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.

Orthodox viewpoints on the formation and transformation of states in early modern (or late pre-colonial) South and Southeast Asia fall broadly into two strands. On the one hand, there are those who see the state as ephemeral, and essentially divorced from society in general.

While looking at the world’s politics and ideologies for a vision of the future nation state, India’s anti-British freedom activists and intellectuals remained deeply ambivalent about drawing lessons from Europe’s experience of Fascism and National Socialism. Indian nationalists cautiously admired elements of National Socialist and Fascist ideology and expressed their distress with imperialist expansionism, racism, and anti-Semitism that accompanied the two regimes. This article draws on the exemplary “global biography” of one such Indian internationalist thinker, Taraknath Das, to investigate interwar Indian preoccupation with Fascism and National Socialism in articulating the discursive ground of Indian nationalism.

In the years after its foundation in 1814, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands witnessed the emergence of several new sites where natural history—the study of naming, describing and classifying plants, animals and minerals—was carried out. These new sites, such as the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (National Museum for Natural History), founded in 1820, the Rijksherbarium (National Herbarium) and the colonial site Nederlands-Indië (Netherlands Indies) had not existed in that form and in that combination before. The Rijksmuseum and the Rijksherbarium, established in Brussels in 1829, were the first national and fully state-funded natural historical institutions in the Dutch kingdom. In the course of the nineteenth century, both institutions rapidly developed into well-known centres for natural historical research in Europe. Significant parts of their collections derived from the Malay Archipelago, a region the Dutch kingdom regained from the British for strategic reasons in 1814. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Malay Archipelago, which had remained a terra incognita to European naturalists and colonial administrators, witnessed an unprecedented run on its natural wealth—initiated and propelled by both the emerging Dutch colonial state and the natural historical institutions in the Netherlands.

Portuguese perceptions of nature in the new worlds they encountered in Southeast Asia from the turn of the sixteenth century were a complex amalgam of inherited frameworks and the forging of a new gaze or vision. Grand claims that the Portuguese discoveries amount to the “construction of space” and the “invention of humanity” have been trumpeted, but are too overblown. From another perspective, Portuguese scholars have recently engaged in a philosophical debate around experiencialismo—the distinction between “scientific experience” and the supposedly pre- or non-scientific “lived” experience of the senses (experiência vivencial), suggesting that the Portuguese Discoveries fall at a critical juncture between these two hermeneutic paradigms. But what did this amount to in concrete terms?

I would prefer to turn to other scholars like the Belgian historian Albert Deman, who has stipulated that the perception of Indian nature in the European imaginary, was locked in three unchanging tropes that even first-hand experience could not easily undo. These tropes were exuberance, superabundance and luxury, and go right back to the first encounters between East and West in antiquity, notably Alexander the Great's adventures of the fourth century B.C., which impressed upon Westerners the East's “superior forms of life” and what Pliny, for example, dutifully acknowledged as “the wonder of the victorious expedition of Alexander the Great, when that part of the world was first revealed.” Why wonder, and what does Deman allude to when he writes of “superior forms of life”? The common impression was that everything grew more forcefully, and in greater profusion in the East. There were, for example, two flowerings a year of some plants; the colours and tastes were stronger; the smells were beguiling. What the Portuguese noted as “the fumos da India” merely drew on biblical reference in the Book of Proverbs to the “spicy breezes of the East”. From these basic conceptions had sprung compilations of all the fabulous stories of the East, texts such as those produced by Ktesias the Knidian and Megasthenes whose ideas were passed down through Pliny into the genre of the marvellous, or mirabilia, fanciful speculations and fables developed along the lines of half-truths reported by returning merchants and travellers, and sometimes fictions spread by Arab middlemen keen to retain their long-standing monopoly of purveyance to Christian consumers.

