The politics of coloured people in twentieth-century South Africa have generally been characterised as marginal from mainstream South African events. Correspondingly, attempts to initiate political developments along cultural or ethnic lines - emphasising Mama or Griqua identity, for example - have been noted primarily for their divisive and factional composition. Such writings focus on overt political action. They highlight either leaders’ involvement with, or opposition to, state structures; or the internal, often petty and frustrated conflicts between leaders, but fail to explain the marginalisation of coloured politics. But this emphasis on ‘the political’ removes from our gaze other, more productive avenues for understanding the identity of mixed-race people in South Africa. Political activity, for the Griqua, cannot be evaluated except through the lens of Christianity. Since religion promises to fulfil people's ambitions through redemption in the afterlife, Griqua-Christian ideas about overt political quests and active campaigning against discrimination - on either an individual or societal level - tended to be deemed unnecessary. As it was God who ultimately meted out punishments or rewards, Griqua people's energies were better used worshipping him. Nonetheless, these same Griqua people lived in the profane world in which - at least during the apartheid era - they were officially classified as ‘coloured’. Their struggles, based primarily on the need for official ethnic recognition as Griqua, were, in effect, political struggles. This partly Griqua, partly coloured identity enabled them considerable political flexibility and produced the complex social patterns explored below. A further distinction underpinning the Griqua-coloured ambiguity was that between inkommers (newcomers) and boorlings (people born to Griqua-town).

The migrants who left India to work on colonial sugar plantations in the nineteenth century have been variously categorised as neo-slaves or as voluntary black settlers. This paper assesses some of the recent historical claims and revisionist interpretations of Indian indentured labour and takes up a number of themes based on the Mauritian case to highlight important aspects of this colonial labour diaspora.

On the face of it, there ought to be many similarities between the heyday of imperialism in South and Southeast Asia. Both areas, it can be said, experienced a long period of colonial rule, and in both cases the European regimes grew out of the enterprise of small trading companies who had ventured to the Indian Ocean area in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in search of exotic items for trade. In both cases the subsequent history proves something of a surprise, for who could have foretold that a quest for the odd shipload of spices or of cotton cloth would lead, quite unexpectedly, to very small North European nations establishing dominion over very large and populous areas of Asia. In both cases, the English and the Dutch only gradually became involved in the acquisition of territory in Asia, and their involvement owed less to an aggressive assertion of superior European economic and technological might than to an insidious and creeping entanglement with the indigenous governments they found established. However, in retrospect, as the traditional historiography has it, the English in India and the Dutch in Indonesia became more and more involved in local politics and moved implacably from trade to rule. With the shift in emphasis came new imperial politics. The emphasis which had once been limited to securing tropical products and commodities for resale in Europe, switched t o broader concerns of economic development. Imperial governments were always expected to cover their own costs, and what underlay their activities were attempts to integrate colonial and home economies and to make them complementary to each other.

The Asian soldier in the service of the European trading companies of the Ancien Régime or of the more modern colonial governments has a long history and is a phenomenon which displays some fundamental contradictions. Ever since the Europeans came to the Americas, Asia or Africa, they employed large groups of the indigenes as soldiers, men of many different customs, languages and cultures. By the thousands, inhabitants of the country filled the ranks which European recruiting was unwilling or unable to furnish.

This article surveys previously underexamined American and British intelligence networks that operated in the Netherlands during the eighteenth century and demonstrates the relevance of the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic to the larger history of the Netherlands, early modern Europe, and the revolutionary Atlantic. The Dutch Republic's favourable geographic location, its postal services, its sophisticated press, and its mercantile economy made it an ideal place to extract information and build intelligence networks, shaping power politics in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. Additionally, this article illustrates how these Anglo-American intelligence networks affected the Dutch Republic and the revolutionary Atlantic. In the late 1770s, American revolutionaries successfully deployed their intelligence network to unleash a propaganda campaign that aimed to convince the Dutch public of their cause. By infiltrating the liberal and sophisticated Dutch printing press, the American revolutionaries not only succeeded in fostering political support among the Dutch public; they also created a transatlantic intellectual exchange with the Dutch opposition that laid the foundations of the Dutch Patriot movement of the 1780s and ultimately the dissolution of the Dutch Republic as a whole in 1795.

