This could be considered as the ‘swan song’ of a French colonial administrator in Tropical Africa. Between 1958 and 1961, most of these colonial administrators had to leave what was soon to be considered one of the major sins committed by France in the twentieth century: the Empire. For some of them it was a real shock, from which they never recovered. Of course, it was the normal outcome of the very process they had prepared: to teach the African peoples how to rule themselves. But: ‘Did it not come too early leaving the new African elite insufficiently prepared?’ If this were so, was ‘the great sin of France not to colonise but to decolonise too quickly?’

The Scramble for Africa between the European powers at the end of the nineteenth century has always struck people as quite an extraordinary process. It has played an important role in the debate about European overseas expansion, and still does. This article is about the discussion surrounding the partition of Africa which took place within a geographical society in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS). In those days, as the expansion reached its zenith, the question of how the British Empire should be organised was one of the most important political issues. The debate about imperialism continued after Africa had been partitioned, and the nature of the debate changed in the light of two World Wars and the era of decolonisation. As time went by, scholars who mainly focused on the economic and political motivations for European overseas expansion dominated the imperialism debate. The role that groups such as geographical societies played became obscured as their ideas were seen as outdated. In recent years there has been a growing interest in the ways societies like the RSGS contributed to the metropolitan culture of imperialism.

In 1914, most New Zealanders welcomed the opportunity to stand together with the British Empire. Historians have long recognised that for a small country the contribution to the war effort of pakeha New Zealanders was substantial. Much less well recognised is the contribution of Māoris who served at Gallipoli and on the western front. In the face of opposition from within the Māori community and from British High Command, a determined group of Māori leaders argued forcefully for sending Māoris into action. Many young Māori men responded with enthusiasm to the recruitment drive and the First Māori Battalion sailed to Egypt in February 1915. This paper explores the tensions that resonated within the Māori community around the recruitment of Māori men and argues that the debates were shaped by different understandings of nationhood. Māoris who opposed recruitment believed that volunteering to fight in a foreign war distracted Māoris from dealing with the difficulties in their own communities. Conversely those who argued for participation in the war believed that their contribution to the war would lead to utu (justice), and that only by including Māoris as soldiers in fighting units could all New Zealanders claim to belong to an authentic nation.

This article studies the role of indigenous teachers within the school system run by the Moravian mission in the Danish West Indies. The mission opened its first day schools for enslaved children in 1841 a few years before the abolition of slavery. The missionaries were reliant on the support of teachers of Afro-Caribbean origin, which were trained in one of the teacher training institutes run by the Mico-Charity Society. This article proposes that the recruitment of Afro-Caribbean teachers with different denominational backgrounds and professional education challenged the mission hierarchy. This will be pointed out by focusing on the recruitment and training of the teachers and by an analysis of their position within the mission society.

In 1885, the Dutch East Indian state began a huge ‘civilisation offensive’ in the field of irrigation focussed on Java. It comprised creating modern irrigation works, regulating irrigation management and planning construction activities. This paper shows the successes and failures of this irrigation programme, which was part of the Dutch ‘colonial project’ as a whole. Particular attention is given to the question of why the colonial state made irrigation affairs one of its special missions. What emerges is that Dutch exploitation interests (sugar) were dominant, though the welfare interests of the native population (rice) clearly became more prominent. Another question to be dealt with is the issue of how the Dutch East Indian state realized its plans. As this paper argues, the engineers of the Public Works Department played a key part, but only in competition and cooperation with other relevant groups.

Throughout the last decade a number of rather detailed studies on eighteenth-century Atlantic merchants and merchant colonies in Atlantic port cities has been published. The works ofJacob Price, David Hancock, Jonathan Israel, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, and Manuel Bustos Rodríguez demonstrate the growing historical interest in maritime trade and Atlantic studies. All of these works carry on the investigative traditions of the authors respective countries, represented, for example, by Bernard Bailyn's works on the New England merchants, Pierre and Huguette Chaunu's and Paul Butel's studies on the economies of the Spanish and French Atlantic, and the investigations of Antonio García-Baquero González on the topic of Spanish Atlantic trade. As a pervasive pattern within this field of research it can be observed that, since the foundations had been laid with these classical studies, the focus of historical inquiry has shifted from quantitative investigations (that is, those on the currents of ships, goods, and precious metals) and from studies on the legal frameworks regulating the Atlantic trades to detailed studies of the individuals responsible for this trade. Arising from their countries colonial pasts, it is not surprising that most of these author's works concentrate on the colonial trade of the Western European sea powers, thus neglecting the central and eastern interiors of the continent. In the 1960s and 70s, some German historians, notably Hermann Kellenbenz and Hans Pohl, published studies in this area, but it has lain fallow ever since. The aim of this article is to shed some light on the perspectives that might open up by reconsidering the influence of Atlantic trade on Central Europe in the Early Modern period.

