“Above all, we will put on record, that the Rechtsschool has not missed its target: the creation of independent (native) lawyers, who are aware of their position as independent judicial officers in the indigenous social relations.”

C.C. van Helsdingen,

Gedenkboek Rechtsschool 1929

When the Dutch introduced peace and order as the governing doctrine in the East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century, the network of colonial state institutions needed to project themselves as a unified, legitimate state with an authority to enforce justice. This state required a corps of jurists who embodied specific forms of subjectivity in order to maintain the projected authority. Educating natives as jurists offered the most economical means to staff the judiciary. This essay looks at legal education for Native elites as a colonial project of subject formation that was inseparable from colonial state formation. It does so by surveying three institutions in the Indies and the Netherlands between 1909 and 1939: the Batavia Rechtsschool, the Leiden United Faculty of Law and Letters, and the Batavia Rechtshoogeschool. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power and biopower in education and concepts from state theory, I argue that the pedagogical strategies and the legal education curricula in the Indies were deliberately designed to produce independent and critical Native jurists who were at the same time loyal to the Netherlands. The argument, thus, stands in contrast to literature that relies on early Foucault to construct education as a strictly normalising institution. I further suggest that although various state institutions did not unanimously agree on this ideal vision of Native jurists, they nevertheless tolerated it due to the urgent need to project the presence of a just state.

Using a variety of sources I focus my attention on two arenas of investigation: the vision of the ideal subjectivity to be embodied by Native jurists, and the technologies employed to achieve it. With this focus, I do not attempt to represent a comprehensive native point of view. Instead, I limit myself to examining the debates among Dutch educators and policy makers regarding proper legal education for the Native elites, the resulting policies as decreed in various ordinances, and the policies' implementation in the schools' curricula and pedagogy.

In late 1874, the Colonial Government of the Gold Coast passed an abolition measure which was designed to end slavery, all other forms of compulsory labour, and slave trading in the colony. The measure took the form of two laws: the Gold Coast Slave-Dealing Abolition Ordinance (1874) and the Gold Coast Emancipation Ordinance (1874). The Gold Coast Legislative Council passed the laws on 17 December 1874 and they received the assent of the Governor on 28 December. On 30 December 1874, the measure was proclaimed. The first of the ordinances absolutely and immediately outlawed the importation of slaves into the Gold Coast, and abolished slave dealing and pawning. The other ordinance provided for the emancipation of slaves by abolishing the legal status of slavery and empowering slaves to leave their owners at will.

Of all of France’s early modern colonial ventures, the least studied and most obscure are the French efforts to establish settlements, missions, and plantations in Guiana. Still, the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil, and their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the sixteenth-century ventures, the Guiana colonies were also prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Were they primarily missions to the Native peoples, plantations, or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? This paper examines the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana, in particular two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. I will the argue that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.

The Portuguese were keen slave traders on the west central coast of Africa in the early modern period, but governors in Angola appear to have been increasingly unhappy about certain aspects of enslavement in relation to debt, and in particular that of children. Slavery for debt was uncommon in early modern Europe, where three arguments, drawn from Roman law, were usually cited by way of justification: birth; war; and self-sale. Cavazzi, an Italian Capuchin missionary travelling around Angola between 1654 and 1665, suggested several similarities between the legal justifications for slavery in Africa and Europe, but also pointed up a major difference: while in Angola in the early modern period enslavement could result from a number of instances of default, in Portugal at the same time - and in Europe more widely – debtors tended to find themselves imprisoned if they defaulted on a payment, rather than enslaved. This paper will consider the nature of debt enslavement in Angola in the early modern period, and how it impacted on the transatlantic slave trade.

Scattered as it was over thousands of miles of African and Asian coastline, the Portuguese empire in the East had a peculiar shape when compared to the Spanish one in the New World. As one author of the early seventeenth century put it, ‘the king our lord does not have more than twenty leagues of land in all Asia, from Macao to the Cape of Good Hope’. Portugal was a small country with a population of one and a half million people, and it is no surprise that the Portuguese presence in Asia - a ‘network’ rather than an ‘empire’, as some authors claim - had to rely heavily on diplomacy. The wholesale ‘conquest’ (conquista) of the East was perceived as a theoretical right of the Portuguese crown, but in practice most relations with Eastern polities rested on a complex set of negotiated links of ‘friendship’ (amizade) or indirect submission (uassalagem).

The words that serve as a motto for this paper are taken from the finest novel about Dutch fin de siècle society and indeed, in my opinion, the finest novel in Dutch literature, Louis Couperus' De Boeken der Kleine Zielen (The Books of the Small Souls). They form part of a dialogue between the widow of a former Governor-General of the Netherlands Indies and her, obviously, very dis-appointed grandson, a young colonial civil servant in the beginning of his career.

