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 offers a preliminary outline of a theoretical concept to cover the precolonial phase of European overseas expansion. It considers the particular case of the Indian Ocean, which provides an exceptionally clear illustration of the need to link research into the expansion with the history of, and changes taking place within, the societies affected by it. What is necessary is to demonstrate the simultaneity and interaction of the region's social organi-sation with European Expansion. For this purpose I have used what may be called a systems approach.

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.

Giovanni da Empoli's second voyage to Asia (1510–1514) was eventful and violent, characterised by the emergence of conflicting agendas among different groups of Portuguese. The Florentine merchant's long letter about the voyage is an extraordinary document, and provides insights in three important areas. First, it allows us to fill some of the gaps in the history of the early phases of Portuguese empire building, questioning the extent to which the Crown was pursuing a clear and coherent strategy that included the conquest of Malacca. Second, it problematises further our conception of “the Portuguese” by reporting episodes of Portuguese-on-Portuguese violence and opposing views on the objectives of Portuguese fleets in the Indian Ocean. Finally, Giovanni unequivocally expresses admiration for the international markets of Eastern city-ports and openly criticises the militarist attitude and lawless tactics of the Portuguese viceroy, Alfonso de Albuquerque, thereby inviting us to reconsider the chronology of a “cosmopolitan reaction” among Italian writers visiting South Asia.

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.

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 Third World today is the historic product of the overseas expansion of European and North American capitalism. Prior to the rise of modern capitalism, the world had been pluralistic. Different centres of civilisation had developed independently. Between them there had been cultural and commercial intercourse. Two historic missions were completed by European capitalism: firstly, the conquest of the world, and in its wake, colonial plunderings; secondly, the integration of the isolated and the peripheric regions into a unified world system.

This paper examines aspects of Asianism (Ajia-shugi) and colonialism (shokuminchishugi) in Japan's prewar relationship with Asia, to illustrate the contradictions and dilemmas of that relationship. Before beginning, it is perhaps wise to remind readers just what Japan's territorial possessions comprised. Japan acquired Taiwan as a colony in 1895, and the Caroline, Marshall, and Marianas Islands of the Pacific as a mandated territory in 1919. In the quarter of a century between those two datas, Japan's territory grew by nearly 80 percent. The picture may be summarized as follows:

Taiwan, South Sakhalin, and Korea were Japanese “territory” in the narrow sense of that word. By contrast, Kwantung, a leasehold, and the Pacific Islands, a mandate, were Japanese territory only in the broad sense of that word. But insofar as they submitted to Japanese sovereignty, they fall within the category of Japanese colonies.

When Adriaen van der Donck wrote A Description of the New Netherlands in 1655, he rightly pointed to Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage and discovery as the foundation of Dutch claims to the North American territory. Presumably arguing on the basis of the right of first discovery, he proposed that local Indian lore supported the fact that the Dutch-employed Englishman had been the first to discover and explore the Hudson River. As a settler in New Netherland, Van der Donck had often heard the native inhabitants claim that before Hudson came they had never seen such a thing as a European ship.

Ethnic hegemony has been the pattern of governance in the Caribbean since the first century of colonialism, with a small but powerful elite of European ancestry directly controlling the destiny of these territories until the 1960s, when a new African-based political hegemony developed. The conquest and subsequent disappearance of the native inhabitants, followed by the steady development of plantation economies on the basis of slave and contract labour, which in turn influenced heavily the emergence of a race-based system of social stratification in these colonies, are too well known to warrant repetition here. The main concern of this paper is to examine, in the context of ethnic and class formations, the political and social dynamics of the post-colonial period with a view to prognosticating probable developments in the ensuing decades of the twenty-first century.

One of the classical accounts on the coming and first establishment of Islam in Indonesia runs as follows: Already a long time before the birth of Islam a mighty stream of colonisation started from Hindustan towards Java and surrounding islands. This stream definitely dominated the culture of this area and its influence is felt until today. After part of the Hindus had accepted Islam, these Indian Muslims were active in the trade with the archipelago and part of them also settled in this area. These traders and emigrants brought Islam into the Indian Archipelago. It is true, that already before this period some other Muslim nations sought articles of trade from the East-Indies and even established small settlements there: surely there resulted no permanent religious influence from these settlements. Islam, such as received by the Indonesians, therefore already experienced a process of adaptation towards the world of Hinduism. This made it easier for this new religion to accommodate itself once again to a degenerated Hinduism. Islam in the East-Indies unmistakably shows the signs of this Indian origin.

The changing cultural climate in Indonesia at the turn of the century can be demonstrated by the story of a young man, Achmad, who graduated from a Dutch senior high school (HBS) in 1899. He was the first native student to pass the final exams at the highest institution of learning (there was none at university level at the time) in Batavia, the capital of the Netherlands East Indies. Another young man had completed the same type of education in Semarang, Central Java, the year before. They belonged to the first generation of Indonesians schooled in Western ideas and thoughts. Indeed Western types of elementary education and teacher training school existed in other parts of the archipelago, but most of them taught in Malay or in the vernacular. Dutch-language schools at a ‘European’ level were reserved for the white section of the colonial society.

Human social organisation intrinsically includes borders, divisions that mark inside and outside, civilised and barbaric, acceptable and unacceptable. Human groups establish physical and ideational boundaries that help order, explain, and direct their lives. Those groups and activities that blur or cross over these lines receive special attention, as their violations of or challenges to what are presented as logical, natural, and moral standards force their reconciliation with generalised norms. Such people and actions are categorised as immoral, uncouth, detrimental, seditious, or non-human. They are also often considered endowed with special powers.

In 1565, an English sailor named John Sparke visited the colonial Floridas for the first, and probably, only time. Sparke, along with thousands of other Europeans, was in the midst of exploring, settling, and exploiting the Western Hemisphere's eastern coastline, an endeavour that escalated in intensity following the spectacular voyages of Christopher Columbus almost eighty years before. Encountering a variety of locales, objects, and peoples for the first time, the mariner made observations that reveal a great deal about the meeting of Old and New World cultures. Referring to the indigenous inhabitants of the region, Sparke wrote, ‘those people of the cape of Florida are of more savage and fierce nature, and more valiant than any of the rest [he had met in the Americas]’. Significantly, the sailor based his opinions, at least in part, on tales of native barbarity communicated to him by Spanish settlers who had begun colonising the peninsula at the dawn of the sixteenth century. According to these stories, Indians were uncivilised and ‘eaters of the flesh of men […] canibals’. Yet, Sparke remained unsure about how to evaluate the indigenous inhabitants. His confusion stemmed from conflicting assessments supplied by French colonisers who had also recently established a foothold in the Floridas.