The old debate amongst historians as to whether the testimony of the sixteenth century really bears out Adam Smith's claim that the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope constitutes ‘one of the two and most important events in the recorded history of mankind’ was, it seems, put to sleep with Niels Steensgaard's thesis of 1973. Steensgaard argued that ‘a structural revolution’ and which truly sounded the death-knell of the old overland caravan trades competing with the sea borne routes, was not effected by the Portuguese from 1498 but awaited the Dutch. The debate, however, was couched very much on the theory of the operation run by the Portuguese, and which was typologised as reactionary in that it relied upon the threat of force rather than commercial competitivity. Whilst price movements between Portuguese and Red Sea pepper on the European market have been analysed by historians such as Herman Van Der Wee and Rene Gascon, nobody has really stopped to consider the complex of factors intervening on the demand side. Pepper, like ginger, was not a unitary good as misleadingly assumed by Douglas Irwin in his attempt to analyse the Anglo-Dutch rivalry for the East India trade with the Brander-Spence analysis of duopolistic export competition. Price lists suggest that pepper came in manifold shapes, sizes and qualities, let alone competing species, all of which rendered the market remarkably heterogeneous with up to seven-fold price divergences between, for example, the different products that would pass as ‘pepper’. This article discusses some of the factors that made for market variegation, and focuses on the market consequences of a Portuguese policy of transportation in the open ship's hold. It suggests that quality was one of the demand factors that shaped the competition between the Adantic and Mediterranean spice trade.

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).

This article explores the effects of music education carried out by Protestant missionaries on local forms of sociability in sub-Saharan Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on a methodological framework of ideal types of musical communities, the examination focuses on examples of musical encounters between missionaries and the Yoruba in West Africa, the Lobedu in South Africa, and the Nyakyusa in East Africa. A closer look at the kinds of sociability facilitated by missionary music will reveal a colonial dialectic emerging from the contrasting forces of cultural hierarchy and belonging.

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.

No library is richer in its field of concentration (the former Dutch East and West Indies) than that of the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology (the K.I.T.L.V.). Any listing of its contents accumulated over the past 175 years, serves as a useful general bibliography for historians as well as anthropologists and linguists. Between 1971 and 1975, the Institute's documentalist, G.A. Nagelkerke, prepared five of those, all of them published by the Institute at Stationsplein 10, Leiden, and still available through it. (Prices are quoted without postage).

Over the last twenty years, global history has experienced a considerable boom, breaking with traditional historical approaches that privileged the national framework and very often adopted a Eurocentric perspective. This triumphalist discourse about the field of global history should not, however, obscure the local and national specificities of this field of research, be they epistemological, institutional, thematic, or historiographical, nor the disciplinary, political, and economic obstacles with which researchers are confronted. This conversation explores the intellectual and structural specificities and constraints of global history.

In order to “describe world history from a new angle,” Professor Haneda Masashi has set up the framework of “Comparative Studies on the Cross-cultural Contacts in Asian Port Cities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” One of the proposed points of comparison concerned communications between Europeans and local people and the indispensable role of interpreters, on whose work “the Dutch trade representatives relied utterly in their business and daily life” in Canton as well as Nagasaki.

Whereas Professor Yao Keisuke, elsewhere in this special issue, has emphasised the different roles of the interpreters in both port cities, Professor Haneda is more in favour of pointing out the similarities. He has identified state control of foreign trade, motivated by concerns over “security, social stability, and the prosperity of the state,” as a fundamental feature common to both countries in this period. Because of a clear distinction between the local people as “insiders” and Europeans as “outsiders,” the foreigners' activities were strictly controlled and contacts between locals and Westerners restricted to a minimum. The interpreters stood between both parties as mediators and were intentionally used by the authorities as “tools of control,” sometimes functioning as spies reporting on suspicious activities, but also acting as safety shields against direct Dutch confrontations or breaches of etiquette and protocol. Mechanisms to control the interpreters themselves were built in as well.

The German presence in nineteenth-century South Australia is associated primarily with the immigration of Prussian Lutherans escaping religious persecution in their homeland. Their settlement in the fledgling British colony aided its early, stuttering development; in the longer term it also fitted neatly South Australia's perception of itself as a “paradise of dissent.” These Germans took their religion seriously, none more so than the Lutheran missionaries who committed themselves to bringing the Gospel to the indigenous people of the Adelaide plains and, eventually, much further afield as well. In reality, however, the story of the German contribution to the history of this British colony extended far beyond these pious Lutherans. Among those who followed in their wake, whether as settlers or travellers, were Germans of many different backgrounds, who made their way to the Antipodes for a multitude of reasons. In South Australia as much as anywhere, globalising Germany was a multi-facetted project.

The intellectual gamut of Germans in South Australia is nowhere more evident than in the realm of anthropology. The missionaries were not alone in displaying a keen interest in the Australian Aborigines. Anthropologists steeped in the empirical tradition that came to dominate the nascent discipline at the end of the nineteenth century also turned their attention to Australia. Indeed, in Germany and elsewhere, Australia occupied a special position in international discourse. The American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan had observed in 1880 that Australian aboriginal societies “now represent the condition of mankind in savagery better than it is elsewhere represented on the earth—a condition now rapidly passing away.”