How did the populations of a remote Cape Verdean island—Santo Antão—construct and formulate their goals of emancipation and social reform in the late colonial period? This article revisits the experiences of anti-colonial mobilisation in the island in the late 1960s, bringing them together with other narratives of social needs formulated by Santo Antão's populations. Those include the fears of being recruited for plantation labour in São Tomé e Príncipe, the objective of obtaining the improvement of social infrastructure, and the local struggles for water that became again more acute between 1945 and independence. The article shows that local experiences of Cape Verdean populations, of both the islands’ elite and local peasants, sharecroppers and fishermen, were much more complex than a simple, straightforward narrative of nationalist sympathies and activity. The internal conflicts outlined here also point to the numerous struggles that would shake Santo Antão's society after independence.

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.

Protocolos or notarial acts are one of those historical sources that everyone talks about but few use. A few social historians such as James Lockhardt and Ruth Pike have assayed the rich ores of these documents (for Lima and Seville, respectively). Art historians have used them with profit, but only a few of an older generation of French historians and Louis-André Vigneras have done much with them for voyages of exploration. Yet they are the last truly rich source of historical information still awaiting study by students of the Expansion (1).

This article is focused on a magazine called Jambo, which was published by the British East Africa Command for troops in its employ between 1942 and 1945. Jambo was an agglomeration of political articles, general interest stories, propaganda, cartoons, crosswords, and more, with many of its contributions authored (or drawn) by men serving in the Allied forces. Here, I use Jambo to consider notions of the “colonial” and “imperial” during the Second World War, exploring how the realities of racial segregation in the colonies fit awkwardly with imperial service. Jambo also permits us a window into the views of some hundreds of British servicemen, who wrote extensively about the Africans with whom they served, revealing the complexities and shifts in British perceptions of African peoples during the conflict. Jambo is unique in another respect: it also provided a forum for African troops. In few other publications—and even fewer with such wide circulation—could educated (but nonelite) African peoples reach thousands of British readers. Though their published letters and articles were few compared to those written by Jambo's British authors, African writers used the venue to critique the conditions of their military service, argue about the sort of social ordering they desired in their home communities, and create an alternate narrative of the war. Like most colonial publications, Jambo had intended audiences, but also voracious, additional, alternate publics that mediated the articles which appeared in its pages. All this suggests that we might think of the colonial public sphere as both local and global, inward and outward looking, personal and communal, and situated along a continuum between colonial and imperial contexts.

If there is one thing that everyone interested in international development issues knows, or thinks they know, it is that the countries of Asia, and especially East and Southeast Asia, have performed much better in the international development stakes since 1960 than the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The principal metric used to measure achievement is growth in per capita GDP, although other indicators have also become widely used, including those such as the Human Development Index, which combines per capita GDP with other measures of social achievement such as literacy rates, school enrolments and infant mortality rates. But whatever measure we use to construct league tables of development progress, at the end of the twentieth century almost all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa were clustered at the bottom while those of Asia were more spread out across the spectrum. Some nations, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Brunei had, by 2000, achieved the status of “high human development”. Most other countries in Asia were in the “medium human development” category, while most countries in sub-Saharan Africa were either in the bottom twenty of the “medium” category or in the “low human development” group. Of the 35 countries in the low development group in 2001, almost all were in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

This article examines some of the core holdings within the Archive for Contemporary Affairs at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Prominent amongst this material are the papers of the National Party (NP), the political party that formalised the structures of apartheid. Paying particular attention to the papers of what Hermann Giliomee has termed ‘The Last Afrikaner Leaders’ alongside recently acquired material concerning post-colonial politics, we argue for the importance of this archive for scholars studying Afrikaner nationalism, at both national and regional level, the rationales and discourses of apartheid and the history of the country more broadly.

In recent years two high quality overviews of the economic history of Indonesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been published that testify of the growing maturity of the field. The two books – The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A History of Missed Opportunities by Anne Booth (1998), and The Emergence of a National Economy. An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000 by a team of authors (Howard Dick, Vincent Houben, Thomas Lindblad and Thee Kian Wie) (2002) – are written by distinguished experts in the field. Both books also aim to be comprehensive, but interestingly, they do this in very different ways. But let me focus on the similarities first: apart from the obvious fact that they want to present an economic history of Indonesia over the past twohundred years, they also have in common that they stress the links between economic and political history. Both try ‘to bring the state back in’, by focussing on the process of state formation – in particular in the colonial period – and, even more importantly, by analysing the consequences of government policies for economic development. The leading theme of the The Emergence (TE), as formulated in the programmatic opening chapter by Howard Dick, are the links between state-formation, the nation state, and the national economy. Similarly, The Indonesian Economy (TIE) contains a detailed analysis of government policy, and in the final analysis of the ‘missed opportunities’ of Indonesia's past, the state plays a crucial role. This also brings me to the other obvious striking similarity: both books try to explain the failure of Indonesian economic development in this period (or at least until the second half of the 1960s), and discuss the reasons why economic development was relatively slow.

