During the first global economy, roughly from Western industrialization to World War I, the gramophone, much like other consumer goods, circulated relatively freely around the world. This paper compares the market in India and China asking how gramophone companies established themselves there and focuses on the interaction between Western businesspeople and local partners. The article first shows how agents started exploring strategies for “localizing” music and, second, how in both countries their interaction with local partners was first shaped by curiosity and commercial interest, and later by traditionalism and nationalism, the latter of which paradoxically both inhibited and enabled Western business. Based on diaries, corporate files, trade journals, and consular reports, the paper shows that the highly localized and politicized demand for music made access to local knowledge a crucial competitive advantage.

What was the ‘late colonial state’ in India? Purely chronologically, it might be taken to be a period from the 1920s or the 1930s onwards; but this is with the benefit of hindsight. Most writers are in agreement that, despite the political rhetoric of British imperialism in India, it was not until the Second World War that an actual withdrawal from India was seriously contemplated by Britain, with the definite reservation that matters of imperial importance such as defence and economic interest should be controlled by Britain as far as possible. If an acceptance by the colonial power of impending decolonisation is to be the basis of such a characterisation, then it is doubtful whether there was a late colonial state at all. If, on the other hand, a difference in the forms of control and of exercise of power over the colony from earlier periods is to be the basis of the characterisation ‘late’, then perhaps there is more of a case for a use of the term ‘late colonial state’ as more than a mere chronological device.

Indian nationalism was born out of the notion that India's poverty and backwardness was not a natural result of technical inferiority or inefficient use of resources, but that it was a consequence of colonial rule. Even before the development of scientific nationalist economics in the 1890s, the moralists of Young Bengal had called for a protectionist ‘national political economy’ on the lines advocated by Friedrich List in Germany, whom they had read as early as 1850. Bholanath Chandra asserted in 1873 that India had once been the greatest textile producer in the world and had initiated the industrial revolution. By 1970,.he predicted, Britain would be eclipsed by the United States and by India as the greatest industrial producers. This would be brought about by rigorous protectionism and by the growth of what he called ‘moral hostility’ to the consumption of foreign goods which had even polluted the materials used in the making of the sacred threads of orthodox Hindus. This emphasis on the culture of consumption and the structure of external economic relations was central to different varieties of Indian nationalist thought as they developed from Dadhabhai Naoroji through to Mahatma Gandhi.

In the Summer of 1492 Christopher Columbus, a Genovese navigator, looks at the contracts he has just concluded with the queen of Castile. On first reading, these documents seem to be ordinary commercial contracts. The navigator agrees to explore, in the service of his contracting partners, new trade routes on the vast and uncharted waters of the Atlantic. His contracting partners will finance the venture. In return for his services the navigator will get a fair share of the future profits and extensive privileges over the unknown lands that he might discover on his voyage. Similar contracts are known, yet none would have such far reaching consequences as the contracts between the navigator Christopher Columbus and his contracting partners, the Catholic Kings Isabel of Castile and Leon and Fernando of Aragon.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Dutch economy experienced a fresh take-off. Up-to-date steamships plied the shipping routes to the Netherlands East Indies; in the Netherlands the network of railways and canals was greatly expanded; modern insurance companies, commercial banks and other financial institutions were founded. The resultant growing need for external capital led to a new legal form of financing, the joint-stock or limited liability company, and the 1870s and 1880s saw the establishment of a relatively large number of newly founded companies of this type. Generally speaking, these companies represented business activities with a long-standing tradition in Dutch economic life: trade, banking and transportation. The economic take-off was also reflected in the growing number of joint-stock companies pursuing economic activities in colonial Indonesia, often with their headquarters in the Indonesian Archipelago itself. According to J. à Campo the number of such newly founded corporations was more than hundred for each year after 1896, reaching its highest level in 1910, when no less than 326 were founded.

Nineteenth-century Europeans visiting Southeast and South Asia eulogised teak trees (Tectona grandis) for their value and beauty. Diplomatic diaries, travel memoirs, literary descriptions and geography books for children described the teak as a universal sovereign of the sylvan world, the regal “lord” of the forests. With dwindling supplies of oak in Britain, British elites saw teak as a vital component of the country's global naval supremacy in the nineteenth century. The fear of a dwindling supply of teak during the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries encouraged the creation of forestry departments and laws in British India that attempted to preserve the finite amount of teak in the sub-continent. Yet the finite ecologies of India and Burma could not supply all the teak required to fuel expanding demand. Britain would have to look beyond its formal empire in Asia to find more teak.

