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.

The discovery of an official report, so far unpublished, about coolie scandals on the plantations on Sumatra's East Coast around the year 1900, motivated me to produce a full-length book on this theme. My original intention had been merely to write a short introduction to the publication of a shocking historical document. However, I changed my mind when it became obvious that proper understanding of the source required more background information on the social and policy framework within which the plantation system operated. This applied both to conditions on the estates themselves and to the evaluation of those affairs by official and non-official outsiders. The main aim of my study is to contribute to the historiography of industrial labour in Southeast Asia. However, it also analyses die linkage that came about between capitalist industry and colonial policy in a region that formed part of the so-called Outer Provinces of die Netherlands Indies.

The comment in the title of this article was made by James I after having been shown a ‘long scrole of fyne paper’, probably a Japanese almanac, and an account of the estates and revenues of the daimyo ‘most of them equally or exceeding the revenues of the greatest princes of Christendom’, and a letter, all of which had been sent by Richard Cocks, head of the English East India Company's factory at Hirado during its entire existence from 1613 to 1623. Cocks's letter and the two enclosures had been sent to his patron, the then Keeper of the Records, Sir Thomas Wilson, who had shown the letter to James with a covering note stating that he had received it ‘from the most remote part of the world’. The letter describes, in considerable and acutely observed detail, the new capital of the Tokugawa shogunate, Edo, the shogun's magnificent retinue as he led a falcon-hunting party (hunting was a pastime he had in common with the British monarch), the great daibutsu of Kamakura, the sights of Kyoto, including Sanjusangendo, and recent political developments relating to the banishment of the Jesuits and friars. Wilson, rather obsequiously, felt that the letters, written in January 1617, ‘were a good recreation for Your Majesty (if you had any idle hours)’ and declared that ‘neither our cosmographers nor other writers have given us true relation of the greatness of the princes of those parts’. But James could ‘not be induced to believe’ what was written, and dismissed the letter as ‘the loudest lies that ever [he] heard of.

Much of the recent work on the economic and social history of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1867) has been driven by a desire to identify what T.C. Smith has called ‘native sources ofJapanese industrialisation’. From the Marxist-influenced historians in the 1920s who sought to explain the pre-industrial roots of the structure of production in interwar Japan, through to contem-poraryJapanese historians' studies of the pattern of Japanese development, a major part of the agenda has been to identify how Japan had got to where it was, in other words, what was the secret of its twentieth century successes and weaknesses. It is not possible to explore the situation of Japan's economy in the century 1750–1850 without benefit of this hindsight, without being aware that while Japan's situation may have been in many ways analogous to that of China and Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, its economic fortunes were by the latter part of the nineteenth century experiencing their own ‘great divergence’ from those of China, India and the other countries of Asia and the near East. To search for the antecedents of this divergence is for economic historians of Japan a parallel exercise o t any search for the sources of the European ‘miracle’. While a focus on the period 1750–1850 as an era of European/Asian divergence means, therefore, that we must highlight the situation inJapan during that century, it must also be accepted that in the case of Japan any comparison with other countries or regions may also suggest the causes of Japan's own divergence some fifty to a hundred years later.

On the night when Nelson Mandela made his acceptance speech as victor of South Africa's first democratic election, he paid tribute to ‘some of South Africa's great leaders including John Dube, Josiah Gumede, Moorooghia Naidoo, Dr Abdurahman, Chief Luthuli, Lilian Ngoyi, Bram Fisher, Helen Joseph, Yusuf Dadoo, Moses Kotane, Chris Hani and Oliver Tambo. They should have been here to celebrate with us, for this is their achievement too’.

In a decade marked off by the quincentenaries of the voyages of Columbus (1492) and that of Vasco da Gama (1498) or perhaps more chronologically and interculturally correctly by the 1502 arrival of three Native Americans at the court of Henry VII of England, it is appropriate to take stock of the field of ‘European expansion’ and to ask if, in fact, such a field exists, or ought to exist, or still means the same thing that it did a generation ago. The celebrations and condemnations that accompanied the quincentenary in 1992 refocused public attention on the question of European expansion and its impact on history of die Americas and of the world. Voices long suppressed and opinions never before expressed found new audiences and joined with scholarly and semi-scholarly works to make Columbus and all that followed in his wake a topic of general public concern. It is dierefore appropriate to take stock once again of what we know about die Era of European Expansion prior to die emergence of modern imperialism in die nineteenth century.

