I have often said, though mainly to captive audiences of students of Leiden University, that the mental map Japanese intellectuals had of their country counted three important hubs: Kyoto, Edo, and Nagasaki. Kyoto had the highest density of juku; it was the place where people studied. Edo was the place where everyone, and certainly the samurai, met; it was a clearing-house of all kinds of information. Nagasaki, finally, was the place that all self-respecting scholars and physicians would want to visit at least once, to get a whiff of the atmosphere of their “source country,” be it China or the Netherlands, and to acquire books.

This thesis, such as it is, breaks down into three questions that can, in principle, be answered. (1) Who travelled to Nagasaki? When? What did they do there? How long did they stay? What are the aggregate numbers? (2) Did an appreciable quantity of the imported Dutch and Chinese books remain in Nagasaki? (3) Did there exist an intellectual establishment in Nagasaki that catered to the needs of visiting students? In practice, it might well be a life's work to answer these questions. In this article, I will concentrate on one aspect of the second of these questions: the import of foreign books through Nagasaki. The context, however, should be kept in mind.

This idea has been with me ever since I read that Hayashi Razan (1583–1657) visited Nagasaki twice—once as a private person in the autumn of Keichō 7 (1602), when he stayed for over one month, and the second time in Keichō 12 (1607), immediately after he had been taken into the employ of Tokugawa Ieyasu's (1542–1616; shogun 1603–5).

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.

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.

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.

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 of science and technology—with much assistance from the work of world historians, environmental historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists—have begun to develop some promising scholarly apparatus for decentring European science in world history. But we are still a long way away from developing a comprehensive, accessible frame in which European science is simply one (albeit very successful) way of conceptualising the natural world.

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.

When, early in August 1538, the lifeless bodies of the Sultan 'Âmir ibn Dâwûd and six of his confidants, by order of Sulaymân Bâshâ al-Khâdim, swung from the mainyard of the Turkish Admiral's galley for three days, not only the fate of the Tâhirid dynasty hung by a thread, but also that of the city of Aden. Afterwards, the Ottoman conquerors transformed this prospering port, a junction in the commercial network encompassing the Indian Ocean, into a military bastion. Merchants were driven away by soldiers. The entry to the Red Sea was cordoned off by guns for Portuguese intruders.