The history of forestry in British India has evoked a wide range of responses from environmental historians. Debates often centre in particular on the ethic of the bureaucratic organisation responsible for managing the government-controlled forests of India: the Indian Forest Service. Born on the subcontinent and rooted in the European scientific tradition, the Indian Forest Service model, or “empire forestry” as it came to be called from the 1920s onward, has been described as a first step in the world-wide environmental movement or, alternately, as the culprit responsible for widespread deforestation of the subcontinent. This article will address a key aspect of the debate over the Indian Forest Service (hereafter referred to as the IFS) that has profound implications for our understanding of the relationship -between imperialism and forestry conservation. By examining the tension between conservation-minded foresters who battled against timber companies and economically focused imperial bureaucrats, we answer the following question: did the IFS develop a legacy of deforestation throughout the subcontinent between 1855 and 1947? We conclude that the IFS did not develop a dominant ethic of resource exploitation, nor did the IFS rapidly accelerate the rates of deforestation during the colonial period. Rather, the IFS provided a powerful and persuasive counterweight to gentleman capitalists and economically oriented administrators who strenuously battled for more extensive exploitation of forest resources.

Historical studies of Christian missionaries in Africa have not prospered in recent years. The Journal of African History, which printed six articles on missionaries during the first ten years of its existence, has only printed two articles on the subject in the course of the last ten years. Only one book on missionaries has been published by a major university press in Britain or America since 1972. Very occasionally articles about missionaries appear in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and African Affairs but never in the Canadian Journal of African Studies or the Journal of Modern African Studies.

From a historiographical point of view, the incident of 1603 has acquired a special significance in the long and tragic history of Chinese massacres on the Philippines. For, when compared to all the rest of the massacres, this is the best chronicled, not only in Spanish, but also in Chinese sources. Moreover, chronicles in both languages include the same facts and are alike in the ordering of events.

The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of knowledge about the transatlantic slave trade, both through research on specific sections of this traffic and through the consolidation of datasets into a single online resource: Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (hereafter Voyages Database). This collective project has elucidated in great detail the slave trading routes across the Atlantic and the broad African origins of captives, at least from their ports of embarkation. However, this multi-source database tells us little about the slave trading routes within the Americas, as slaves were shipped through various ports of disembarkation, sometimes by crossing imperial borders in the New World. This gap complicates our understanding of the slave trade to Spanish America, which depended on foreign slavers to acquire captives through a rigid system of contracts (asientos and licencias) overseen by the Crown up to 1789. These foreign merchants often shipped captives from their own American territories such as Jamaica, Curaçao, and Brazil. Thus, the slave trade connected the Spanish colonies with interlopers from England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal (within the Spanish domain from 1580 to 1640), and eventually the United States. The importance of the intra-American slave trade is particularly evident in Venezuela: while the Voyages Database shows only 11,500 enslaved Africans arriving in Venezuela directly from Africa, I estimate that 101,000 captives were disembarked there, mostly from other colonies. This article illuminates the volume of this traffic, the slave trading routes, and the origins of slaves arriving in Venezuela by exploring the connections of this Spanish colony with the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French Atlantics. Imperial conflicts and commercial networks shaped the number and sources of slaves arriving in Venezuela. As supplies of captives passed from Portuguese to Dutch, and then to English hands, the colony absorbed captives from different African regions of embarkation.

It is well-known that in 1763 the French presence in India was reduced by the treaty of Paris to five trading posts, or comptoirs, whose names—Pondichéry, Yanaon, Karikal, Mahé and Chandernagor—were erstwhile learned by heart by the French schoolchildren. French India lasted until 1954 and sparked a wide scientific interest in France at least until the beginning of the 1970s. Since that time, along with the history of French colonial policy during the early modern period as a whole, the study of French India has largely gone out of fashion. The last decades of the Ancien Regime have especially been concerned by this disaffection. The best current French specialists of these parts of the world, like Philippe Haudrère, have focused on the activities of the Compagnie françaises des Indes, which was suspended in 1769, or, like Jacques Weber, devoted themselves to the history of the French presence in India during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Even if the period of Dupleix is more studied, the history of French India during the eighteenth century does not seem to tempt many researchers nowadays.

“The stigma of piracy,” writes Sugata Bose, “has provoked heated historical and political debate without always shedding much new light on its meaning and substance.” As a stigma, it has not only misrepresented the morality and motives of so-called pirates, but has also succeeded in ascribing an air of criminality to their activities, in an absence of any law that would actually have made it so. Moreover, recounting the spectacles of piracy in world history once nourished a faltering vision of imperial triumph, in which the maritime violence of empires, particularly the British Empire, was seen to be a wonderful thing. Since then, naval history has run aground, while other historians have begun to confront some of the questions head on: what is a “pirate,” and what made its violence illegitimate relative to the power of sovereign states? Most important to the present article is questioning how piracy developed into a central pillar of maritime-imperial expansion. Was it, as Bose suggests, part of a wider “extraterritorial and universalist anticolonialism” within the Indian Ocean arena, or was it merely an oppositional fantasy that legitimised sea power against a ubiquitous and ill-defined foe?

