The historical image of Suriname – and maybe of colonies in general – is dominated by stereotypes, as well as by assumptions which are far too facile. That at least is the impression left after comparing a variety of primary sources on Suriname with the historiography of this colony. One small example will suffice. Almost every time slavery is introduced in literature on the history of Suriname, emphasis is placed on the fact that it was one of the hardest or cruellest slave systems in the entire Americas. The implication is that Suriname slavery is invariably considered to have been a system which remained static for more than two centuries. Something it certainly was not. Moreover, it shows that not one of the authors has ever troubled to take a look at the available demographic sources. Had they done so, they would have noticed there are no indications that Suriname deviated in this respect from the average Caribbean pattern.

This article uses the records of the Bombay Mayor’s Court (1728–1798) to explore the ways in which an ostensibly English court of law attempted to administer law in a way that was acceptable to a cosmopolitan cast of litigants. I show how, due to the Court’s popularity with Indian litigants, and the difficulties of its hybrid jurisprudence, the Court eventually moved to a model of formalised arbitration. In this arrangement, local Indian elites exercised considerable autonomy, while British judges gained an illicit commission. As such, the evidence from the Mayor’s Court points to a novel iteration of legal pluralism in which ill-defined legal regimes came to blur and blend with each other in a single forum. I argue that this forces us to reconceptualise solely jurisdictional definitions of legal pluralism, which must be complimented with the study of a court’s ‘jurispractice’.

The island of Bombay is the ancient property of the English East India Company; it hath hitherto been, of all her settlements, the most conducive to the greatness of the nation in Asia; yet, through the splendour of achievement, great acquisition of the territory, and immense harvests of wealth in Bengal and the Coast of Coromandel, it hath been in some measure overlooked, and, as if in a corner of the world, unnoticed.

Certain stages of the European expansion process into Asia during the Age of Commercial Capitalism lend themselves well to the comparative historical approach because of the startling similarities and contrasts they offer. The Dutch and English commercial leaps forward into the Orient, for instance, occurred at the same time in the organisational framework of chartered East India Companies - the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) — which, moreover, chose the same theatre of action: Southeast Asia (Banten, Spice Islands) and South Asia (Surat and Coromandel). But although the aims, modes of operation and organisation of the two companies had much in common, these nonetheless each finally carved out their own sphere of influence in the trading world of Asia - the Dutch in Southeast Asia and the English in South Asia. While this consolidation process was taking place, the EIC and VOC gradually shed their semblance of being purely maritime trading organisations and, towards the second half of the eighteenth century, acquired the character of territorial powers. A shift in the balance of power also occurred between the two companies: if the Dutch were still paramount in the seventeenth century, the English totally overshadowed them as powerbrokers in Asian waters during the eighteenth. Did this transition of maritime hegemony occur gradually or should we rather speak of a ‘passage brusque et rapide’ as Fernand Braudel has suggested? Was it, as the traditional explanation has it, the inevitable outcome of the decline of the Dutch Republic to a second-rate power in Europe, or were local Asian developments, be they political or commercial, also involved?

Post-1945 Spanish and Portuguese emigration and immigration histories encapsulate the Iberian region's long-standing interconnectedness with the wider world (particularly Latin America and Africa) and other parts of Europe alike. Portugal and Spain have both been part of multiple migration systems as important sending countries that ultimately experienced an international migration turnaround owing to their transition to democracy, decolonisation, and accession to a European Union in which internal freedom of movement counted among its core principles. With the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and Europe's migration crisis of the 2010s serving as its vantage point, this article considers these topics as they intersect with issues that include nationality and citizenship, race and racism, and religion and Islamophobia in multicultural Spain and Portugal.

This article engages questions of colonial intimacy in the context of the market – specifically, by white commercial sector in apartheid South Africa to lure black South Africans into burgeoning consumer markets. I focus on the 1960s, when the exercise in racial domination grew more ambitious and coercive, at the same time as buoyant economic growth efforts spurred consumerist desire. African consumers were largely invisible and incomprehensible to white businesspeople, who turned to advertisers and market researchers to bring ‘the African consumer’ to light. This was largely an epistemological challenge – the pursuit of new modes of knowledge about African people, and especially the material intimacies of their daily lives. This article examines this knowledge-making project, along with the anxieties, lapses and contradictions that inhered in it.

