In the year 1819, three years after the British return of the East Indies to the Netherlands, a young man of twenty arrived to Kupang, a port on the coast of West Timor. Kupang was by no means a large place but it was the centre of Dutch colonial power over this part of Indonesia, and its administration monitored the various islands that the Netherlands laid claim to: Solor, Alor, Rote, Savu, and others. This task was made the more difficult since some of these places were also claimed by Portugal, which maintained a colonial governor in Dili, in the eastern part of Timor. The last serious conflict between the two colonial powers had occurred the previous year when the little harbour Atapupu was forcibly occupied by the Dutch resident. The tempests of the Age of Napoleon had been severely felt in Timor, whose inhabitants were located at the extremities of the colonial claims of the warring parties. Britons, Dutchmen, and Portuguese had fought or intrigued for the resources of an island that was neither the richest nor the most accessible in the island world of Southeast Asia—rather the opposite.

The name of the young man was Reint Le Bruyn. Born in Zutphen, Le Bruyn had spent his early years as a child labourer in a textile factory. Coming from relatively destitute conditions, he had nevertheless picked up some education, and in 1818 he signed up for the Nederlandsch Zendeling-Genootschap (NZG), the Dutch Missionary Society. This society, the first among about fifteen to concentrate on the East Indies, had been established in 1797 by a missionary who later worked in South Africa. It was modelled on the London Missionary Society which was founded two years earlier. Societies of this kind emerged as part of the wave of rising interest in undertaking missionary activity in non-Western societies, which, interestingly, coincided with the questioning of traditional clerical hierarchy after the outbreak of the French Revolution. Biographical sketches of Le Bruyn's life have typically pointed to his Christian devotion to explain his career choice. However, it could also have been a way for poor men of ability to engage in work that provided a degree of professional recognition that they could not have hoped for at home. Missionaries received scant preparation for their task in Rotterdam; they had little knowledge of the societies that awaited them, and they only learned any substantial Malay, the main language of communication, on arrival in the Indies. Le Bruyn successfully overcame these obstacles and had an eventful career on Timor for the next ten years, to the extent that posterity hailed him as the true pioneer of the Protestant mission in these waters.

By the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, two islands had come to dominate global cane-sugar production. For most of the sixty-year period between 1870 and 1930, around half of the world's internationally traded crop came from Cuba and Java. The two islands had many topographical similarities that made them particularly well suited to the establishment of sugar plantations: both are relatively large islands with fertile soils and semi-tropical climate. They were also situated in regions that had been drawn into the European sphere of influence in the sixteenth century but that had only been lightly exploited before the nineteenth, when they were both well placed to assume leading roles in the satisfaction of the escalating demand for sugar in the industrialising societies of Europe and North America.

However, Cuba and Java existed within two very distinct sets of imperial and commercial networks: Spanish and Atlantic, and Dutch and Indian Ocean respectively. As a result of this, while there have been a plethora of studies about cane agriculture and the sugar industry in each of the islands, there has been little effort to compare their histories or explore the interconnections between them. Only recently has a start been made to study systematically the “convergence and divergence” of the sugar industry in the two hemispheres and to compare the differences and similarities to be found in the paths followed by the two islands.

Although the sugar industries of Cuba and Java took different directions, these were inextricably linked. While Cuban planters could exploit the availability of large areas of underused land to overcome the relative scarcity of labour, planters in Java took advantage of the relative abundance of labour to maximise yields from the more limited land available to them. As a consequence of this, Javanese planters influenced by the work of Cuban agronomist Álvaro Reynoso paid considerable attention to the development of scientific methods in cane cultivation. Meanwhile, Reynoso's ideas fell on deaf ears in his home island, where most planters ignored the need for a more scientific approach in the fields in favour of technological advances in the sugar factory and what they saw as their immediate commercial interests.

In December 2007, our Chinese and Dutch colleagues organised an international conference in Guangzhou and Macao entitled “Canton and Nagasaki Compared, 1730–1830: Dutch, Chinese, Japanese Relations.” I participated with seven Japanese colleagues. With more than twenty-five papers, the conference was a great success and participants were eager to deepen their discussions and to enlarge the scope of their inquiries. And so, stimulated by the co-editor of this special issue of Itinerario, Professor Leonard Blussé of Leiden University, I took up the responsibility of organising the follow-up conference in Japan on the same theme, but placed in a broader temporal context: “Canton and Nagasaki Compared.” Comparing the two port cities Canton in South China (nowadays called Guangzhou) and Nagasaki at the western end of the Japanese archipelago, between 1600 and 1850 would yield new historic insights and reveal new perspectives for further research. The articles presented in this issue bear the fruit of this exclusive intellectual exchange.