In Latin America, where British imperial expansion had left little administrative trace, Argentina was nonetheless profoundly affected by British investment and imported British technical expertise. Among the more modest examples of British expansionism in Argentina was the arrival, from 1865 onwards, of Welsh immigrants eager to establish a colony in Patagonia isolated from the seemingly unstoppable progress of Anglicisation by an overwhelmingly hegemonic Victorian England. By the time of the First World War, however, the Celtic character of the colony could no longer be taken for granted: Argentine government pressures had already meant that the Welsh-speaking colony was now more firmly integrated into the nation-building process. Friction which then developed between the Welsh community and the Argentine government acted as one of the push factors which sent Welsh Patagonians back to Wales and on to Australia, for example…To this process of integration the Great War added new pressures in the form of the question of loyalty to Britain during the conflict. Those who stayed in Patagonia during the war often expressed views which were pro-British and the Argentine province became a source of recruitment for the British armed services…Using a range of sources, this paper attempts to show that the Welshness of the Patagonian colonists had not destroyed their British patriotism: the latter survived and even came to the fore during the conflict of 1914-18.

Through the framework of “friendship” defined by Judith Butler, Leela Gandhi, and Vanessa Smith, this essay tracks the relationship between Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty, a Bengali revolutionary terrorist who spent three decades in British jails in colonial India and Francis Lowman, a police officer who was responsible for his imprisonment. Informed by Chakrabarty’s autobiography, the essay shows that terrorism and intimacy were closely linked. Even though the revolutionary terrorist and jailor opposed one another in violent ways, these relationships were grounded in mutual recognition and built on what (following Butler) is called the “fundamental sociality of colonialism.”

Owing to the development of global history in recent decades, the idea of the West as the standard by which to consider economic development in other parts of the world has been abandoned.

In his studies, Kenneth Pomeranz emphasised the similarities in the living standards that existed in the core region of East Asia and Northwest Europe until the beginning of the nineteenth century. He concludes that the reasons for the great divergence between East Asia and Northwest Europe had to do with the regions' access to coal mines and the New World. His studies stimulated comparisons between East Asian countries, such as China, India, and Japan, with Northwest Europe using different economic indicators.

However, these studies do not adequately explain the reason for the “small divergence” between China and Japan after the mid-nineteenth century. There were no significant differences in the living standards or real wages in the core regions of China and Japan until late in the century. Because of the development of transportation technology during the 1800s, the location of coalmines cannot explain the difference between the two countries. Therefore, it is important to examine the institutional background for the “small divergence” between China and Japan.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, India's Mughal empire (1526–1858) fragmented into a number of regional polities that were, in turn, gradually subsumed under the paramount authority of the British East India Company. This essay describes concomitant developments in the empire's Persianate political language, particularly with regard to ideas of sovereignty, statehood, and dominion. It argues that by the mid-eighteenth century, the Mughal “empire of Hindustan” was increasingly framed as a territorialised governing institution comprising emerging provincial sovereignties rooted in local ruling households. This conceptual dispensation, however, remained ill-defined until the 1760s, when a treaty regime dominated by the Company built upon this language to concretise the empire as a confederacy of independent, sub-imperial states. The essay contends that in the short term, this redefinition bolstered the authority of incipient dynasties in provinces like Awadh, but in the longer term generated conflicts that abetted the expansion of colonial rule and laid conceptual foundations for British paramountcy in India.

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.

Among the more emphasised aspects of the Atlantic history are the mobility of ideas and goods but also the endless movement of peoples that linked the margins of the ocean and gave the Atlantic basin an indisputable cohesion. Within the theoretical framework of the subfield of Atlantic history, this study addresses the way the imperial perceptions shaped the migratory patterns of the Portuguese Atlantic, notably the transoceanic behaviour of the men who volunteered to defend its scattered territories. During a particularly difficult period in the mid-seventeenth century, the hierarchical ambiguities of Portuguese empire and its religiously charged military thought, in conjunction with the prevalent political culture of service, promoted a constant back and forth across the ocean that revealed the conceptual unity of the Portuguese Atlantic world. For these men, for a while, there were no alluring centres and unappealing peripheries; the Atlantic was conceived of as a wide circulation space essentially free from mental or emotional prejudices.

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.

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.