The third volume of Dutch Sources on South Asia mentions that there are some late-eighteenth-century Marathi letters, written in the Modi script, preserved in the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia.1 Scanned copies of the same were obtained by Lennart Bes (Leiden University) with the kind permission of the Indonesia Archives. Using these scanned copies, this paper gives the complete Roman transliteration of the two letters as well as their translation, and contextualizes the letters within Maratha documentary practices as well as within the contemporary political scene of the late-eighteenth-century Coromandel Coast. In addition, this article provides a commentary on the Maratha perception of Europeans in general and of the Dutch in particular, arguing that the Marathas had an unusually positive opinion about the trade-oriented Dutch, especially when contrasted with the territorially ambitious English and the Portuguese.

This article deals with Malay letters and documents from the archives of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—VOC), dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collection of “golden” Malay letters, which belonged to the governor- general of the VOC in Java (1704–1709) Joan van Hoorn, made a long voyage on the ship Sandenburg from Batavia to Cape Town and Amsterdam in 1710. Its cultural and historical value was firstly estimated by the outstanding Russian scholar and antiquarian N. P. Likhachev, who purchased it for the Paleographical Museum in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1910. The pages of the fifty-seven diplomatic letters cover one of the most controversial periods of VOC history on the Archipelago, 1683 to 1710, the establishment of its relationships with local nobility and states. The collection represents the original letters of the sultans of Palembang, Gowa, Buton, Bone, Tallo, Banten, and Cirebon, and of prominent historical figures of Malay states as well as the famous Indian merchant from Surat, Abdul Ghafur. They are written in Malay (in Arabic graphic: Jawi and Pegon), Arabic, Javanese (in two scripts: Pegon and Carakan), Dutch, Spanish, Persian, and Chinese. Their investigation will contribute to the academic scholarship on the famous records, reconstructing the history of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) on the Malay Archipelago, and on the peculiarities of Malay letter writing in different languages, scripts, and regions.

This anthology of excerpts from histories and travel accounts composed during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries features representations of indigenous oral traditions about the founding of European colonies in Sri Lanka, Melaka, Gujarat, Cambodia, Manila, Jakarta, Taiwan, New York, and the Cape of Good Hope. According to these accounts, the colonists first requested as much land as the hide of an ox could cover, and then cut that hide into strips and claimed all the land they could encircle. The “oxhide measure” is a widely-attested folkloric motif. The introduction, however, questions assumptions about the unreliability of oral traditions and looks to history instead of folklore for an explanation for the colonial parallels. It proposes that Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch colonists performed the “hide trick” in emulation of the classical story of the Phoenician Queen Dido’s founding of Carthage.

This article recommends a virtually unknown manuscript on the early Portuguese presence in India to wider scholarly attention. Dubbed here the Wye manuscript, this text purports to be an English translation of a sixteenth-century Malayalam history that was produced at the court of the ruler of Calicut. The South Indian kingdom of Calicut was central to Portugal’s project of monopolizing the region’s all-important pepper trade; the Wye manuscript therefore holds the promise of adding an Indian perspective to a history that has been written largely on the basis of European sources. This article examines the external and internal evidence for the author’s claim of having translated the text from an original palm-leaf manuscript held by members of Calicut’s royal family. An analysis of its content shows significant overlap with an Arabic history of the sixteenth century; a comparison of their similarities and differences suggests a number of insights into the processes of composition and revision of both the Malayalam and Arabic texts. Last, and most important, the Wye manuscript is transcribed in full in the hope of stimulating further discussion and study.

This article examines some of the core holdings within the Archive for Contemporary Affairs at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Prominent amongst this material are the papers of the National Party (NP), the political party that formalised the structures of apartheid. Paying particular attention to the papers of what Hermann Giliomee has termed ‘The Last Afrikaner Leaders’ alongside recently acquired material concerning post-colonial politics, we argue for the importance of this archive for scholars studying Afrikaner nationalism, at both national and regional level, the rationales and discourses of apartheid and the history of the country more broadly.

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).