A renewed interested in Indian Ocean studies has underlined possibilities of the transnational. This study highlights lexical borrowing as an analytical tool to deepen our understanding of cultural exchanges between Indian Ocean ports during the long nineteenth century, comparing loanwords from several Asian and African languages and demonstrating how doing so can re-establish severed links between communities. In this comparative analysis, four research avenues come to the fore as specifically useful to explore the dynamics of non-elite contact in this part of the world: (1) nautical jargon, (2) textile terms, (3) culinary terms, and (4) slang associated with society’s lower strata. These domains give prominence to a spectrum of cultural brokers frequently overlooked in the wider literature. It is demonstrated through concrete examples that an analysis of lexical borrowing can add depth and substance to existing scholarship on interethnic contact in the Indian Ocean, providing methodological inspiration to examine lesser studied connections. This study reveals no unified linguistic landscape, but several key individual connections between the ports of the Indian Ocean frequented by Persian, Hindustani, and Malay-speaking communities.

The first reference to a ‘Sea of Melayu’ is from an Arabic document dated c. 1000, which noted that travellers ‘reaching the Sea of Melayu, were approaching the area of China’. While the location of the Sea of Melayu is not specified, the practice of naming a sea after a dominant people surrounding its shores suggests that this particular body of water must have been the Straits of Melaka. This is clear in the only other known reference to the use of this name, which is found in Description of Malacca, Meridional India and Cathay written in 1613 by Emanuel Godinho de Eredia, a Eurasian Jesuit born in Portuguese Melaka. Eredia refers to the Sea of Melayu as that ‘land-enclosed sea between the mainland of Ujontana [Malay Peninsula] and the Golden Chersonese [Sumatra]’. He was clearly referring to the Straits of Melaka, though it was obviously not yet called that by his contemporaries. Eredia's description of that ‘land-enclosed sea’ clearly reveals a commonly held assumption of the greater significance of a land mass over a body of water. But for Malays and many other sea and riverine peoples, the focus was on water, not land, and entities were formed by seas and rivers joined by short land passages.

For centuries, trading companies and colonial officials have sought to manipulate indigenous Asian kingdoms by banishing recalcitrant elites, thereby discouraging resistance and ensuring compliance. Less examined by scholars is how colonial officials adapted this tool in their efforts to manage mobility and achieve territorialisation at the turn of the twentieth century. Applying Josiah Heyman and Howard Campbell's framework of “re-territorialisation” to make sense of how states harness mobile flows for the purpose of redrawing boundaries and producing new political spaces, this article will examine Dutch strategies for incorporating the sultanate of Aceh into the Netherlands East Indies. Site of an infamous multi-decade war of insurgency and pacification between 1873 and the early 1900s, this Sumatran kingdom had long resisted imperial subjugation. Dutch authorities eventually moved to complete its elusive ambition of conquest by leveraging distance and forcibly sending Acehnese elites to “training schools” in Java. By fusing exile with pedagogy, colonial officials hoped to transform Acehnese elites into loyal servants of the colonial centre. Rancorous debates about the deposed Acehnese sultan, however, illustrated the limitations of such re-territorialisation schemes and the resiliency of alternative Asian geographies.

In 1623, the Dutch governor of Amboyna, an important clove-producing island in modern-day Indonesia, executed a group of English merchants and Japanese mercenaries accused of plotting to seize control of the VOC castle on the island. After news of these events reached Europe, the Amboyna Massacre, as it came to be called in England, rapidly became invested with great consequences as English and Dutch leaders fought over the issues of blame and compensation. This article examines the Japanese mercenaries accused by the VOC, the silent participants whose cause was not taken up by any national government.

When it came to innovating ad hoc imperial structures in what the late John H. Parry called ‘The Age of Reconnaissance’, no European power could hold a candle to Portugal. It had one arrangement for the Atlantic islands, a modification of this pattern for Brazil; then it had another scheme for the African west coast and a different one for the Estado da India Oriental (which included the African east coast). Finally, as is known well enough, its relations with Macao and the Portuguese stations in Japan were again unique. Thus it was not particularly surprising to me when I discovered recently that besides all these, there was still another variant which nobody appears to have realized, one which fell somewhere between semi-rule and no rule at all. This was in the Bay of Bengal, and I only became aware of its special nature three years ago when I read of runaway soldados from Goa escaping to that region in the Reformação da Milicia e Governo da India of Francisco Rodrigues da Sil-veira. Later I visited Mylapore and became interested in the Indian east coast. Slowly, I began piecing the remarkable story together of how the entire bay area must be classified as a separate Portuguese colonial genus.

Why are some forms of bound labour more coercive than others? Specifically, why was European indentured servitude in America more coercive than craft apprenticeship or life-cycle servitude-in-husbandry, despite the close similarity and derivative nature of these institutions? Concepts recently advanced in labour economics offer some preliminary answers to these questions. This investigation is exploratory in nature and focuses on three types of voluntary long-term labour contracts. However, the arguments and conclusions presented here may have wider applications and be useful for future research on other forms of bound labour which involve consent and contract.