The Gulf of Guinea, home to numerous ethnic nationalities, stretches from the Republic of Senegal in the west to Nigeria in the east. There have been population movements and socio-economic interactions within and across the coastal belt over the past millennium. In response to their environment, the people have been engaged in fishing, salt-making, commerce and boat making. Fishing, the pivot of their economy, has taken the leading fishing groups – the Fante and Ewe (Keta) of the Republic of Ghana, and the Izon (Ijaw), Itsekiri and Ilaje of Nigeria – all over the entire West African coastline, where they have established many settlements.

When speaking of decolonisation and post-colonialism, it is essential to avoid the generalising approach which sometimes leads to a distortion of the real. Decolonisation is generally seen as accession to sovereignty. For the elites and the populations of the French Overseas Dependencies it represents a reforming of the bond with France. It is a conversion of what was political subordination into dependence on social and economic resources. This conversion is a rational process based on the following idea: Independence would be costly compared to the advantages of dependence. In other words, Guadeloupe, Guyane and Martinique would be decolonized without becoming independent. Therefore, the transition from the status of colony to that of ‘departement’ is not a legal contrivance. Even if local populations did not choose their political status through the electoral process, they did vote for the parties which were in favour of French citizenship.

The aim to this article is to analyse the judgments and opinions of Africans about Europeans during the early Portuguese expeditions to West Africa in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. While opinions of Europeans about Africans are for that period certified by numerous and varied sources, the opinions of Africans are difficult to examine. Cultures of the West African coast in the fifteen and early sixteen century were illiterate. Local oral traditions do not go back – within the scope of this field of interest – to such distant centuries. There are two types of sources: Firstly, African statements written down in European texts, which require a particularly critical approach; secondly, some Africans expressed their opinions about Europeans in works of Art. These include the statues of Europeans from the area of present-day Sierra Leone (the Sapi people), and from the state of Benin (the Edo people). In this article the author examines: 1) the circumstances in which the Africans expressed their opinions (ad hoc meetings, political negotiations, trade, court ceremonies); 2) the authors (individuals or social and ethnic groups), which were attributed the judgments; 3) the content of speeches; and 4) the motives which guided the Africans. Then author compares individual cases, analyses the common characteristics and the distinct features of judgments and opinions known to us, and discusses the possibility of identification of general traits of Africans’ opinions about Europeans.

In a seminal paper published nearly forty years ago, Frank Thistlethwaite argued that the migration process ought to be liberated from the stereotypical historiographical tradition. This tradition offered a homogeneous image of undifferentiated waves of uprooted peasants and artisans suffering from epidemics of emigration fever during times of crisis. Instead, he argued, a close study of the individual or group experience of emigrants from particular regions, to specific destinations, would reveal a great deal about the motives, characteristics and pathways of people participating in highly distinctive movements. Thus, emigration might be seen not as a phenomenon in its own right, but as an aspect of a process that stimulated the seasonal circulatory movements of specific occupational groups not only within Europe, but extending outwards around the Mediterranean basin and often culminating in a circular navigation of the ‘Atlantic lake’. For millions of European workers, a natural extension of this ‘proletariat globetrotting’ was an individually-organized one-way voyage to the New World.

It is common wisdom among the historians of the Dutch East Indies that everyone in the Dutch East India Company engaged in private trade. That is, ‘everyone’ traded in goods supposedly monopolized by the Company and ‘everyone’ abused his or her position to squeeze graft from the Company's trade. It was, supposedly, to get their hands on the private trade and graft that people joined the Dutch East India Company (VOC: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) in the first place. But back in the Netherlands the VOC's Board of Directors (the Heeren XVII) objected vociferously to private trade, which drained Company profits and shareholder revenue. To appease the Heeren XVII back at home, the various Governors-General and Councillors of the Indies (Raad van Indië), who represented the Heeren XVII in Asia, issued annual placards forbidding private trade while the High Court (Raad van Justitie) carried out infrequent desultory trials for private trade. But these prosecutions were inevitably doomed to failure, so the story goes, because everyone engaged in private trade would ‘cover’ for everyone else.