Cui bono information and record keeping? In his most recent work devoted to the study of British and French imperialism in the Levant in early modern history, Cornel Zwierlein has argued that “empires are built on ignorance.” It is, of course, true that during the old regime Western knowledge of things “Oriental” was patently defective, marked as it was by blind spots and glaring gaps; and if observed in the broader context of European colonialism in Asia, the British and French cases are hardly exceptional. Sanjay Subrahmanyam's Europe's India has shown compellingly that the Portuguese, too, blindly forged ahead in their imperial expansion into South Asia, with a good dose of improvisation. By focusing on a mission to Khiva, Bukhara, and Balkh in 1732, I set out to show that the Russian venture in Asia too was premised upon ignorance, among other things. More specifically, I argue that diplomatic and commercial relations between Russia and Central Asia developed in parallel with the neglect of intelligence gathered and made available in imperial archives. Reflecting on the fact that the Russian enterprise in Asia was minimally dependent on information allows us to complicate the reductive equation of knowledge to power, which originates from the “archival turn.” Many today regard archives as reflective of projects of documentation, which granted epistemological virtue to the texts stored, ordered, and preserved therein. The archives generated truth claims, we are told, about hierarchies of knowledge produced by states and, by doing so, they effectively operated as a technological apparatus bolstering the state. However, not all the texts which we find in archives always retained their pristine epistemic force. To historicise the uses, misuses, and, more importantly, the practices of purposeful neglect of records invites us to revisit the quality of transregional connectivity across systems of signification in the early modern period.

Dans le cadre de la problématique du développement et du sous-développement, l'Extrême Orient forme un chapitre à part, à cause des voies assez remarquables que la Chine, le Japon et la Corée ont empruntées pour la modernisation). C'est l'impérialisme occidental qui a provoqué cette modernisation au cours du processus d'incorporation de l'Extrême-Orient dans l'économie capitaliste dont les Etats-Unis et l'Europe occidentale formaient les axes.

In 1901, the parliament of the new Commonwealth of Australia passed a series of laws designed, in the words of the Prime Minister Edmund Barton, “to make a legislative declaration of our racial identity”. An Act to expel the large Pacific Islander community in North Queensland was followed by a law restricting further immigration to applicants who could pass a literacy test in a European language. In 1902, under the Commonwealth Franchise Act, “all natives of Asia and Africa” as well as Aboriginal people were explicitly denied the right to vote in federal elections. The “White Australia policy”, enshrined in these laws, was almost universally supported by Australian politicians, with only two members of parliament speaking against the restriction of immigration on racial grounds.

The idea that the African Atlantic world was populated by Atlantic Creoles who crossed cultural divides with relative ease is appealing, and it lends itself well to studies of identity formation that highlight the talents and opportunities that emerged from processes of cultural blending. Yet an examination of how travelling Africans ascribed meaning to their spatial and emotional groundings underlines that creolization in the African Atlantic was less smooth than suggested by the figure of the Atlantic Creole. For Frederik Svane and Christian Protten, two Euro-African men born on the Gold Coast in the early eighteenth century, Creole conditions resulted in identity practices that ranged from the complete rejection of African culture to a celebration and redefinition of the significance of African origins in the Atlantic world.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, officers of the Danish West India and Guinea Company struggled to balance the sovereignty of the company with the mastery of St. Thomas’ and St. John's slave owners. This struggle was central to the making of the laws that controlled enslaved Africans and their descendants. Slave laws described slave crime and punishment, yet they also contained descriptions of the political entities that had the power to represent and execute the law. Succeeding governors of St. Thomas and St. John set out to align claims about state sovereignty with masters’ prerogatives, and this balancing act shaped the substance of slave law in the Danish West Indies. Indeed, the slave laws pronounced by and the legal thinking engaged in by island governors suggest that sovereignty was never a stable state of affairs in the Danish West Indies. It was always open to renegotiation as governors, with varying degrees of loyalty to the company and at times with questionable capability, strove to determine what sovereignty ought to look like in a time of slavery.

