The article “Adventures in Abyssinia: The Relation of Charles Poncet, 1698 to 1700” by Ronald S. Love, published in Itinerario 28/3 (2004): 38–69, does not indicate the extent to which it was based on a publication by Theodore Natsoulas that covers the same topic. The article by Natsoulas, “Charles Poncet's Travels to Ethiopia, 1698 to 1703”, appeared in Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700, edited by Glenn J. Ames and Ronald S. Love, 71–96. Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies 45. Westport: Praeger, 2003.

In the article by Stefan Halikowski Smith, “Perceptions of Nature in Early Modern Portuguese India”, Itinerario 31/2 (2007): 17–49, the following illustrations should have appeared on page 39. The editors regret the error.

In the fall semester of 2007 Professor Allison Blakely visited the Netherlands, a country that he studied extensively for his acclaimed book on racial imagery, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Indiana University Press, 1994). His other work on the black experience in Europe, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Howard University Press, 1986), won the American Book Award in 1988. Professor Blakely published numerous articles in a myriad of national and international journals. Blakely is currently Professor of European and Comparative History and George and Joyce Wein Professor of African-American Studies at Boston University. In 2006 he was elected president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and in the spring of 2008 he will be a visiting fellow at Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.

Two of the former so-called rival empires of trade in the Orient, the Dutch and the British with their respective East India Companies, are today friendly neighbours, closely co-operating both politically and economically. Their erstwhile mercantile rivalry in the East, however, is still reflected in the fact that part of the records of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) is nowadays kept in—of all places—the department of India Office Records at the British Library in London, the very repository of the archives of the British East India Company (EIC).

This article presents an overview of the relatively unknown and unexplored materials derived, copied, or translated from the VOC and stored in that lion's den. Apart from a few miscellaneous papers, three groups of records will be described: the remaining archives of the VOC establishment at Melaka (in Malaysia), VOC documents in the Mackenzie collections, and relevant materials in the archives of the EIC. The bulk of the first group of records and parts of the second and third group are unique. In addition, the few Dutch records from Melaka that still remain in Malaysia will be dealt with in an Appendix.

The intention of this paper is to fill a gap in a rich yet underrepresented aspect of Indian Ocean slave history. I have elected to found this study on a close reading of a journal from a slave-trading vessel that sought slaves for the Cape in Madagascar in the mid-1770s. This vessel, De Zon, conducted a slave-trading operation on behalf of the VOC along the west coast of Madagascar from May 1775 to January 1776. I have undertaken a close reading of the journal maintained by the merchant of De Zon, so as to write a history sensitive to the daily experiences of the slave traders in Madagascar, as well as to the codes and discourse through which this experience was filtered.

This paper is primarily concerned with the experience of negotiation and trading as it was recorded by the VOC merchants on the vessels, and is drawn predominantly from the first trading encounter of the crew of De Zon when they arrived in Madagascar in 1775. In contrast to the surveys that comprise the majority of the English-language scholarship on slave trading in Madagascar, this paper is founded on a close reading of particular episodes; it thus represents an attempt at a micronarrative that illustrates and details the historical experience of VOC slave trading on the island at a particular juncture.

This article reconstructs the voyage of the Swimming Lion to the Caribbean in 1595 and the court battle to which it gave rise. The Master mariner Gillis Dorenhoven was accused of piracy by Pedro d'Arana, contador of Havana, who sued his employers before the Middelburg Admiralty Court in 1609–1610. Johan Boreel, the eldest son of one of the defendants, sought expert advice from his friend Hugo Grotius. The author of Mare Liberum, published in April 1609, became involved in the case at various levels. Pressure was put on the States General to revise their instructions for the Admiralty Court. Grotius also tried to convince the Admiralty judges that freedom of trade and navigation was a fundamental right of Dutch merchants in the West Indies and that Dorenhoven's actions should be seen in this light. For political reasons, he could not refer to the Americas in Mare Liberum. Yet the case of the Swimming Lion reveals just how expansive his notion of freedom of trade and navigation really was.