The Nigerian liquor trade provoked fierce debate: was it advancing development or fashioning an economy based on the unproductive consumption of alcohol? The liquor trade was caught between two prevailing colonial perspectives on African economic development: the Darwinian-based principle that Western civilisation had a duty to protect Africans from all bad external influences, and the civilise-through-trade concept seeking to modernise Africans by exploiting colonies to their fullest potential. Humanitarian concerns and economic interests were entangled. Positive views of the liquor trade claimed its necessity in developing the Nigerian economy. Some admitted that the trade formed a necessary evil, but did not fail to emphasise its role as a transitional currency, promoter of cash-crops-forexport, and a desirable commodity among those with money to spend. Merchants saw commerce as a great civilising agent, with the liquor trade as its most important constituent. On the other hand, liquor trade critics used the temperance equation to further their cause: drinking alcohol was bad, abstinence was good. Arguing that the imposition of ‘a Rum and Gin Civilization’ would be ‘a hydra that devours the natives’, halting useful commerce and hindering economic development, they agitated for Prohibition and a complete restructuring of the colonial economy along alcoholfree lines.

Since their independence in 1975 the former Portuguese African colonies of Guiné, Angola and Mozambique have been notorious for their instability, while the microstate of Sāo Tome has sunk to become one of the poorest and most debt-burdened countries in the world. The easiest explanation for these disasters can be found in the circumstances of the Portuguese withdrawal from Africa and the maelstrom of the final phases of the Cold War in which these states became embroiled. But are these explanations adequate?

Motivated by both science and empire, European explorers increasingly ventured into the high Himalaya after 1800, where they encountered the insidious yet little understood effects of altitude sickness. They did not, however, do so alone. Tensions arising from the highly unpredictable distribution of symptoms were exacerbated by explorers’ dependence on pre-existing networks of labour and expertise, which forced them to measure their bodies against those of their Asian companions. This article examines altitude physiology in the early nineteenth century, largely overlooked by scholars in favour of the more systematic scientific studies of the later period. I consider engagement with indigenous explanations (resulting from poisonous miasmas from plants), the tropes travellers used in their accounts to avoid inverting hierarchies around bodily performance, and attempts to quantify symptoms and instrumentalise bodies by measuring pulses. I argue that high mountains became spaces of comparison, intensified by uncertainty over the scientific status of altitude sickness, and use this to bring into focus the practical, everyday aspects of relationships between explorers, guides, and porters. By considering comparisons at multiple scales, this article also historicises the formulation of high mountain medical topographies in the context of upland frontiers and imperial expansion.

Countless studies by historians, art historians and anthropologists have dealt with the early modern image of the South African Khoikhoi. Lacking everything that Europeans valued, they fell prey to the most contemptuous imagery available. The term ‘Hottentots’, by which they were known, was considered more or less synonymous with monstrous appearance, beastly habits and cultural ignorance. As such they were portrayed in official reports and travel journals, in prints and drawings. Few European artists and travel writers published their observations with any recourse to reality, however. They usually created their images in Europe in accordance with prevailing artistic and literary conventions, time and again reverting to stereotypes that were embedded in prejudice and based on incomplete and distorted knowledge. Thus far scholars have not discovered a single drawing by an eyewitness from the first two centuries of Khoikhoi-European encounters. As a consequence our insight into the mechanisms of stereotyping is far from complete. We neither know how the images were perceived by European viewers nor do we know if and how the stereotypes blurred the perception and judgement of eyewitnesses themselves.

The investigation of a shipwreck must extend beyond the uniqueness of the single event in order to have interpretative value for social scientists. One or even several shipwrecks will not necessarily represent a universe. Since statistically significant numbers of shipwrecks may never be studied, methods of inquiry must be devised where quantity is not a prime concern. When we noted the discrepancy between cargoes listed on ships manifests and cargoes actually recovered from shipwrecks of the Spanish Colonial period, the challenge was to determine where and under what circumstances contraband behavior occurred and might be predicted.