In 1762, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, Britain’s Royal Navy and East India Company mobilised a motley army of Europeans, South Asians, and Africans and invaded Manila, the capital of Spain’s Asian Empire. The Black Legend blinded the British to the complexities of the real balance of power in the Philippines. The Spanish colonial government quickly raised militias of Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese mestizos, and indigenous Filipinos who ultimately defeated the British. The loyalties of the soldiers of many nations who converged in Manila could not be taken for granted. This article examines the ongoing bargaining that took place between imperial officials and soldiers, revealing the crucial role that negotiation played in eighteenth-century empire building beyond the Atlantic. War transformed fighting men of many nations into important historical actors who determined the outcome of the Seven Years’ War in the Indo-Pacific world.

The Swedish East India Company has been studied mainly from an economic standpoint, but throughout the eighteenth century its employees played a crucial role in Swedish knowledge production on China. This article studies travel writings, speeches, and eulogies by the employees of the Swedish East India Company, noting in which ways they produced knowledge on China, and discusses reasons for choosing these particular ways. The company employees' production of knowledge is found to have strong links with their constructions of masculinity. Consequently, this article discusses the political implications of a connection between masculinity and knowledge for men employed in a non-colonial East India Company from a militarily weak country, and the role that the perceived and presented knowledge of China and its inhabitants played in this intertwining of gender construction, natural history, and power.

This article explores the private trade networks of English East India Company merchants on the west coast of India during the first half of the eighteenth century. Existing studies of English private trade in the Indian Ocean have almost exclusively focused on India's eastern seaboard, the Coromandel Coast and the Bay of Bengal regions. This article argues that looking at private trade from the perspective of the western Indian Ocean provides a different picture of this important branch of European trade. It uses EIC records and merchants' private papers to argue against recent metropolitan-centred approaches to English private trade, instead emphasising the importance of more localised political and economic contexts, within the Indian Ocean world, for shaping the conduct and success of this commerce.

This article suggests that conditions of coloniality produce a sui generis public sphere, one which contains multiple, plurilingual collective audiences, rather than a single “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas), or a single “imagined community” (Anderson). By way of illustration, it locates diasporic Chinese publics in the colonial public sphere of British Malaya, and argues for a more analytically differentiated understanding of their constituent collectivities, or what it refers to as “we” publics. It analyses a Chinese-language newspaper, the Yik Khuan Poh, elaborating the different “we” publics convened within its pages, and emphasising the regional and translocal geographies of collective belonging that exist within the “transnational we,” which models of diaspora tend to overdetermine. In situating the Yik Khuan Poh in its temporal and spatial contexts in the early twentieth century, this article also raises questions about the character of colonial public spheres in an era of significant globality.

Organic farming activists have promoted the idea that ancient peasant wisdom informed the basic principles or Albert Howard’s Indore method, and of organic farming generally. The myth of the peasant origins of organic farming has influenced environmental activists and historians alike and concealed the remarkable contributions of Albert Howard and his first and second wives, Gabrielle and Louise Howard. A few statements made by Howard himself, and by his second wife, Louise, inspired the myth of peasant origins of organic wisdom. But a closer look at the published and unpublished writings of the Howards show that the formulation of the Indore method, which lies at the heart of organic farming, is a strict scientific protocol with its roots in the scientific work of Albert Howard and his cohorts.

Japan is a land where the lemons bloom. The earth yields three crops a year, and all sorts of animals, birds, and fish abound in this charming country. Water is plentiful – rivers, brooks, springs and hot springs – and there is a well in the large, fruitful, and beautiful garden attached to every house. The houses, made with excellent workmanship of wood, are built close to the ground on account of the windy climate. Their floors are remarkably clean, as they are covered with straw mats on which no shod foot is permitted to tread. There are no locks or bars on the doors.

In the many letters written by princes in the Indonesian archipelago to the Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company at Batavia, the relative status.is expressed in the address. Titles that are used range from “friend and ally” to “father” and “grandfather,” reflecting the formal relationship that had been laid down in the contracts. The address shows the position of the VOC occupied during the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The Dutch East India Company, though a large bureaucratic apparatus, was approached in a personified way. The formal distance to the Governor-General was expressed in terms derived from daily social life. It also makes one realize that a trading company had become an Asian ruler. In the Indonesian archipelago the VOC constituted an important political power.