Forced migration as a reaction to National Socialism represents individual as well as simultaneously collective, transnational, and global experiences. Not only identity-forming categories but also forms of knowledge are profoundly reshaped by processes of displacement and resettlement. The paper argues that the biography of the archaeologist Grete Mostny (1914–91) offers an exemplary case study of such processes of adaptation on individual, collective, and academic levels. Due to her escape from Austria to Chile as a persecuted Jew in 1938/39, Mostny's identity as a white European (female) scholar attained a whole new significance and became the door opener for her interdisciplinary career at the interface of archaeology and anthropology in her new homeland. Her research in Chile was a product of a global event—namely mass forced emigration from Europe—as well as of factors on the micro level, such as her European descent and her academic education, which gave her certain privileges in her new environment. When Mostny arrived in Chile in 1939, a new European and U.S. hegemony had already begun to dominate academia in the country, which was trying to modernise itself and move from the academic periphery closer to the centre. Mostny, the once racially persecuted scholar, fit well in this process by making use of her “European” knowledge and her networks. In 1954 she received international attention when she put together a pioneering interdisciplinary research team to study El Niño del Cerro El Plomo, a four-hundred-year-old Inca mummy found in the Andes five thousand metres above sea level. Nationally, Mostny's study contributed, beyond all measure, to the Andean state's identity, as it re-evaluated and enhanced Chile's prehistory. In a time of political and social tensions in Chile, the rediscovery of its Indigenous prehistory—even by a foreign white scholar—helped to overcome the old shadows of colonial historical research, perhaps because in the immediate present the Indigenous movement in Chile offered little potential for consensus. This article uses Mostny's transnational biography as a lens through which to detect these connected histories and entangled hegemonies in the fields of anthropology and archaeology, which have become instrumental in the formation of Chile's national identity. Moreover, the paper shows that the category of race played a central role in the field of knowledge production and career development, not only for Grete Mostny.

This article is concerned with the colonial state as a producer, consumer, and regulator of print. Propaganda and censorship may represent two extremes in the management of a colonial public sphere. Censorship was an interactive and negotiated process—one whose successful management was in the interest of both the censoring agents and those censored. One might think that censorship is a measure taken in order for communication to break down. If we imagine colonial print communication as a continuum suspended between partners that at one end desire full freedom of expression and at the other full control, absolute censorship does constitute silence, like that represented by the dramatic closure of the African press in Kenya with the Emergency of 1952. In a politicised colonial environment, like that in postwar Kenya, censorship may be understood as negotiation between colonisers and colonised on the limits of free speech. The article examines what changed in Kenya's late-colonial period in relation to the production, broadcasting, censoring, and suppression of non-European newspapers, and how the change affected the institutions and groupings that produced and received texts. More narrowly, it seeks to trace the dynamics of textual interfaces between the European print frameworks and those of the consolidated or emerging non-European publicists and publics. An examination that situates censorship in a broader context of management of discourse, of negotiation and dialogue, one that tests and goes beyond the dualism of suppression and resistance, may make it clearer why and to what extent a number of critical, anti-colonial publications were allowed to exist, and some were encouraged; and what the limits were, when opposition became unacceptable, and communication broke down.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese purchased large numbers of people in China as slaves. Many of those people were children. This article considers where those children came from and why they were sold to the Portuguese. During the late Ming period, as social inequality intensified, poor farmers increasingly had to sell themselves and their offspring to rich landowners as bonded labourers. However, some farmers chose to break the law and sell to foreigners instead. Other farmers became bandits, and kidnapped other people's children to sell into bondage. Both of these criminal trends provided the Portuguese with young slaves.

The third volume of Dutch Sources on South Asia mentions that there are some late-eighteenth-century Marathi letters, written in the Modi script, preserved in the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia.1 Scanned copies of the same were obtained by Lennart Bes (Leiden University) with the kind permission of the Indonesia Archives. Using these scanned copies, this paper gives the complete Roman transliteration of the two letters as well as their translation, and contextualizes the letters within Maratha documentary practices as well as within the contemporary political scene of the late-eighteenth-century Coromandel Coast. In addition, this article provides a commentary on the Maratha perception of Europeans in general and of the Dutch in particular, arguing that the Marathas had an unusually positive opinion about the trade-oriented Dutch, especially when contrasted with the territorially ambitious English and the Portuguese.