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 Spain's last colony, Western Sahara, both efforts by the colonial power to stimulate development and the negative impacts of colonisation intensified between the end of the Ifni-Sahara War (1957–58) and the Spanish withdrawal in 1975. Spanish economical and geopolitical interests triggered an important industrial and urban development of the territory. Cities such as Laayoune, Villa Cisneros, Smara, and the Bou Craa phosphate deposits were to showcase Spanish modernising colonial policies.

However, the effects of war, the control of colonial frontiers, and severe droughts during the 1960s strongly affected Sahrawi society. In this context, the Spanish colonial state developed new forms of control over the Sahrawi population, which included the progressive (forced) settling of nomadic people around military posts and Spanish cities, bringing about the adoption of new economic paradigms. Not only did the Francoist government distribute subsidies, both money and goods; it furthermore implemented policies aimed at controlling the Sahrawi way of life, particularly in the areas of hygiene, education, and gender relations. The essay analyses these “carrot-and-stick” strategies at the intersection of colonial control and forced sedentarisation with regard to the implementation of a market-oriented economy in Western Sahara.

These concluding reflections assess how the contributors to this special issue intervene in key assumptions that shape the current field of archival studies. As the “archival turn” gains ground, forms of Euro- and state-centrism reappear in scholarship otherwise innovative in its attention to the textual remnants of the past. Here, instead, we explore the methodological stakes involved in defining both the “archive” and the historical power brokers who created and preserved a documentary record in pursuit of their varied social, cultural, economic, and political projects. The essay points to the resurgence of culturalist and civilisational indices for comparative archivistics, and follows the arguments collected in this issue to assert by contrast the often uneven and uneasy regional, administrative, and procedural definitions at work within preserved records. Identifying “mobility” as both a methodological tactic and a historical process, this conclusion presents a fluid rather than fixed textual landscape and presents an alternative frame for investigating preservationist practices.

Although French chartered companies operating on the west coast of Africa and in India followed a similar model of organization, their liquidation processes differed depending of the area of their monopoly. As well as exploring the reasons for the distinction between these two regions of exclusive trade, this article demonstrates that the differing liquidation processes negatively impacted company shareholders in the two regions. Taking the perspective of shareholders farther, it explores the case of a specific investor and the informal economic profits he benefitted from. This approach contributes to deepening our understanding of the French early modern companies’ bankruptcies by examining informal aspects that would not be readily visible from an exclusively institutional point of view.

The dominant theme in the historical literature on agricultural production for export is the fast-expanding demand by Europe in the course of the industrialisation during the nineteenth century of agricultural goods originating in Asia, Africa as well as the Regions of Recent Settlement. In a large number of cases, the growing supplies of agricultural export were put together through recourse to the plantation system. The colonial governments often played an important, and sometimes a decisive, role in the rise and the smooth functioning of this system. This could be in the form of liberal land grants, the delegation of coercive authority to the management over the labour supply and so on. The direct, including entrepreneurial, role of the government was often evident also in arrangements which were not of the usual plantation variety, but which operated on the basis of accommodation, and indeed integration, with the existing organisation of traditional peasant agriculture. An outstanding example of this is the well-known Cultivation System introduced by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch in Dutch Indonesia in the 1830s. The common theme that cuts across the bulk of the great diversity of arrangements of the use of coercive power by the colonial state in a variety of ways and often in fairly liberal doses.

In Tapanuli, a province in western Sumatra, economic expansion in the late colonial period was frustrated by the problems of transportation in its mountainous and inaccessible terrain. In 1921, Resident F.C. Vorstman of Tapanuli stated in his succession report: ‘The construction of main roads is one of the most powerful means to improve economically backward regions’. This statement is not very surprising in itself, but it does reveal that some government officials had a clear idea of the impediments of economic development in the Outer Islands of colonial Indonesia, and how these obstacles could be overcome. As I will argue in this contribution, the development of infrastructure was one of the major factors in a process of increasing economic integration in Indonesia in the late colonial period. Moreover, infrastructural improvements were more significant in stimulating national economic development than the government policies under the Ethical Policy.