I first came upon Henry Davison Love's Vestiges of Old Madras a decade ago in The Hague. The four volumes were published at London in 1913 and have been very lately reprinted by the Oriental Books Reprint Corporation of Delhi. The dull cloth bindings of the Indian edition, however, hardly conjure the thrill I experienced the first time I watched the original volumes heave into view on the book conveyor of the Royal Library. Probably no one had checked them out for over fifty years, and they sparkled pristinely, as though they had been delivered from a time warp. Golden letters embellished on ivory-coloured boards flashed richly out from maroon and black mouldings decorated with slender urns and caryatids. How much we miss today for not having editions like that!

In early 1959, Luiz Rendall Silva, Cape Verdean administrator of the concelho (district) of Fogo, on the volcano island of that name in the Sotavento group (Leeward Islands), wrote a very energetic report to his Portuguese superiors. He complained to the Governor of Cape Verde about the lack of decisiveness in Portugal's colonial welfare policy, and about the absence of clear programmes for the future of the islands. In his words, he wished “for the improvement of the Cape Verdean land and for the benefit of its populations, and for a more visible advancement of the civilising mission.”

In the 1660s the renowned publishing company of Jacob van Meurs in Amsterdam published three richly illustrated monographs that fundamentally changed the European perceptions of the empires of China and Japan. It all started with the publication in 1665 of the travel notes and sketches that Joan Nieuhof had made ten years earlier, while travelling in the retinue of two Dutch envoys to the Manchu court in Peking. With no less than 150 copper prints, this book aroused so much interest in travel topics—it was published in Dutch, French, German, Latin, and English—that Van Meurs did not hesitate to launch a whole series of illustrated volumes about faraway countries. To keep the China lovers happy, he published a reprint of the richly illustrated China Monumentis by the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. In 1668, another monumental illustrated work appeared in Dutch (and later also German, English and French editions) time about Africa written by the Amsterdam physician Olfert Dapper, and shortly afterwards, when that publication also proved to be a smashing success, Van Meurs asked for the right to publish two more works, one on Japan and one on China. That privilege was obtained on March 1669. The book on Japan, Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen der Oost-Indische Maetschappij aen de Kaisaren van Japan, or “Memorable embassies of the (Dutch) East India Company to the Emperors of Japan,” was compiled by Arnoldus Montanus, a learned Dutch clergyman, who according to the preface had already published fifty-three monographs. The book on China was authored by Olfert Dapper, who this time edited the travelogues of the second and third Dutch embassies to China. What made these books so interesting is that they all were based on eyewitness accounts of the interior of the widely known but little explored empires of China and Japan by servants of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The reason why it was possible for the Dutch merchants to travel where few other westerners had gone before was that they had been sent by the directors of the company as envoys bearing tribute presents to the rulers of both realms to secure privileged trading rights.

This article analyses four accounts of mutinies and wrecks of Dutch East India Company ships: those of the Nieuw Hoorn, Batavia, Blydorp and Nijenburg. These stories can be read as worst-case survival manuals, which support the Company’s discourse of discipline. They advise readers that the best option in the event of disaster is to obey the officers’ orders and the Company’s rules, linking this advice to moral and religious ideas of endurance and divine providence that were common in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The accounts also link shipboard spatial protocols with proper social order. The stories present the Indies as a dangerous physical and moral testing ground, from which the ship provides a vital protective barrier, but only if the crew acts with disciplined solidarity and shows seamanlike virtues of cohesion and perseverance. Disorder among the crew, especially the breaching of spatial boundaries between officers and men, invites the dangers of the Indies to penetrate the safe space of the ship. Such breaches threaten all the boundaries on which the lives of the ship and crew depend: between the ship and the sea, between moral and immoral behaviour, and between Europeans and the non-European world. Where spatial boundaries break down, the stories show chaos and calamity following. Where the stories have ‘happy endings’, these are brought about by the re-establishment of proper spatial and social hierarchies.