It was Charles Boxer who has characterized the struggle between the Portuguese and the Dutch about their respective positions in world trade as the First Global War. In summing up the results at around 1650 Boxer contended that the Portuguese had won in the New World, that the Dutch had won in Asia, while the two countries had reached a stalemate in Africa.

This conclusion is correct only within the political domain. In fighting the Portuguese and the Spanish, the Dutch, together with the British and the French, did not reach economic the limits of their expansion because of Iberian resistance, but because of the general demographic and economic constraints on overseas expansion at the time. These limitations allowed for the creation of two expansion systems, each with its own sphere of influence in the Atlantic. The Iberian system covered the South Atlantic and the Northwest European system the Middle and North Atlantic. Both systems had a similar structure and incorporated European ports providing European and Asian trade goods, trading posts in Africa and plantation areas and settlement colonies in the New World.

The establishment of a Dutch trading factory at Kayalpatnam in 1645 initiated half a century of Luso-Dutch rivalry for the control of the Madurai coast (modern Tamilnad) until its ‘final solution’ in the 1690s. The stakes were high and involved both material and non-material considerations. Contemporary Dutch sources estimated the capital value of the local chank or conch shell and pearl fishery at 350,000 and 5 to 6 million guilders, respectively. Almost half of the circa 500 vessels involved in the pearl fisheries of 1668 and 1669 came from the seven major ports (yelu ur) of the socalled Fishery Coast (Costa de Pescaria). Control over southeast India littoral, moreover, meant mastery of the strategic Palk Straits and the Indo-Ceylon trade in areca, textiles, salt, grains, ray skins, chaya or dye roots, lime, and the like. Dutch projections of potential revenues derived from this source in the 1670s ranged from 1.28 to 1.65 million guilders per year. Apart from the intra-Asiatic or country trade, exports from the Madurai coast became increasingly important in the long-distance trade with Europe in the wake of the ‘calicoe craze’. Between 1680-81 and 1734-35, the total invoice and sales value of Dutch textile exports from Madurai destined for patria amounted to 8.85 and 15.31 million guilders, respectively. The annual invoice and sales value of Company textile exports from southeast India littoral to the Dutch Republic peaked in the first decade of the eighteenth century at an average of 282,824 and 644,541 guilders, respectively. In 1704-05, the invoice and sales value of Dutch textile exports from Madurai to Europe alone amounted to no less than 659,215 and 1,362,050 guilders, respectively.

Between 1584 and 1588, the Florentine merchant Filippo Sassetti sent a whole sequence of letters from India to his friends and the grand ducal court in Florence. He informed his correspondents about local Indian plants, animals, the mechanisms of commercial exchange and Indian social structures and politics. Apart from publishing and editing letters, the scholarship so far has focused on linguistic, geographic, medical and ethnographical issues related to his letters. This article focuses on a set of rarely explored resources: the valuable objects sent with Sassetti's letters to the grand duke Francesco de Medici (1541–87) and his brother cardinal Ferdinando (1549–1609). The letters are exceptional, since they allow one to reconstruct the origins and itineraries of the items that Sassetti describes in detail. None of the objects survived in Florence but some of them are traceable to the Medici inventories of the sixteenth century.

This article surveys the diasporic life and legacy of the Ethiopian ecclesiastic Täsfa Ṣeyon. After examining his origins in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and the circumstances of his arrival in mid-sixteenth-century Rome, the article outlines his contributions to the evolving Latin Catholic understanding of Ethiopia. Täsfa Ṣeyon was a librarian, copyist, teacher, translator, author, and community leader, as well as a prominent adviser to European humanist scholars and Church authorities concerned with orientalist philologia sacra as it pertained to Ethiopian Orthodox (täwaḥedo) Christianity. As such, he was a key extra-European agent in the Tridentine project of Ethiopianist and Eastern Christian knowledge production. The article also surveys the complex modern legacy of Täsfa Ṣeyon's career, documenting his posthumous influence in the fields of Ethiopianist Semitic studies and Ethiopian vernacular historiography.