Among the most entrenched criticisms of the record of European colonial rule in Africa is that it discouraged, or actively obstructed, the emergence of diversified colonial and post-colonial economies. Specifically, it is normally argued, the colonial state failed to create the climate in which industrialisation might have been possible. The two basic explanations advanced for this policy of neglect were a desire to ensure that the colonies continued to provide the metropolitan economies with a steady supply of desirable commodities, and a concern to protect the market share of metropolitan exporters. Critics of the colonial legacy, across the ideological spectrum, have often assumed that ‘development’ was a condition which could only be achieved through the process of industrialisation, and that specialisation in commodity production for export could not have been in the colonies' long-term interests. Moreover, in the late colonial period, industrialisation had come to be seen by many as a measure of a state's effective autonomy and economic ‘maturity’, as witnessed by the sustained attempts by many former African colonies to promote their own industrial sectors, often with substantial state involvement or assistance. While it cannot dispute the obvious fact that in most of late colonial Africa, industrialisation was negligible, this paper will offer a refinement of conventional assumptions about the colonial state's attitudes towards this controversial topic. Drawing on examples from British Africa, particularly that pioneer of decolonisation, West Africa, and focusing on the unusually fertile period in colonial policy formation from the late 1930s until the early 1950s, it will suggest that the British colonial state attempted, for the first time, to evolve a coherent and progressive policy on encouraging colonial industrial development.

In the year 1819, three years after the British return of the East Indies to the Netherlands, a young man of twenty arrived to Kupang, a port on the coast of West Timor. Kupang was by no means a large place but it was the centre of Dutch colonial power over this part of Indonesia, and its administration monitored the various islands that the Netherlands laid claim to: Solor, Alor, Rote, Savu, and others. This task was made the more difficult since some of these places were also claimed by Portugal, which maintained a colonial governor in Dili, in the eastern part of Timor. The last serious conflict between the two colonial powers had occurred the previous year when the little harbour Atapupu was forcibly occupied by the Dutch resident. The tempests of the Age of Napoleon had been severely felt in Timor, whose inhabitants were located at the extremities of the colonial claims of the warring parties. Britons, Dutchmen, and Portuguese had fought or intrigued for the resources of an island that was neither the richest nor the most accessible in the island world of Southeast Asia—rather the opposite.

The name of the young man was Reint Le Bruyn. Born in Zutphen, Le Bruyn had spent his early years as a child labourer in a textile factory. Coming from relatively destitute conditions, he had nevertheless picked up some education, and in 1818 he signed up for the Nederlandsch Zendeling-Genootschap (NZG), the Dutch Missionary Society. This society, the first among about fifteen to concentrate on the East Indies, had been established in 1797 by a missionary who later worked in South Africa. It was modelled on the London Missionary Society which was founded two years earlier. Societies of this kind emerged as part of the wave of rising interest in undertaking missionary activity in non-Western societies, which, interestingly, coincided with the questioning of traditional clerical hierarchy after the outbreak of the French Revolution. Biographical sketches of Le Bruyn's life have typically pointed to his Christian devotion to explain his career choice. However, it could also have been a way for poor men of ability to engage in work that provided a degree of professional recognition that they could not have hoped for at home. Missionaries received scant preparation for their task in Rotterdam; they had little knowledge of the societies that awaited them, and they only learned any substantial Malay, the main language of communication, on arrival in the Indies. Le Bruyn successfully overcame these obstacles and had an eventful career on Timor for the next ten years, to the extent that posterity hailed him as the true pioneer of the Protestant mission in these waters.

The documentary record of African opposition to the CAF (Central African Federation) has been the subject of renewed historiographical interest in recent years.2 This paper seeks to contribute to the existing debate in three principle ways. Firstly, it will show that opposition to the scheme was fatally undermined by the pursuits of two very distinct strands of NAC (Nyasaland African Congress) and ANC (African National Congress) political activism. In the second instance, it will show that this dissimilar political discourse produced contradictions that resulted in bypassing African objections. Thirdly, the paper will go a step farther, suggesting that the two respective anti-Federation campaigns not only undermined the efforts of both Congress parties to stop federation, but laid the path for future discord in the national dispensation then materialising.

