Government requires coercion, if only to arrest free riding. Physical coercion alone may not suffice for this purpose, however, and ideological means may be needed as well. This basic principle underlies all government. In market economies the coercive capabilities of government may be expected to be financed out of taxes ultimately levied on factor owners' money incomes, that is, on wages, profits, and rent. On the other hand, in economies where markets have not developed due to high transactions costs individuals' contributions to the provision of public goods will take the form of payments in kind and labour services. In this case, the free rider problem suggests labourers will attempt to shirk; the government, therefore, will have to compel labourers to work and, therefore, will appear to be coercing labour even though it may only be seeking to curtail shirking.

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.

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.

During a parliamentary debate in April 1874, the Dutch conservative politician Nierstrasz made this provocative statement on the war in Aceh. He was supported by the former conservative Minister of Foreign Affairs, Van Zuylen van Nijevelt, who dismissed the negotiations held with Aceh on the basis of a strict ultimatum condescendingly as ‘negotiations à la Bismarck’, and unworthy of a Dutch statesman. Nierstrasz maintained the Dutch were pursuing a ‘utilitarian’ policy in Aceh which they would abominate seeing implemented on themselves in Europe. The Aceh War was a disgrace to a Christian nation. Furthermore, the moral issue put forward by the Dutch authorities: that the state of Aceh was guilty of piracy and slavery, was no more than a pretext.

This paper examines Dutch colonial discourse as it was developing at the beginning of the twentieth century. I argue that colonial circumstances were changing at the beginning of the twentieth century in many aspects - economic, political, social - and that these changes required new policy and administrative responses. I take as examples of these changing colonial conditions and responses, two episodes in the history of ‘the late colonial state’, which I argue are both representative of and formative in shaping, colonial policy in the last decades of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia.

The concepts of war and peace are not as simple as they appear at first glance. Closer scrutiny reveals that reality cannot be reduced to the simple dichotomy expressed by this pair of words. There have after all been wars which were never declared and periods of peace which did not follow peace treaties. Yet this made them no less real. Moreover some acts of war were described euphemistically as ‘punitive expeditions’, ‘punishment raids’, or ‘police operations’ while others were described pejoratively as ‘terrorism’, ‘banditry’, and ‘piracy’. There have been wars which officially lasted seven, nine, thirty, eighty andeven onehundred years although theactual fighting took place within a much shorter period. Conversely there have also been eras of peace which were in fact no more than a truce extending over a number of years. In fact the concepts are so elastic that not only in George Orwell's frightening Newspeak but also in ordinary English one can say that “Waris Peace” if only one adds two adjectives: cold waris armed peace.

For those historians and anthropologists who study shamanism, Altai represents the ‘motherland’ of this institution. For their inspirations scholars who want to explore ‘classical’ cases of shamanism usually turn to this area, located in south-western Siberia, at the intersection of Russian, Mongolian and Chinese borders. At the same time, many of these scholars, who are concerned with a quest for ‘ideal’ and ‘traditionalist’ shamanism, ignore almost one-hundred years of contacts between native Altaians and the Russian Orthodox mission that considerably affected indigenous culture and ideology. For instance, some Russian anthropologists have stressed that despite Christian activities, natives still clung to their traditional beliefs at the turn of the twentieth century. N.A. Alekseev emphasised the superficial character of native Christianization and stressed the persistence of indigenous religion. In his recent work, Potapov, another prominent Altaian scholar, similarly concluded:

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.

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 his article “Research on the 17th century Mission in China and the Chinese Reaction”, Prof. Eric Zürcher referred to Chinese documents owned by the Sinological Institute of Leiden University, including “some very interesting texts that show us “late Ming Christianity in action”, such as devotional texts, stories about miraculous happenings”; (p. 113 b). One of these was the Lixiu yijian, A Mirror to Encourage (self-)Improvement. In this paper, I intend to analyse this document in order to show the interaction between mission Catholicism and Chinese popular religion, to demonstrate one facet of the meeting of East and West.

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.

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.