In 1637 Hans Putmans, having just retired as governor of the Dutch East India Company's Taiwan comptoir, set out from the East Indies to return to Holland. During the long voyage home he composed a report about his last year as governor, describing how he had expanded the Company's control over large parts of the island's hinterlands. He himself had led Dutch troops against the town of Mattau, one of the most powerful aboriginal towns of Taiwan, and against the towns of Soulang and Taccareangh. The results of his expeditions were, he wrote, spectacular: ‘Through the […] guidance and will of God, [the conquest] was easily accomplished, and, since they had never before seen such a manner of war, our authority and respect among these blind heathen was extended and raised to such a point that not only the towns of Soulangh, Backeluan, […] Taccareijangh, […] and Mattau presented their lands to the Dutch state, but also Pangsoia, Tapouliang, and many other towns in the area’. In all some twenty aboriginal towns sought peace with the Company after Putmans' expeditions, a huge increase in the Company's holdings on Taiwan. When, in 1929, Putmans had taken his oath of office, his job had been to run a small trading factory on the island's coast, a base from which the Company could profit from the rich China trade. The subjugation of these twenty towns abruptly changed his job, and changed the Company's mission on Taiwan: How were these towns to be administered?

To nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship, the early modern expansion of powers like Spain, Portugal, England and Holland, was a necessary preliminary step towards Europe's ultimate domination of the Asian and African continents. Moreover, the relative ease with which colonial powers manhandled regions like North Africa and the Indo-Pak subcontinent suggested that their early modern ‘pioneering’ counterparts must have shared similar experiences. While some historians highlighted superior business concepts (joint-stock companies, profit-sharing) or superior shipbuilding and navigation techniques as the means with which trading powers like the Estado da India and the English East India Company penetrated and overwhelmed Indian Ocean commerce, other scholars boiled it down to the European affinity for using ‘men-of-war, gun, and shot’. The critical underlying assumption of any of these teleological explanations s i that ‘encountered’ cultures were unable to adequately respond to European technology, of course hinting at some deeper and more profound deficiency. Scholarship in recent decades has shorn such confidence and begun to scrutinise this seedling period of interaction between Europe and non-Europe, suggesting that the initial playing ground between ‘encounterer’ and ‘encountered’ was perhaps more level than previously portrayed.

Historiography on the extreme violence of fin de siècle colonial wars has often remained nationally fragmented or actively invested in theories of national exceptionality. Focusing on the British, German and Dutch empires, this article seeks to understand the extreme violence as a transimperial phenomenon and asks how we can conceptualise and give empirical substance to this transimperial dimension. First, I give some indication of the degree of transimperial connectivity in the field of colonial warfare, highlighting how intensive mutual imperial observation and the individual mobility of actors fed knowledge into what Kamissek and Kreienbaum have called an “imperial cloud.” Secondly, I argue that a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence can be discerned on the level of colonial warfare's racialisation and the resulting specific communicative and performative aspects. Drawing on fin de siècle manuals of colonial warfare and a selection of case studies, I take the transimperial notion of “moral effect” to demonstrate how such basic notions both generated and legitimised extreme violence in colonial warfare.

The setting is 25 February 1603. At dawn the three ships under the supreme command of Jakob van Heemskerk spot a Portuguese carrack in anchor off the Eastern shores of Singapore Island. She was richly laden with wares from China and Japan. The battle for the carrack lasted for most hours of daylight, and as night was about to fall, the Portuguese captain, crew, soldiers and passengers surrendered. They forfeited ship and cargo for having their lives spared.

Through an institutional approach and by focusing on long-term developments, this article offers a genealogy of the pluralistic character of the landraad (regional colonial court) in colonial Java. It argues that the pluralistic landraden—consisting of a Dutch president, Javanese judges, a local prosecutor, and Islamic and Chinese advisers—were crucial to the process of colonial state formation. This long-term process reflects continuities rather than rupture and change between the era of the VOC and the nineteenth-century developing colonial state. The spatial sites of the landraden reveal not only the conflicts between several layers, institutions, and individuals in the process of colonial state formation but also the importance of local actors in this process. Local dynamics as well as tensions between the various layers of the colonial state, which were striving either for uniformity or for the maintenance of local pluralities, provide insights into the complex formation processes of dual rule from below.

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.

The term indonesianisasi stands for the removal of Dutch tutelage and a subsequent fundamental reorientation of the economy of Indonesia at the time of decolonisation and during the years immediately after Dutch acknowledgement of Indonesian independence in December 1949. The term was initially used in a narrow sense designating the replacement of Dutch officials and managers by Indonesian nationals in the government bureaucracy and private firms in Indonesia during the years leading up to the nationalisation of remaining Dutch business assets in Indonesia in December 1957. There is a growing appreciation that the term needs to be applied i n a broader sense as the transfer of economic leadership in newly independent Indonesia with profound consequences for future economic development. This article forms a first exploration of the application of the term indonesianisasi in such a broad sense. It should be emphasised, therefore, that this is a starting-point of new research rather than the outcome of a completed undertaking.