The articles deal with wide ranging subjects, from urban fires to the art of translation, and cover the broad period 1600–1850s. All contributors have taken the comparison of the two port cities at heart. We have grouped the thirteen contributions along four major research themes that emerged out of the conference: shipping networks and the state; managing trade flows; mediating trade; and urban and cultural life. The contributions bear witness of what I would call the four major benefits of the comparative history approach, which will be discussed further below.

The English East India Company (EIC) first arrived in Siam in 1612, when its traders were given a royal audience by King Songtham (r. 1610/11–28) in Ayutthaya. Peter Floris and Lucas Antheuniss, Dutchmen working for the EIC, came to Patani on the Globe and then branched out to other ports, exploring the possibilities of trade in mainland Southeast Asia. Armed with a letter from King James I, the EIC employees led by Antheuniss and Thomas Essington were able not only to approach the court, but also to observe for themselves the possibilities of trade in Siam. This first sojourn in Ayutthaya marked the start of over a decade of Anglo–Siamese contacts, through the establishment and maintenance of an EIC factory in Ayutthaya.

During this first phase, the EIC was to stay in Ayutthaya for only eleven years, closing its factory in 1623. It was not until the 1660s, after a gap of around thirty years, that the company returned to trade in Siam. After a troubled stay, the EIC once again left Siam in 1685, and was engaged in war with the court of King Narai (r. 1656–88) over several disputes. The only English merchants coming to Siam after 1688 were “country traders” mostly based in India.

Between 1947 and early 1952, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was established within the framework of the United Nations to “solve” the so-called European refugee problem after the end of the Second World War, resettled one million European refugees—victims of Nazism as well as East European refugees who escaped the Red Army—all over the world. The IRO's resettlement project is regarded as a blueprint for the establishment of the postwar international migration regime, and it was the predecessor of later initiatives such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

In this article I argue that the IRO's history as well as the history of the migration regime after the Second World War has, thus far, mainly been written from the perspective of U.S. American and European history. Northern nations are considered agents in this history, while southern countries are considered as passive “destinations.” In the case of Venezuela, the article argues that the Global South's active role in the migration regime must be taken into consideration to understand postwar migration. From the perspective of a connective approach to global history, it shows how Venezuela, as a political agent, was involved in shaping the migration regime; how it perceived itself as an agent within that regime; and how it intervened on a small scale to shape its form and function.

The port of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas has long been a vibrant centre for ship trafficking in the Caribbean, as it was during Danish colonial rule starting in 1672. In 1917, Denmark officially sold and left what became the US Virgin Islands. Not everybody left, though. The Danish-owned West Indian Company, which owned the majority of the St. Thomas port and its attendant facilities, stayed until 1993. At that point the harbour was sold to the Virgin Islanders, who for some time had complained about the fact that a Danish company still profited from the islands. The harbour of Charlotte Amalie, which is my central analytical unit here, thus provides a lens through which to approach Danish colonial imprints.

The harbour is and has been characterised by activities of a temporary and opportunistic kind: industries blossom, people and crops from far away get uprooted and replanted in the Caribbean, businesses provide work for locals, goods are shipped out to be consumed in other places. The transitory nature of projects designed by people elsewhere, I argue, is part of what colonialism is. As I will show, the traces of such projects appear not only as particular ecologies but also as dilemmas to be grappled with long after the foreign decision-makers have left. My approach to colonial legacies on the Virgin Islands, then, mobilises the shifting flows of people, commodities, and interests shipped in and out of Charlotte Amalie to leave behind altered landscapes that are continuously debated.

The interconnectedness of Atlantic West Africa and the Scandinavian Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries exemplifies an entangled or shared history (histoire croisée). The present article maintains that in the context of the brutal transatlantic chattel trade this history manifests different historical trajectories as well as the temporality of episodic events and structural duration that are configured in the divergent itineraries of two eighteenth-century African Christians. Their texts and life histories reveal them as purveyors of intertwined Christian and non-Christian cultural codes and discursive fields, in one case according to a plantation-colony itinerary and in the other according to a world-port itinerary. The complex social realities of multiple texts and material cultures did not operate independently of socioeconomic structures intertwined with Atlantic world circuits.

