This article places missionary education squarely at the centre of any consideration of European expansion in the modern era. It focuses more specifically on the place of local teachers in Bolivia and their relationship with one evangelical Protestant mission, the Bolivian Indian Mission, which originated in New Zealand in the early 1900s. It takes a non-metropole and a “multi-sited” approach to missions and education. It argues that what we know about Bolivian teachers was mediated through the missionary voice and that these teachers negotiated their lives within a particular missionary space, in which there operated a number of intersecting influences from other sites within the wider imperial or Western network. It aims to both reclaim the identities of Bolivian teachers (focusing on teachers’ identity and function) and to reflect critically on intrinsic methodological and conceptual issues (emphasizing the nature of sources, missionary discourse, the resulting status of Bolivian teachers, and Bolivian agency).

Missions were not simply sites of modernity, they were also the source of key data for the modernist theories of human progress. The idea that so called “primitive peoples” provided a window to the origins of human institutions seemed axiomatic to nineteenth-century theorists of human society who sought evidence for these ideas from settlers, administrators and particularly missionaries. The 1870s and 1880s were the high point of missionary engagement with study-bound anthropologists, as questionnaires and letters were sent from the centres to the edges of empires. Missionary responses, augmented with settler and explorer observations, became the footnotes in early anthropological texts on “primitive” societies. These analyses were then mined for the foundation texts of the other social sciences in the late nineteenth century. Along with many other scholars, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read the anthropology of the period and slotted the findings into their analyses of human society.

Johannes Hoornbeeck (1617–1666) was a Dutch Protestant theologian, generally regarded as a member of the so-called Further Reformation in the Netherlands. He wrote a number of theological works in Latin and in Dutch. Most of his works have a polemical character, defending his orthodox protestant stance against a variety of heretical views. In De conversione Indorum et gentilium, based on disputations with students and published posthumously, he enters into a discussion with the ‘heathens’. To this end he carefully combines biblical and classical scholarship and also reflects on the latest ethnographical information collected by both Protestant and Catholic travellers and missionaries. The book is characterised by great erudition and by an openness for other people’s opinions that necessitates the constant appraisal of one’s own point of view. We argue that such an open engagement with heretical views ultimately carries the danger of a sceptical view of one’s own religion.

Historians have often viewed the history of the German empire with Berlin firmly in the centre of the lens, thus privileging the nation-state to the neglect of both the local and the transnational. Zooming out to include transnational processes such as migration and to globalise German history enables us to complicate the dominant narratives of the German nation-state. The movements of Germans overseas—whether as migrants, missionaries, or merchants—helped to forge a global presence for the German empire, but also entailed complex negotiations both among Germans and between Germans and their various “others,” thus revealing the ways in which German nationalist and colonial discourses and practices adapted to local conditions. While the German empire sought to establish itself as a colonial power abroad only in the late nineteenth century, Prussia-Germany was already a colonial power at home, in its eastern provinces. Zooming back in from the global to the local, and refocusing from Berlin to the borderlands, further complicates our understandings of the German empire, by revealing the ways in which local conditions in the eastern borderlands, themselves influenced by transnational phenomena such as international migration, informed the development of German nationalism there. Most notably, the demographics of the Prussian eastern provinces—and the movements of Jews, Germans, Poles, and Ruthenians/Ukrainians in and out of the region—required German nationalists to integrate greater flexibility into their discourse.

This study first considers how master secretaries of the Ottoman Imperial Council went beyond their field of scribal business and began to have a share in carrying out the empire's foreign policy by putting it into words. Next, it deals with the specific genre of documents that took shape step by step as one chancery office worked up an incoming writ and forwarded it to another bureau. It thereby shows how we can indeed unearth new knowledge on political history by looking into these outputs of the chancery's practice of writing and keeping financial transactions between dignitaries, superintendents, petitioners, and departments. The study then tackles in what ways one can link these trends to the early modern growth of the chancery and the branching out in government, and how the state's lordship rights and making, as well as keeping, logs were understood in those times. A document belonging to the handled genre is reproduced, transcribed, and translated at the end.

This paper deals with several themes central to recent debate about Dutch colonial society in Java, the key island of the erstwhile Netherlands Indies. Primarily, these themes relate to the colonial-metropolitan nexus, and my discussion seeks to illuminate these themes with particular reference to the documented experiences of three women who were either on their way to the Indies—or making their way back from there—early in the 1830s. The paper's fundamental argument concerns the importance of the concept of “Empire Families” to an understanding of Dutch colonial communities in the Indies. It is an understanding that serves to correct some misconceptions about the dynamics of those societies in the early to mid-nineteenth-century period. Among other things, building on the work of others and drawing on unpublished documentation, it seeks to locate some aspects of colonial “discourse,” particularly those relating to “colonial women,” in the broader framework of social history.

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.

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.

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.

On December 23, 1965, the president of newly-independent Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, wrote a letter to the prime minister of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar. Kaunda—an outspoken opponent of continued Portuguese rule over the African colonies of Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea—found himself in the awkward position of asking for Salazar's help. Zambia needed Portuguese support, Kaunda wrote, in “confronting the present difficulties provoked by the retaliations of Rhodesia owing to the punitive economic measures of England”

The Macao–Nagasaki connection in the early seventeenth century involved a complex set of interrelationships with regard to trade, mission, cultural intercourse, and other important topics between China, Japan, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. The rise to importance of Macao and Nagasaki was the result of the interruption of Sino–Japanese trade relations and the policy adjustments by the governments of China and Japan to bring the Portuguese under their control and administration. One of the main differences between Macao and Nagasaki was that the former remained a Portuguese settlement for centuries, while the latter was an enclave first of the Portuguese and later of the Dutch. This short article, mainly based on secondary sources by C. R. Boxer, Leonard Blussé, and others, is a tentative study of the international relations in East Asia and their changes after the appearance of the Portuguese and the Dutch in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Two important facts make the sixteen-century international relations in East Asia different from the situation before: the appearance of the Portuguese in this area and the deterioration of Sino–Japanese relations.

For the first thirty years after the Portuguese arrived on the coast of Guangdong in 1514, encounters between them and the Chinese were rife with misunderstandings and conflicts, because Portugal was not a tributary country of China; the Portuguese were totally new to the Chinese. As the Portuguese could not establish formal commercial relations with China, in order to acquire Chinese goods they sought close relations with Chinese and later Japanese smugglers and pirates. They even engaged in the slave trade, which gave them a very bad name in China.

“It is extraordinary, and almost like a dream”, wrote a Jesuit priest in Macau in 1589, “that a man can be carried for six whole months in a ship, where the accommodations cannot in any way be sufficient and spacious, and many other difficulties must be endured.” Imagining a conversation with the group of Japanese youths who were sent to Europe as the representatives of the “Kings of Japan”, the author made a blunt assessment of the conditions of the passage to India aboard the carracks that plied the Carreira da Índia: Being trapped on ship for so long was tantamount “to being shut in a prison”. Yet, as he contended, “certainly no one who was offered a house, even a regally appointed one, to live shut inside for six months, could stay detained or locked in for so long; much less on a ship replete with so many different kinds of inconveniences”. Anxious lest his readers misunderstand this verdict on the Cape Route, the Jesuit author qualified his judgment in the fictional reply to this assertion: “Indeed, the inconveniences on ship surpass even those of prison.”

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.