A long time ago – longer than I care to remember – I proposed what an economist would call an equilibrium model of imperialism (1). Briefly stated, the argument went as follows:

-Imperialism is a response to disparities of power. The very existence of such disparity is an invitation and temptation to exploit it. Not everyone will respond to such invitation, but there will always be some who try to translate potential dominion into actual.

-Motivation is secondary: where a disparity of power exists, imperialism will never lack for reasons or justifications. These will vary from the crudest greed or will to dominance to the loftiest altruism.

-To understand the timing and extent of imperialist dominions, therefore, it is more important to study the character and distribution of power than the incentives to its exercise.

On 13 April 1650 the young Chief (Opperhoofd) of the Siam factory of Dutch East India Company (VOC), the Merchant (Koopman) Jan van Muijden, arrived at Batavia aboard the flute de Gecroonde Liefde (Crowned Love), with a cargo unusual even by the standards of this thriving stapling port. Aboard were a total of twelve elephants, a gift from the King of Siam and his Mandarins, Oya Sabartiban (Okya Sabartiban) and Oya Berckelang (Okya Phrakhlang), to Governor-General Cornelis van der Lijn and the four Councillors of the Indies present in Batavia at the time, one of whom was the Director-General and second-in-command François Caron. When Van Muijden stepped ashore, he presented Van der Lijn and the Councillors with a letter from Prasat-Thong, the King of Siam, in which the King requested several precious diamond rings for himself and for his Mandarin, Oya Sabartiban, ‘various curiosities from the Netherlands and elsewhere’, military assistance against his rebellious subjects in Cambodia and on the Malay peninsula, and an end to the all-too-frequent molesting by Company ships of Chinese and Portuguese vessels en route to Siam.

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.

I thank Professor Frank for his swift reaction. I have considered his critiques and reservations seriously and will attempt to use them constructively, just as he did mine. For the sake of convenience I answer his comments in the order in which he has presented them. Space does not permit me to go into all his remarks extensively.

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.

In 1958, Unesco and the International Council on Archives (ICA) decided to anticipate the needs of historical research in the newly emancipated Third World by creating the Guide to the Sources for the History of the Nations. This was intended to make accessible the documentary sources for the history of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania preserved in Europe and the United States. An International Technical Committee was set up, consisting of representatives from the various national archives. This Committee formulated specifications for the preparation of the guides. In each national volume, sources were to be described according to the individual repository, and, within each repository, by grouping or series. According to the nature of each group, descriptions will concentrate on the speciality and functions of the organisation producing the records or on the subjects which can be studied with their help. To this are added data about the size of the archives, the available inventories or other entries and their value. The guides will also include privately-owned archives (family and business archives), manuscript collections in libraries, maps and plans, iconographic materials, sound archives and microfilms. In describing maps and iconographic materials, emphasis will be laid on MSS and printed material from before 1700. It is not intended to replace the existing inventories, catalogues or indexes (printed or not), but to provide a first entry to the sources, with a maximum of information in a condensed and usable form. In several cases, however, summary listing of source material will be unavoidable, for instance when relevant material in a collection of individual documents or in a map collection has never been adequately described.

There are two views of British policy toward the Commonwealth Caribbean. One, held most firmly by those with responsibility for British policy, is that Britain is fully engaged with the region and that it remains committed to its welfare. It is exemplified by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's website which contains a section entitled ‘Britain's Special Relationship with the Caribbean’. The other, encountered in the Caribbean and by its diplomatic representatives in Britain, as well as by some of those in Britain who have close contact with the region, is that Britain has diluted its commitments and is in a long process of withdrawal from the region. It is exemplified in observations made from time to time by Caribbean High Commissioners in the UK, and none more so than Sir Ron Sanders, the former and current High Commissioner for Antigua and Barbuda who has written on Britain's lack of commitment to the Caribbean.

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.

For Europeans, Matteo Ricci's mission memoirs proved to be the most comprehensive and accessible book about China. Ricci's account of the early Jesuit mission was immensely popular, receiving translations into most European languages. Until the twentieth century, however, anyone who read Ricci's narrative was not reading what Ricci himself had written. Rather, they were reading a curated translation produced by one of his successors, Nicolas Trigault. The resulting work, De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas, was an edited translation, substantially the same but often different than Ricci's original manuscript.

This article reexamines Trigault's translation, on its own terms, as an artefact of globalisation. Not only does the adaptation reveal information about the Jesuit missions that Ricci's manuscript did not, but it also had a significant impact on European Catholics, as its dissemination inspired would-be missionaries to seek their vocations in China.

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.

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.

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.

In surveying the negative effects of the expansion of Europe it seems difficult to find an area which was worse affected than the Caribbean. The autochthonous population of Amerindians had been decimated on a scale unknown elsewhere. Rather than becoming an attractive refuge for migrant Europeans, the Caribbean became the home of plantation agriculture, which ruthlessly destroyed the existing environment and small scale farming. To top it all, the Caribbean plantations needed a constant influx of labourers. The success of Caribbean exports created a paradox: the region was in constant and increasing need of manpower while at the same time the number European migrants was decreasing rapidly

Turning to the history of Indian industrial labour conditions from a first degree in British and European history, with their wealth of first class literature on the industrial revolution, was something of a disappointment. The majority of Indianist historical studies in this field concentrate on the more institutional sides of unionisation, or on economic aspects, while much of the sociology of industrialisation (especially the material produced in the 1960's) to which I turned appeared to consist largely of blueprints for the distortion of whole cultures in the name of modernity and progress.

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.