Travel in search of a better future is an essential part of human history. This paper will examine one aspect of this phenomenon, that of migrating labourers, focusing on the migration and mortality of Javanese and Chinese labourers to the East Coast of Sumatra from 1869 to 1930. One of the goals of this investigation will be to better understand the condition in which they lived. The rate of mortality among Javanese and Chinese labourers is still based on appropriations, because previous scholarship focussed primarily on labour conditions on the plantations and not on the real evidence of mortality of the labourers. Perhaps this is because documentation in the early part of the period is incomplete and hard to come by. It is obvious, however, that from the outset of the plantation society, mortality was high. In Koelies, Planters en Koloniale Politiek, Jan Breman estimated that on Sumatra's East Coast one out of three or four coolies died before his contract had ended. However, reports of hospitals in the area are a source for new evidence about the mortality of the labourers in the early years of their recruitment. This paper will present this evidence.

This article will analyze some of the images of Indonesia as expressed in the Dutch press in the period between December 1949 and August 1962 from the granting of independence to the handing over of die last remnant of the former colony, Western New Guinea. It will focus on two aspects. First, how did the press report about Indonesia and second, what role did it play in the deterioration of the Dutch-Indonesian relationship? To what extent can the press be held responsible for the negative image of the Dutch with regard to Indonesia after 1949?

Beneath the surface of apparent unity of the colonial empires of Britain and Holland in India and Indonesia, there existed a wide variety of relations between the Western power on the one hand and indigenous political structures on the other. A colonial power could control its territorial possessions in several ways, usually classified in terms of either direct or indirect rule. Furnivall, in his famous comparative study of British Burma and the Netherlands East Indies, saw Burma as a ‘typical example’ of direct rule and Java as exemplary of fhe system of indirect rule. In the same work the author, however, acknowledged that in general there was no clear distinction between the two systems of government and that colonial practice was determined more by, what he calls, ‘economic environment’ rather than philosophies of empire. Indeed, the terms direct and indirect rule can be seen as extreme opposites. in the realm of ideas, while in reality colonial rule was always something in between. This explains partly the confusion about the form of government in nineteenth century Java, which, in view of its dualistic features, was classified by some authors under the system of indirect rule while others (with an eye upon less solidly controlled areas within Indonesia) thought it more in tune with theories of direct rule.

A systematic comparison of the development of modern bureaucracies in India and Indonesia during the colonial era has never been made. No equivalent of the excellent work done by J.S. Furnivall on the colonial administration in Burma and Java is available. Yet, much of what he said is useful for the subject of this paper and we shall therefore lean heavily on him. It would be an overstatementto say that Indians before the Second World War felt interested in the events and developments in Indonesia. In the other direction that interest surely existed. We need only to recall the deep impact the Indian nationalist movement made upon such Indonesian nationalists as Sukarno.‘The example of Asian nationalism to which Indonesians referred most often was the Indian one.’ This applies for instance to the Congress non-cooperation campaign in the early 1920s. Indonesian nationalists could since then be classified as cooperators and non-cooperators, although for them the principal criterion was not the wish to boycott Dutch schools, goods and government officials(such a boycott actually never occurred in colonial Indonesia)but the refusal to participate in representative councils such as the Volksraad(i.e. People's Council).

Although the United States granted the Philippines formal independence in 1946, American influence in the former colony did not disappear overnight. In the decades following independence, American policymakers continued to play key roles in Philippine politics; American businessmen, presidents, legislators, and bureaucrats and US-based international money lending agencies continued to have a considerable impact on the Philippine economy; and American popular culture continued to penetrate Philippine society and culture (as it did elsewhere). But perhaps no sector of Philippine society was as profoundly influenced by Americans as the academic one, and no subdivision of the Philippine academy bore the American imprint as visibly as Philippine social science. This paper examines the academic career, writings, institution-building efforts, and scholarly agenda of the US-born scholar who arguably had the greatest impact on post-war Philip- pine social science: Father Frank Lynch, a Jesuit professor of anthropology and sociology at Ateneo de Manila University.

The period from the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the creation, expansion, contraction, and fall of empires, enhanced and expanded communications, creation and growth – as measured by volume, range and intensity – of trading diasporas, diffusion of major religions far beyond their points of origin, intercontinental and transoceanic dissemination of flora and fauna, major movements – both coerced and voluntary – of population, growing technological sophistication, and advanced in humankind's knowledge of natural, earth, and planetary sciences. It also witnessed religious strife, conquest and war, decimation of populations through disease and hunger, and continued subjugation and oppression of groups of people. Taken by themselves, none of these aspects had been absent before this period and many had manifested themselves, albeit in vastly differing degrees of intensity on a very broad spectrum, on the major landmasses of the world.

