Historians have very little information about the operation of Asian commercial networks and the social interaction between merchants. Hampered by this lack of data scholars have focused on trade routes and commodities. Our knowledge of the Armenian trading network is more or less limited to its geographical dispersal. The network stretched from New Julfa, a suburb of the Iranian capital of Isfahan, to Amsterdam and London in Europe, and to important centres in the Levant and Central Asia, covering the Indian Subcontinent, and extending eastwards to Manila in the Philippines. Armenian merchants were prosperous and communities were located in commercial towns all over the world. The brothers Khojah Joseph and Khojah Johannes Marger, for instance, established a partnership at Hyderabad in 1666 with a starting capital of 27,550 rupees. Some forty years later on the death of Joseph Marger, the trading activity of the two Armenians was worth more than two million rupees.

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.

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.

This dossier focusses on non-European teachers within mission schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the period of colonial control. These teachers were central to the missionary project and helped to disseminate both Christianity and Western knowledge across the globe. Local teachers, alongside other mission assistants and helpers, also helped translate, transmit, and transform both Western and local forms of knowledge and contributed to broader discourse about knowledge, yet the importance of their work has often been overshadowed by the work undertaken in examining missionary elites. This dossier, with its extended introduction and three case studies from Africa, the Danish West Indies, and Bolivia, sheds light on the roles of non-European mission teachers as well as their recruitment and training, their self-representations, and methodological as well as conceptual issues about how information on these often inconspicuous intermediaries of mission education can be retrieved from disparate sources.

This paper examines the attempt of British missionaries on Madagascar to use medicine and the mission hospital as a way to convert the Malagasy people during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In their attempt to educate the Malagasy about the benefits of Western civilization, which was often defined through science as well as Christianity, missionaries were challenged by Malagasy culture and the local environment. To counter the ability of the Malagasy to challenge Western methods through their cultural beliefs and healing practices and so convert the Malagasy to Western ways, British missionaries had to carve out a space isolated from the Malagasy environment. Medicine, particularly the mission hospital, offered a space to champion Western science and Christianity. In their attempt to bring civilization to Madagascar, missionaries directly tied together science and Christianity while domesticating the space of the hospital.

Many of the principles we know today about the world economy were first discovered in Early Modern Asia. The Portuguese and the Spanish were the first to extend their sphere of trade to encompass the world. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes and others, all made their way past the Cape of Good Hope seeking their share of the Asian trade. By the middle of the century, one of them became so successful that, aside from being the envy of the others, they set a new standard of efficiency in global operations. It was of course the Dutch.

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.

This article concentrates on Catholic mission teachers in Southern Tanzania from the 1890s to the 1940s, their role and agency in founding and developing the early education system of Tanzania. African mission teachers are an underrated group of actors in colonial settings. Being placed between colonized and colonizers, between conversion and civilising mission, between colonial rule and African demands for emancipation, between church and government and at the heart of local society, their agency was crucial to forming African Christianity, to social change and to a newly emerging class of educated Africans. This liminal position also rendered them almost invisible for historiography, since the colonial archive rarely gave credit to their vital role and European missionary propaganda tended to present them as examples of successful mission work, rather than as self-reliant missionary activists. The article circumscribes the framework of colonial education policies and missionary strategies, it recovers the teachers’ active role in the colonial education system as well as in missionary evangelization. Finally, it contrasts teachers’ self-representation with the official image conveyed in missionary media.

This article examines the claims of Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials in the mid-eighteenth century regarding the Islamic source of a legal code prepared for the local population in Semarang, northeast Java. Although the VOC had encountered local legal cultures in Indonesia since the mid-seventeenth century, it preferred to circumvent those in favour of European laws whenever possible. But in the eighteenth century, VOC officials addressed indigenous legal systems more directly when the company sought possibilities for direct control. This resulted in the production of many codes on the legal status of Muslim and Chinese subjects of Indonesia. In the process of codification, some officials claimed to have consulted Islamic legal texts and Muslim jurists. One criminal code that came out of the effort supposedly took its rulings accurately from the Mugharrar, which is possibly the Muḥarrar written by the Islamic jurist ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1226). I argue that this assertion is baseless, and demonstrate that the very pretense is part of a larger colonial project that sought legitimacy from the indigenous subjects at a time of political and economic crises.

At the end of the Second World War, the islands of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia were all under foreign control. The Netherlands retained West New Guinea even while control of the rest of the Dutch East Indies slipped away, while on the other side of the South Pacific, Chile held Easter Island. Pitcairn, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Fiji and the Solomon Islands comprised Britain's Oceanic empire, in addition to informal overlordship of Tonga. France claimed New Caledonia, the French Establishments in Oceania (soon renamed French Polynesia) and Wallis and Futuna. The New Hebrides remained an Anglo-French condominium; Britain, Australia and New Zealand jointly administered Nauru. The United States' territories included older possessions – the Hawaiian islands, American Samoa and Guam – and the former Japanese colonies of the Northern Marianas, Mar-shall Islands and Caroline Islands administered as a United Nations trust territory. Australia controlled Papua and New Guinea (PNG), as well as islands in the Torres Strait and Norfolk Island; New Zealand had Western Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau. No island group in Oceania, other than New Zealand, was independent.

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.

In the “Concluding Remarks” appended to his journal for 1853–63, published in London in 1866 as Ten Years in Sarawak, Charles Brooke gave his support to the unfashionable idea of miscegenation between Europeans and Asians. The younger nephew of the first Rajah, James Brooke, and heir apparent to the Brooke raj to which he succeeded two years later, his views were of some significance. Accepting that a tropical climate was “not adapted for the permanent residence of Anglo-Saxons,” he proposed that a mixed race could provide Sarawak with a “suitable population.” To support his argument, Brooke cited the observation of Dr W.J. Moore of the Bombay Medical Service that Europeans had not survived as a race after many generations of British rule in India:

Of the numerous pensioners, etc. etc., there is not one single instance – there is not a great-grand-child or grand-child of these pensioners retaining their European characteristics. An infusion of native blood is essential to the continuance of the race. The fact is, for the white man, or his offspring, there is no such thing as acclimatisation in India. Exposure, instead of hardening the system, actually has the contrary effect, and the longer Europeans remain in this country, the more they feel the effects of the vertical sun.

As was the norm with frontispiece illustration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the figures personifying the four continents on the title page to Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum were allegorical stand-ins, representing both a geographical place and its identifying features, symbolised by their appropriate accoutrements (fig. 1). They were not meant to serve as documentary evidence of diverse peoples, which partially explains why the personifications of the four continents are generalised and generic and adopt classicising ideals for body type and posture. In contrast, Willem and Joan Blaeu's map of Africa from 1655 includes ethnographic images as border decorations (fig. 2). These are more naturalistic and taken from contemporary travel accounts, suggesting the presence of factual information sources. Yet both the title page and the map share a visual language that signalled culturally-specific meaning to the viewer.

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?

This article discusses the early modern Acehnese epic tradition to demonstrate the emergence of an individualized Muslim ethics. From the late seventeenth century onwards, a protracted decline of Acehnese royal power initiated a process of political fragmentation as well as the gradual integration of rural areas in the globalizing economy. This shift coincided with the emergence of local religious teachers as a new and influential social group. Contingent upon these changes, the Acehnese epic tradition shifted from a dominant cosmological model based on ritual hierarchies to a paradigm of reflexive ethics based on individual responsibility to God.

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.