regions of embarkation.

Let us begin with a drawing, depicting the river mouth of Batavia. We see a lively scene. Europeans and Asians are fishing, peddling, rowing, riding, walking, and sitting along the waterway. A small prauw on the left appears to be manned by Javanese and Chinese. Behind the Waterkasteel, on the right, large numbers of oceangoing vessels are anchored before Batavia. In the middle of the drawing, we see three men on the path along the waterway, the “jaagpad,” pulling a flat cargo boat. The clothing indicates that these are “Moor” sailors. On the boat, we see three other sailors with turbans.

This scene, drawn by Johannes Rach in 1764, places the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in its Asian context. In previous decades, increasing attention has been paid to the structure of the “Asian” or overseas organisation of the VOC. Even more so, research has shown the importance of the Company's participation in the intra-Asian trade. From 1500 onwards, European trading companies not only became important in intercontinental European–Asian trade, but they came to dominate maritime trade within Asia as well. The VOC was one of the largest merchants active in intra-Asian shipping for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the VOC, however, it was not only its presence overseas that built the link between the Company and its Asian context. The VOC and its Asian context became intrinsically interwoven. Leonard Blussé, for example, emphasises the character of Batavia, the headquarters of the VOC in Asia, as a “Chinese colonial town.”

In August 1958, Meeuwis Drost (1923-86) was the first missionary for the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (Vrijgemaakt), or Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (Liberated) to start proselytising among the Papuans of the Upper-Digul area in Netherlands New Guinea. He later recalled how that day: “I simply started with Genesis one. And they listened!” Drost finished teaching the entire Old Testament within one year. To start at the beginning seems logical and is in fact the approach used by most missionaries of the Liberated churches. Transfer of religious and cultural knowledge was seen as an important aspect of their work, especially with an illiterate audience. The Protestant religious landscape in the Netherlands had fragmented heavily during the nineteenth century. Two secessions from the Dutch Reformed Church in 1834 and 1886 led to the formation of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands in 1892. Its tendency to depose those who refused to adhere to its theological views resulted in the Vrijmaking (Liberation) in 1944. Although the Liberated churches were one of many Protestant branches, they were very secure in their own theological views. Consisting of exclusive political, religious, educational and even recreational organisations they formed a mini-pillar in Dutch society.

Jews in most of early modern Europe struggled to assert their rights within legal frameworks that presumed them to be intrinsically different—aliens—from the (Christian) population around them no matter where they had been born, how they dressed and behaved, or what language they spoke. This struggle played itself out on various fronts, not the least of which was in the Jewish assertion of the right to become more than aliens—to become citizens or subjects—of the territories in which they lived. Citizenship, in its various forms, was a structural representation of belonging. Moreover, citizenship conferred tangible rights. As such, being a recognised citizen (or subject) had not only great symbolic, but also great economic, importance.

On transatlantic slave ships the Africans were predominantly there as cargo, while Europeans worked the deadly job of sailing and securing the vessel. On the plantations the roles changed, and the slaves were transformed into a workforce. European sailors and African slaves in the Atlantic world mostly encountered each other aboard slave ships as captive and captor. Once the enslaved arrived on the plantations new hierarchies and divisions of labour between slave and free suited to the particular working environment were introduced. Hierarchies of status, rank and colour were fundamental to the harsh and isolated working environments of the ship and the plantation. The directors of Surinamese plantations shielded themselves from the wrath of their enslaved by hiring sailors, soldiers or other white ruffians to act as blankofficier (white officer). These men formed a flexible workforce that could be laid off in case tensions on plantations rose. Below the white officers there were non-white slave officers, basjas, managing the daily operations on the plantations. The bomba on board slave ships played a similar role.

The writer, poet and dramatist Sergei Tret'iakov was a central figure of the early Soviet literary and artistic avant-garde. Born in 1892 in Kuldiga, a town in what is now Latvia and was then the Governorate of Courland, one of the three Baltic provinces of the Russian empire, he was educated in prerevolutionary Riga and Moscow. Fluent also in Latvian and German, he started out as a poet in Russian and came under the influence of futurism when living in Vladivostok in 1919. During the Russian Civil War, Tret'iakov spent several months in Harbin, Tianjin, and Beijing in 1920 and 1921, and he returned to China as a teacher of Russian at Peking University between 1924 and 1925. The mid-1920s were also his most productive period as a writer for the theatre. Back in the Soviet Union, he went on to write experimental documentary prose, reportage and film scenarios while making radical statements in literary theory. He collaborated closely with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), the cinema director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), and as a translator and critic he brought the plays and poetry of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) to Soviet readers.

After failing to wrest Brazil from the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, the French turned their attention to the region north of the Amazon and south of the Orinoco River. The Guiana ventures the French launched during the middle decades of the seventeenth century met with numerous disasters, many of them self-inflicted, including bankruptcies, mutinies, murder, and costly rivalries between companies based in Paris and Rouen. Despite their many setbacks during the seventeenth century, however, the French were determined to establish plantations on the island of Cayenne in modern French Guiana. By the eighteenth century, French planters were cultivating sugar and tobacco in and around Cayenne using primarily the labour of African slaves. The nucleus, thus, of the future colony of French Guiana had been laid, in a territory sandwiched between the English colony of Guyana and the Dutch colony of Suriname, to the northwest, and Portuguese-controlled territory to the south and east. Prospering in Guiana was never easy, for the French or their African slaves, as the 1762–4 disaster of Kourou attests. But by then, the indigenous Galibí inhabitants of Cayenne (members of the Carib language group) seem to have been largely “written out” of the history of Guiana, except when they appear as a minority of slaves among a sea of Africans on a plantation.

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).

On July 21, 1786 a secret meeting took place in the office of the Spanish ambassador in Paris, Count of Aranda. The ambassador, aided by the Irish abbot O'Sullivan (who acted as translator), met John Brooks, a British captain who introduced himself as a loyalist veteran of the American Revolution. Brooks had come to Paris from London, all expenses covered by the Spanish government, to inform Aranda of an expedition projected in Britain to invade the northern coast of South America in the vicinity of the port of Cartagena. According to Brooks, Juan Blommart, a French veteran of the American Revolution, was the leader of the projected expedition. With official British backing—Brooks declared that the Marquis of Buckingham was sponsoring the expedition—and the participation of military adventurers John Cruden and Francisco de Miranda, the expedition was scheduled to sail before the end of the year. After receiving Aranda's report, the Spanish Ministry of the Indies sent the information across the Atlantic to New Granada's Viceroy Antonio Caballero y Góngora for him to make all the necessary preparations to face this potential threat.