In early 1787, as American vessels flooded the Gold Coast with rum and as the French worked to extend their coastal position, the Cape Coast Castle governor Thomas Price, reported that the Fante, England's coastal allies, ‘are too politic a people, and too well acquainted with their own interests, ever to wish to confine their trade to one nation’. Price's summation of the issues affecting Anglo-Fante relations on the late eighteenth-century Gold Coast (modern Ghana) provides the foundation for this article. This article contributes to West African coastal historiography in that it examines the relationship between the Gold Coast and the Atlantic World through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The article expands upon this foundation by narrowing the focus to one Gold Coast trade/administrative enclave. It examines the enclave during a period of change, the 1770s to the early 1800s that culminated in radical reconstruction of coastal relations. The article utilises the Fetu city of Cape Coast, also the administrative centre for England's Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (hereafter CMTA), to examine the relationship between Atlantic (external) and coastal (internal) factors within an African trade enclave. To accomplish this, it eliminates the dichotomy that exists between exploring general coastal trends within a diverse coastal region. This raises a question concerning the consequence of these general trends upon diverse states, cultures and peoples. Do the general trends affect each group similarly or differently and, if so, why? The focus upon one Gold Coast enclave expands our understanding of the consequences caused by the interaction of Atlantic and coastal factors.

The historiography with which most of us interact outside our own country or area of expertise is predominantly western and primarily in English. Although increasingly diverse in authorship, this historiography continued to build on traditions and sources which were developed in a less universalist age. It is not surprising the find that the period (roughly mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries) in which most independent countries of eastern Asia sought to disengage from the European-dominated world economy is poorly understood or appreciated. I am conscious of the danger that my own recent work on the Southeast Asian ‘Age of Commerce’ may unintentionally reinforce negative images of those states which reacted to the traumas of the seventeenth century by decreasing their interaction with European traders.

Before embarking on our exploration a word of caution is in order. The following is not meant to be a full-fledged scholarly paper pulling out all the available evidence. All it intends to do is to throw out a couple of suggestions which hopefully may give rise to discussion. It is, therefore, an unabashed exercise in speculation. Also it will endeavour to compress within the compass of a brief paper complicated and diverging developments taking place during a period of more than a thousand years over a diverse and widely stretched area. At best it may serve as an essay in the sense of a speculative ‘attempt’; in short, a discussion piece. It arose from previous discussions with students and colleagues, especially with Andre Wink, who may recognise a blurred reflection of their own ideas.

The importance of Africa and African agency in the formation of the Atlantic world is now widely acknowledged by historians, but Africa has drawn less attention than other regions in analyses of the British Atlantic. Drawing upon the nascent methodology of global microhistory, this article contributes to a scholarly rebalancing by examining two maritime lawsuits from the 1640s concerning British voyages to Senegambia and Sierra Leone, both of which resulted in conflict between British seafarers and with their African trading partners. A close study of the documents surviving from these lawsuits provides an unusually detailed glimpse of these particular moments of contact and violence across cultures. More fundamentally, such an approach illuminates the ocean-spanning networks within which these ventures took place, and reveals the ways in which British traders and sailors perceived trade in Africa within their own legal frameworks. This article argues that by the middle of the seventeenth century, as merchants and politicians in Britain began to imagine an Atlantic empire, trade in West Africa was an important part of their vision of the Atlantic world.

In the last issue of Itinerario (vol. XVI, 1992/2), Jan Breman of the University of Amsterdam, has published an English translation of his introduction to the third edition of his book Koelies, Planters en Koloniale Politiek. In this article, titled ‘Controversial Views on Writing Colonial History’, Breman tries to deal with some of the ‘more sceptical and sometimes even hostile’ reactions to his book on plantation labour in East Coast Sumatra during the last decades of the nineteenth century. However, his contribution has a more important purport, as he suggests a specific way in which the history of the colonial past should be written, dismissing at the same time the approach to the colonial past undertaken by what he calls the ‘Leiden Revisionist School’.

To write a comparative study on so broad a scale as colonial exploitation systems in two such very different countries as Java and India would be an enormous task. A more practical approach would be to select a single aspect of the Dutch system on Java for study, and compare this same feature in the context of the British colony. And, conversely, to isolate a particular facet of British practice in India and compare it to Dutch usage on Java, asking.how the systems worked or did not work as they did over a given span of time.