Architecture is testimony to the passage of time, to social relations and ways of doing things. Architecture is responsible for the morphology of cities; it constitutes a fundamental element in the city's image and of the urban landscape. In the context of Indo-Portuguese culture, architecture—emerging as the sedimentation of different ways of doing things—appears from a research perspective as a particularly delicate issue because of the shortage of specific documentary information. Given the difficulty of access to documentary support, the study of architecture often falls back on the descriptions and accounts of travellers which are almost inevitably constrained by an interpretive vision that speaks more of the observer's own mindset than of the object itself.

The Swedish Africa Company (Svenska Afrikakompaniet, SAK) was a chartered trading company which conducted a limited and short-lived trade in the middle of the seventeenth century. Its political and economic significance for Sweden itself was negligible, and in West Africa the Company was one of the smallest and shortest lived of trading companies. At first glance, the SAK appears to be merely a historical curiosity and therefore outside the interest of scientific research. Yet closer examination reveals that the Company was actually quite profitable. An understanding of how t i achieved its success will surely add to our knowledge about European trade in West Africa.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 2009, Greenland obtained self-government, terminating Danish supremacy, which had taken many forms over the centuries. This article analyses significant moments in Greenlandic-Danish relations by unpacking distinct contact zones that have emerged through the many encounters between locals and newcomers. Contact zones are always emplaced and create their own logic, which is not always easily readable as “colonialism” in the sense of appropriating lands and extracting surplus. While wrongs may have been perpetrated and ill-informed actions towards the inhabitants taken, relations between Greenland and Denmark illustrate how “colonialism” is neither uniform nor scalable. The analytical focus on colonial moments stresses the nonlinearity of colonial relations and allows for a subtler understanding of the postcolonial remains.

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.

When entering a foreign country, one usually fills out an immigration form asking for a set of personal details such as one's name, nationality, date of departure, destination, and the purpose of one's visit. In addition, one needs to answer several questions, for example, whether he has any banned substances or objects like drugs or weapons, whether he have a criminal record, and so on. Furthermore, one has to waive any rights to appeal an immigration officer's decision and finally declare and sign that all answers are true and correct.

While many assume that this familiar system is specific to the modern age, historical documents show us that this supposition is not valid. In fact, we can find a similar system in the early modern Ryukyu Kingdom, though little attention has been paid to it. To demonstrate this system, I will begin introducing a document left by a shipwrecked Chinese captain coming to Ryukyu in the late eighteenth century:

The captain Li Zhenchun states that: We received a permit for sailing from the government of Min prefecture in Fujian on December 24, 1770, loaded wood under the Nantai bridge on May 13 in the next year, sailed from Min'anzhen for Shandong on May 24, and arrived on June 24. Though we left for Fujian on December 2, after purchasing beans, on the next day, a storm broke our mast and halyards, which made it impossible for us to navigate and caused our ship to drift into Yaeyama Island in your country on the 22nd. Now we are living on board here. There is no Christian missionary, arsenic, Epicanta gorhami [, which is a terribly virulent insect including cantharis], or any other poison with us. None of us are disguised as Chinese people clothed in Chinese clothes. Also we have no weapons. If you find any violation as such, we should be tried by the national laws. There is no lie in this report.

This special issue focuses on the broader context and interconnectedness of different slave regimes in early modern Asia. Various transnational commercial and imperial projects influenced the waxing and waning of individual slave regimes, while internal and interpersonal conditions within polities also played important roles. The well-known European seaborne empires of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and England were major drivers of this early modern slavery, but they coexisted and competed with other groups of trader-raiders. These included merchants from the Islamicate world and Chinese coastal regions, which connected Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, and other regions. These extensive markets linked different regions together, such as the Malabar Coast with East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Red Sea. While the focus is on the Iberian expansion and its impact on the slave trade, this special issue acknowledges that slavery in Asia should be understood as a result of multiple overlapping and interacting regimes. Each article examines a particular regime while emphasizing its interactions with neighboring regions during the early modern period. The main focus is on the encounters between different slave regimes facilitated by early modern commercial networks. The history of slavery in early modern Asia involved clashes and cross-pollination between disparate slave systems. A further contribution relates to the terminology used to define and understand slavery in non-European contexts, which is still a subject of debate. The concept of “regimes of bondage” is adopted as an umbrella term to encompass the various forms of coerced, subaltern, and dependent labor in Asia during this period. Finally, by using local categories and sources, including European and non-European language materials, the special issue aims to recover marginalized perspectives and highlight the complexity and challenges of studying slavery in Asia.

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.

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.

“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.

This article looks at the specific early modern trade practice of the pacotille and at pacotille commercial networks, particularly of free women of colour, as a means of approaching female trade knowledge and intimate networks in the ancien régime Caribbean colonies. Surviving documentation of this flexible commerce allows us to approach women of highly different backgrounds as knowledgeable and skilled agents within the socioeconomic framework of eighteenth-century global trade, who combined their knowledge of the male-dominated trading spheres with their own intimate networks in highly profitable ways. This essay explores not only what these women knew about long-distance trade, but also how they used their local expertise (e.g., of time regimes, landscape, and people) as well as their intimate networks for personal gain in the eighteenth-century French colonial worlds.

This essay advocates “refugee political thought” as an autonomous category which needs to be centre-staged in global intellectual history. I concretise this by studying Bengali Hindu refugees who migrated from Muslim-majority eastern Bengal (after the Partition of British India in 1947 part of Pakistan, and after 1971, the sovereign state of Bangladesh) to the Hindu-majority Indian state of West Bengal, and occasionally their descendants as well. By studying the transnational horizons of Bengali refugees from the late 1940s to today, I posit them as part of modern global intellectual history. Bengali refugees and their descendants connected their experiences with those of refugees elsewhere in the world, seeing themselves, for example, as “new Jews.” Later, some of them aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause. Refugee politics became enmeshed with Cold War revolutionary currents. European, Soviet, and Chinese Marxist theory—and latent Lockean assumptions—propelled the everyday politics of refugee land occupation. Marxism, sometimes with Hegelian inflection, nourished the East Bengali-–origin founders of Subaltern Studies theory and Dalit (lower-caste) thought. Ultimately, this essay shows how Bengali refugees instrumentalised transnational thinking to produce new models of democratic political thought and practice in postcolonial India. I describe this as “refugee democracy.”