When the abolitionists achieved the suppression of the British slave-trade in 1807, they believed that a brave new world of free labour was opening up for Africa. Although they thought mainly in terms of ex-slaves providing the labour for plantation areas, they hoped that any shortfall could in part be met by free emigration from Africa. The reality was to be cruelly different from these dreams. Emigration continued, but overwhelmingly in the form of coerced labour, and most attempts at stimulating free emigration failed. Labour exports across the Atlantic remained close to the late eighteenth-century high point for about four decades, and then fell away steeply to almost nothing by the First World War, as the long, halting and often contradictory European campaign to abolish coerced labour slowly bore its fruits. In the interests of comparison with other areas of emigration, this report will devote a little space at the end to analysing why a small current of free emigration developed, and why it remained so limited. But the bulk of the report will focus on large exports of coerced labour.

This article discusses the ways in which newsprint allowed local contributors and readers in colonial settings to think across gender, race, and other core colonial subject-positions. It also asks about the extent to which the central role of men in controlling local print networks has implications for how we conceptualise “publics” and “public spheres” in the colonial era.

Among the roughly 150,000 soldiers sent to the Dutch East Indies between 1815 and 1914, the Luxembourg contingent made up a tiny minority of just 1,075 men. Based upon extensive research into their careers, data on these soldiers provide further clues to understanding what drove Europe’s young men to become colonial soldiers. The results of this national case study will be compared with earlier investigations by Bossenbroek and Bosma on recruits for the Dutch colonial army. Similar to the Dutch soldiers, their Luxembourg counterparts had a predominantly urban provenance. However, in contrast to the Dutch, they did not have a strong military background, and it appears that fewer Luxembourgers stayed behind in the Dutch East Indies after their tour of duty. They were more attracted by the payments that the recruiters doled out in advance, particularly at a time of economic crisis, than in a career in the tropics.

As historians, living in the contemporary world, we ask and are asked about the causes of underdevelopment. And, as most of the former colonies belong today to the underdeveloped countries of the Third World, we are confronted with the question as to what importance the colonial era plays in the history of these countries. There is a consensus that the history of colonialism can only be meaningful approached in the broader spectrum of underdevelopment and the specific problems of the Third World. There is no satisfaction in retreatingto the ostensibly objective approach of the historian and wanting tolimit ourselves in showing how colonialism came into being, what administrative structures arose, what economic policies were followed and finally how the colonized revolted and the process of decolonization got under way. Society will simply not allow us to do so. Equally, if not more important, is the question regarding the impact of colonialism on the colonized societies and how far it may be held responsible for the existing structures of underdevelopment.

This essay discusses the important contributions of three new works on Indian citizenship by Ornit Shani, Uditi Sen, and Oliver Godsmark. Their books discuss the territorial partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947, the framing and inauguration of the Indian Constitution in 1950, the preparation of voter rolls and the first democratic elections, and linguistic reorganisation of Indian states in 1956, alongside questions of refugee rehabilitation, counterinsurgency measures and rising ethnonationalisms. The emphasis is not only on the legal regimes of national citizenship, but also how it is unevenly mapped and experienced. This emphasis on territoriality is an invitation to ask questions about continuity and change in the transition from empires to nation-states, as well as invented pasts and imagined futures that transcend national borders set up after the end of colonial rule.

Although this paper builds on earlier research, let me frankly confess that this is still a preliminary report as it is not based on comprehensive research in the original sources upon which my work on the seventeenth centuryis based. Given the huge amount of sources available for the eighteenth century, to write a truly thorough paper on the Arabian seas in the eighteenth century would take many years – nay, a life-time so voluminous is it. Holden Furber, perhaps the greatest historian of the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean, started to work on this topic in 1936, published a volume on the 1780–1790 period in 1948 and then announced he would write further volumes tracing the story back into the seventeenth century. But Holden Furber spent the rest of his life hunting down further archival material, with new material constantly forcing him to delay further publications for another forty years. Even then he was only able to write a preliminary survey of the eighteenth century, ending with the causing note that, of course, he had not studied the Dutch material as well as he would have liked to.