As part of its attempt to understand ‘an apartheid of souls’, this volume is concerned to show how mission activity, particularly that of European-based churches with close links to the expansion of Dutch/Calvinist influence, may have nurtured the local construction of race or ethnic difference in Indonesian and South African society. One well-known account of Christianity in South Africa shows how the interaction between mission and missionised produced a sharply dichotomised sense - experienced by the Tshidi Tswana as the contrast between setsivana and segoa - of difference between indigenous and imported culture. While this shows how processes devoted to undermining it may paradoxically strengthen a sense of cultural identity, what it does not yield is a sense of how Christianity, appropriated within Tswana and other African societies, furnished a means of marking internal distinctions of social class, dovetailing in unexpected ways with ethnic difference. It is such divisions - potently fusing class with ethnicity and having crucial implications for the ownership, reclaiming, and use of land - with which the present paper is concerned.

European expansion in Asia and the subsequent clashes between European trading companies and the trading systems of Asia have given rise to vivid discussions in the last decades. The discussions, ranging from Van Leur's theories of the tenacity of the indigenous ‘pedlar’-trade, to Steensgaard's theories of the structural superiority of the trading companies over their Asian competitors, have as yet been rather one-sided. Mostly, when comparing the two trading systems, the historians have concentrated on the trade which took place directly between Europe and Asia. Consequently, the competition between the ‘native’ Asian trade and the trade carried out by the companies have been discussed solely as an aspect of this bi-lateral trade. European participation in the intra-Asian distribution and re-distribution of goods has as yet not been fully discussed. Although authors like Holden Furber and K.N. Chaudhuri have acknowledged the need for further analysis of this subject, neither case-studies nor more theoretical works have appeared.

In the two final decades of the nineteenth century, Spain introduced a number of measures promoting Spanish economic interests in the Philippines which culminated in a protectionist tariff established in 1891. As a consequence, Spain's trade with the archipelago rose unprecedentedly, particularly evident in the import of textiles and other manufactured goods. Through their neo-mercantilist policies, ‘the Spanish were able to recover something of their former economic position in their own colony’, that they in the course of the nineteenth century had lost to foreign, particularly British, competitors.

The project about the maritime history of the Java Sea, in which various scholars from Indonesia and the Netherlands have been participating since about 1996, bears the title ‘The Java Sea Region in an Age of Transition, 1870–1970’. From the beginning of the project there has been discussion about the time-span to be covered by the project, especially about the terminal year. Some people feared that the availability of sources would limit the prospects of fruitful research. On the basis of this, it was even proposed to stop at 1945, the date of Indonesia's independence. However, in the end most of the scholars involved agreed that it would be worthwhile to continue to roughly 1970, because then it would be possible to include the first years of the Orde Baru regime and pinpoint its effects on the rehabilitation of ports. Moreover, 1970 was also convenient for the simple reason that it was one hundred years after the year, taken as the starting point, namely 1870. The year 1870 as a point of departure was never the subject of any discussion. Because of the liberalization of the economy, namely the general shift from exploitation by the colonial state to exploitation by private enterprise and the alleged beginning of the so-called Age of Modern Imperialism, which tied the corners of the Archipelago closer together, it was simply accepted. Within the confines of the maritime sector, 1870 was assumed to symbolize the change from wind energy to steam power and a beginning of the improvement of ports. Confidently, the opening up of the Suez Canal in 1869 heralded an intensification of contacts between the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies.

Historians have made in depth studies on the consequences of the Dutch incursions and invasion into the north and northwest of Brazil, for both the Spanish Empire and the United Provinces of the Dutch Republic. The purpose of this paper is to show that the war between Spain and the Dutch Republic also affected the south of Brazil and that it forced Spain to adopt measures that altered the policy of the Spanish Crown regarding Sao Paulo.

Historians have traditionally paid relatively little attention to the French migrations to America. Although in the early modern period France was a demographic giant, had a deep – yet not enough recognized – maritime tradition, had many colonies in the Americas from the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence to the Amazon, and suffered from a tumultuous political history comparatively few of its people migrated to British North America and the United States. France has therefore and to some extent understandably enjoyed minimal visibility in the American ethnic landscape. There is, however, a long tradition of French migrations to America, beginning with the Huguenots at the end of the seventeenth century. At times these influxes were important in terms of number and influence, indeed in 1690 and in 1790 French was spoken in the streets of Charleston and of Philadelphia.