The Union of the Iberian Crowns (1580–1640) promoted a wider cultural exchange between Portuguese and Spanish Asian settlements in Asia. This paper identifies the remarkable circulation of artisans and patrons and the development of new building techniques during this period, which allowed for a shared cultural dialogue that may be best described as forms of mestizage. So, it tries to address the mobility of patrons and architects, which helps explain the diffusion of techniques and models. The first case shows how cultural dialogue promoted new techniques from local traditions and materials, which were later used in neighbouring settlements. The second demonstrates the role these mixed solutions played in the creation of the image of a pure state, in the form of public palaces, a mestizo society, mainly in urban houses, and a local cultural resistance, keeping traditional housing forms in the native quarters. Thanks to this approach, the currently preserved built heritage can be seen not only as a European cultural transfer but also as the result of a fruitful global dialogue.

Dutch colonialism has traditionally focused on the East Indies, rather than the West Indies. Thus when Queen Wilhelmina, while in exile in London, declared in 1942 that the colonies should become autonomous with the words ‘relying on one's own strength, with the will to support each other,’ she was thinking of the East and not so much about Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. Yet as it turned out, all constitutional plans, culminating into the Statuut or Charter of the Kingdom of 1954, even though conceived and drafted with the East in mind, was ultimately only applied to the West. The Netherlands East Indies, occupied by Japan during World War II, opted for independence after the War. The Hague did not accept this step and waged both hot and cold wars to fight against Indonesia's independence. This, for the Netherlands traumatic, experience left its traces in Dutch policy regarding its Caribbean territories.

The historiography of the decolonisation of the French overseas empire offers its students a highly mixed picture. While the atrocities committed during the independence wars in Indochina and Algeria belong to the black pages of contemporary French history, the decolonisation of the French sub-Saharan territories is presented in a much more positive light. In 1960, France ‘gracefully’ agreed to the independence of fourteen of its African territories, after which close relations with the regimes of nearly all those states were nurtured until at least the 1980s. This smooth transfer of power is all the more remarkable when one compares it to the much more problematic British and Portuguese decolonisations in black Africa. How did the French do it? Or should one say: how did the Africans in the French territories do it? In this paper, I will attempt to unveil some of the critical political processes that took place in Senegal at the end of the 1940s, because this period was crucial in the formulation of die relation between French policymakers and an upcoming African political elite. In many ways, die processes that took place in Senegal during this period would determine die course of French policy towards all of its African possessions. A study of this period seems therefore more than justified.

In examining the process of modernization in Qajar Iran, modern scholarship has tended to focus either on the effects of Western exposure on Iranian intellectuals and educators, or on bureaucratic and military reforms initiated by the three major reformers of the nineteenth century, ‘Abbas Mirza, Mirza Taqi Khan (Amir Kabir), and Mirza Husayn Khan (Sipahsalar). This paper will address a different and equally important aspect of the modernization process, technological innovation, by discussing the introduction of mechanized coin production in Qajar Iran in the context of the country's prevailing social, political and economic structure.

Our joint work, like so much else in life, had its origin in an accident of fate. It would never have seen the light of day, at least in its published forms, had it not been for the chance that the authors both came to the University of Birmingham in the mid-1960s, from different backgrounds and with different interests, and then found that, by the mid-1970s, their research interests had converged to the point where co-operative work began to appear both logical and feasible. At that moment, like countless other scholars in all branches of research, we did not have a clear idea of what we were embarking on or, of course, how long it would take. But we made a conscious decision, at a time when we had built up a considerable amount of intellectual capital, to attack one of the big problems of modern history, namely the causes of imperial expansion, and to take a chance on the outcome.

Taiwan is strategically situated within East Asia, but little is known of it until the sixteenth century. The Chinese spread far and wide throughout Asia even before the Christian era, but allowed this large and fertile island lying so close to the Mainland to remain in relative obscurity until the middle of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The cause of this isolation is that Taiwan had no large quantities of marketable products to attract traders and that the island still lay outside the network of Asian trade routes of the time.

I should preface this paper with a cautionary note. It is not intended to parade as a full-fledged scholarly paper bringing new or little known facts. Nor does it aim at novel theories or interpretations. It does not even have its roots in the fascinating details and problems of Luso-Indian history per se. It only wants to propose a somewhat different, although not overly novel, perspective. This perspective is – not surprisingly – an indological one. My starting point is my concern with India's traditions of empire and imperial expansion. Given this concern, it seems quite logical to turn to the Portuguese as well as to the Dutch experience of and tangles with the tradition and practice of empire they obtained in the world of the Indian Ocean, where the subcontinent has always occupied a predominant position. The exercise is the more interesting since the Portuguese, and after them the Dutch, were each in their own way empire builders in their own right. They had to react to the imperial configurations that were coming about at the time of the Portuguese appearance in the Indian waters and that were being consolidated when the Portuguese were followed by their Dutch rivals. The experience and the reactions of both the Dutch and the Portuguese have something to tell us about India, as well as the other way around.

All over Southeast Asia, the perception that the European colonizers had of the Chinese was characterized by a fundamental ambiguity. On the one hand, the Chinese were recognized to be very useful, and even indispensable to the economic development/exploitation of the colonial territories, as they were hard-working labourers, possessed needed entrepreneurial, commercial and technical skills and had already established trade contacts with the indigenous populations. But, on the other hand, the Chinese were perceived as a potential political threat because of their strong communal organization and solidarity, their secret societies and their frequent clan fights.