In his speech of throne of October 17, 1825, the Dutch king William I expressed his concerns on the extremely loss-making Dutch colonial enterprise of that moment. The aftermath of the closing down of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) in the 1790s and the transfer of the company's indebtedness to the state, threatened to bring about the loss of the Dutch first-rate position on the international colonial forum. Moreover, the fiasco of the so-called liberal interlude of the enlightened Governor-General G. van der Capellen and his often frivolous politics in Java during the period 1816–1826, deeply disillusioned the king. Therefore, William officially announced the appointment of a commissioner-general, a representative provided with extraordinary power and authority who was only supposed to give account direcdy to the king himself. He also informed the States General of the appointment of the governor of the province of SouthBrabant in the Southern Netherlands Leonard du Bus de Gisignies as his commissioner-general on August 10 of the same year.

In analysing the history of the Portuguese expansion, it is tempting to use purely economic factors. This perspective minimizes two non-economic problems confronting Portuguese society at the beginning of the fifteenth century: on the one hand the general cohesion of Portuguese society, which could only be brought about by the noble and military élites, and on the other the problem of national independence, which at the time was under threat from Castile. In fact, these problems persisted, alongside others that were generated by the very solution that was found for them, namely by overseas expansion. The capture of Ceuta in 1415 was an ingenious attempt to overcome these problems in one go. Due to their military weakness, it had been impossible for the Portuguese elites to take part in the conquest of Granada. The project of Ceuta did permit territorial growth. Besides, it mobilized the nation ideologically, thus reinforcing its identity without threatening the unity of the Respublica Christiana.

The study of the early European colonial presence in Asia has been stimulated in recent years by a series of excellent works. These have been both of general and specialist nature, written not only by historians, but also by political scientists as well as specialists of international relations. The truly excellent study published in 2002 by Edward Keene, can be taken as a point in case. Central to his revisitation of seventeenth-century treaties of the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) with the Emperor of Kandy, is the notion of divided sovereignty expounded by Hugo Grotius around 1600-1610. It was against the backdrop of such concepts of divided sovereignty that the VOC could ultimately conclude its complex web of treaty relationships that broadly characterise the Dutch colonial empire in the East Indies up the advent of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. There is some legitimacy in contending that Keene's postulations effectively rework and reinterpret, at the level of international relations, what was once conveniently dubbed the ‘Age of Partnership’, i.e. an age characterised by trade-driven colonial empires that grew upon a complex, sometimes self-contradictory network of treaty relationships as well as formal and informal cooperation garnered from native elites. Admittedly such relations were often but not always based on unequal power and treaty relationships. Despite the uneven playing fields created by many such Euro-Asian treaties, especially those forged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the conclusion of treaties was assumed on the basis of the nominal co-equality of sovereigns and plenipotentiary agents acting on their behalf. European and Asian treaty partners were accepted as contracting equals, and this is particularly stunning given that the feudal world of European power politics at the time was, by comparison, probably more complex and legally structured than Asia. Certainly, the underlying power relations behind these early modern agreements were completely different from those imposed by the mature colonial powers on Asia at the zenith of nineteenth-century imperialism!

When one looks at the phenomenon of declining handicrafts either in terms of the impact of modern technology or in terms of the onslaught of imperialism, India and Indonesia are obvious cases to examine in relation to the nineteenth century. For India there is a well developed literature, much of t i of contemporary nineteenth and early twentieth century vintage; the literature for Indonesia, however, appears somewhat thin in comparison. On closer examination there appear to be many questions of a common nature raised by the literature on the two countries and potentially fruitful issues awaiting investigation in a comparative perspective. To illustrate these possibilities and to stimulate discussion I attempt in this paper to draw upon some work I am doing on two major Indian handicraft industries, textiles and rice processing, and relate some findings of mine and of others to what has been done (or can be done) on these industries in Indonesia.

Until fairly recently, histories of European imperial expansion in the Indian Ocean region have been written largely in terms of the endeavours of Europeans in creating and controlling empire. Only in the last couple of decades has recognition been given slowly to the role of the indigenous economic and political compradors, both large and small, who were vital to the evolution and sustenance of European colonial empires.