The Columbian legacy also involved catastrophic demographic collapse and brutal exploitation. Within fifty years of Spanish occupation, native populations of the Caribbean archipelago verged on extinction; after eighty years, demographic decline in Mexico and Central America may have reached ninety percent. Although epidemiological transfers devastated American Indians, other aspects of inter-hemispheric biological exchange substantially enhanced the world's capacity to support human life. Eurasian grazing stock (goats, cattle, pigs, sheep) as well as animals of burden (horses and oxen) were introduced to the Americas while native American plants — not least, the potato, maize, tomato, various beans, and squash — were transferred to the Eastern Hemisphere. Precious metals were also conveyed to the Old World with effects that continue to be debated upon European economic growth, the distribution of wealth, the organization of power, and the conduct of war. Africa's portion of the Columbian legacy was to supply 5/6ths of the human migrants from the Eastern to the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1775 and to experience the domestic transformations dictated by the Atlantic slave trade. Taken together, the convergence of continents in the age of discovery would appear to have shaped the modern world, as Abbe Raynal implied. But did it? From Raynal's time to our own, how have historians related these developments to the advent of modernity or to the establishment of Europe's global economic paramountcy? Did the development of the Old World hinge upon the discovery of the New?

As a native of the Netherlands, I have been imbued with an awareness of the history of the Second World War in both Europe and the Pacific ever since I was a child, though I must admit that the Japanese occupation of the Dutch colony in the Dutch East Indies from 1942 to 1945 plays a less important part in my imagination than thefiveyears of German occupation of the Netherlands. My parents and brothers can directly recollect the latter dark period, and I see it vividly in my mind's eye, born (in 1948) and bred as I was in Rotterdam, the city whose centre was razed to the ground by the German air raid in May 1940. The effects of the bombs were still clearly visible during the years in which I was growing up there. Given this double Dutch memory – memory of the hostilities in Europe, and memory of South-East Asia – it hardly seems fortuitous that the Dutch scholar Ian Buruma chose the German and Japanese memory of the Second World War and of the War in the Pacific as the theme for his 1994 publication The Wages of Guilt.

This essay examines letters of petition sent by failed white settlers in South Africa to the British Governor General. These letters comprise a particular discursive genre that combine aspects of both private and public. The key to their success was controlled emotion: petitioners had to present their distress in such a way as to excite the exercise of compassion. Allowing subversive or stray emotions to enter a letter was bound to undermine a petitioner’s appeal. Reading this epistolary corpus critically allows us to understand the discursive strategies by which colonials claimed a sentimental attachment to Britain, the empire and, indeed, the Governor General himself.

Much of Harbin's early history revolved around struggles over the city's identity and also for control of the city's colonial legacy. The city's Russian past, in particular, has existed uneasily alongside its development as a Chinese city, and nearly a century after Russian control over the city ended, the competition over Harbin's identity continues to evolve. After many decades of denying and dismissing Harbin's colonial past, local, regional, and national Chinese governments are now exploiting that past as an asset for the city's economic development. Building on trends that first emerged in the 1990s, Harbin's Chinese rulers are now turning to the city's non-Chinese past as a means of competing in a global cultural and economic environment. More than attracting foreigners focused on nostalgia, however, Harbin seems eager to present itself as example of the “occidental” exotic for Chinese domestic tourists.

On December 15th last, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Professor of Russian Studies at Brock University in Ontario, visited Leiden for a lecture on the applicability of Edward Said's theories on Orientalism to Russian images of Asia. He kindly consented to a lunchtime conversation with fellow Russianist Henk Kern and Carolien Stolte to talk about his life, his work and his most recent book. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye teaches courses in Russian and Inner Asian history. His research interests focus on Imperial Russian intellectual, cultural and diplomatic issues. He has written two books, Toward the Rising Sun: Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), and Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

This article examines the decision-making process for a new fort which the Dutch West India Company proposed to build near Takoradi in present-day Ghana in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. By closely following the process of design, evaluation, and redesign of the fort, this article argues that the WIC was institutionally incapable of coordinating and carrying out such a complex project. The original design for the new fort was made in 1774 by Johan Frederik Trenks, a Silesian-born engineer who, as it turned out, was not current with modern design practices and used Dutch examples from the first half of the seventeenth century. The design was sent to the Netherlands for evaluation and returned with scathing criticism. The long, drawn-out process of design, evaluation, and redesign of what was after all a relatively small fort show the institutional paralysis of the WIC in the years leading up to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–84). Though the fort would never be completed, construction did begin shortly before the war. The conflict, followed shortly thereafter by the dissolution of the WIC, meant the project would never be completed.