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.

A commentator on Muhammad Iqbal, the great poet-philosopher of.Muslim India, once wrote that ‘Pan-Islamism is not actually defined anywhere’. If true, it has not been through want of trying. Since the term ‘Pan-Islamism’ became common currency in the late nineteenth century, a variety of European journalists, colonial officials and academic researchers (not to mention Muslims themselves) have striven to offer a precise interpretation of the phenomenon. But they have failed to develop any consensus, even on basic questions: what was Pan-Islamism? why was it? or even, has it ever existed? Some have considered it an essentially religious drive, others as a political mobilisation. Some observers have presented it as a movement, as a disciplined, and perhaps clandestine, organisation with active members and fixed purposes. Others have dismissed it as mere sentiment, as nothing more than the vaguest of emotional attachments between co-religionists. A number, believing that Pan-Islamism seeks to re-create a past perfection, have argued that it aims to regroup Muslims under one sovereign authority much as they had enjoyed during the Prophet's lifetime. Others, on the other hand, have sensed more modern connotations, claiming that it intends to forge an exclusive international federation of Islamic states with the very real potential for threatening non-Muslim countries. At least one Marxist writer has distinguished between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ strains.3 This suggests that Pan-Islamism might both nurture the longings for some distant past and be responsive to the demands of the present.

It is a well-known fact that the reconstitution of the English East India Company in the 1660s caused a significant revolution in its Asia trade. Coincidently with this improvement, the Company also attempted to expand its trade to East Asian countries, using its Bantam Agent, its only base in Southeast Asia, as a springboard for launching this strategy. Around 1668 the Court of Committees in London was looking for an appropriate opportunity to re-open relations with Japan through the channel of Cambodia. The plan of re-entering the Japan trade – in this the directors in London might have been influenced by their officials in Bantam or they themselves had overestimated its prospects – was then put into practice at the end of 1671. Forthe Company itself, trading with Japan would obviously be profitable, as it had observed at first hand the considerable success of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) over the last decades. The English in the East also grew convinced that the regional trade between Japan and other areas would reap extra profits for the Company. Among the selected targets was Tonkin, present-day northern Vietnam. At that time, its silks and other textiles were highly valued and could fetch good prices in Japan. Traders who took Tonkinese silks to Nagasaki were then able to purchase Japanese silver and copper. These precious metals would be brought back to invest in local merchandize at other factories to keep up the flow of the Japan trade and to supply marketable goods for Europe. The ultimate aim of the English in tradingwith Tonkin was, therefore, to create the so-called Tonkinese silk-for-Japanese silver trade, like that successfully undertaken by the Dutch since 1637. Besides, the search for new markets for English manufactured goods was another reason that spurred the Company on to carry out this plan.

There is no generally accepted explanation as to why Mare Liberum, or The Free Sea, was written. The most common view is that the Text was a propaganda instrument designed to improve the position of the United Provinces during the truce negotiations with Spain from 1606–08. Central to Grotius' strategy was his reliance upon Iberian Scholastics as a means of providing a series of irrefutable propositions to the Spaniards.

The demarcation of phases of empire has a perennial fascination for historians of European expansion. One of the most elusive processes of change both to date and to define is what most scholars would recognise to be the shift from the colonial systems of ancien regime Europe to the empires of the nineteenth century. In outline, it seems that systems based on the close regulation of commercial capitalism through privileges devolved on more or less autonomous colonies and trading companies gave way to national empires under direct state authority and increasingly geared to the needs of industrial metropolitan economies. In the mid-eighteenth century the old order was generally intact; by the mid-nineteenth century it had largely been replaced. Greater precision about the timing and speed of change remains very difficult to attain, but within this wide parameter it seems reasonable to suppose that different empires moved at different speeds: the economically and politically sophisticated British are likely to have remodelled their system ahead of their competitors, probably forcing them towards modernity in the process.