The spectre of a global crisis, predicted in 1997, but then failing to materialise outside (parts of) Asia, Russia, and Brazil, now looms again. Expectations of the arrival of a world-wide economic recession might constitute a conducive atmosphere for the study of economic crises and depressions in the past, in this case the Indonesian past. It is in fact somewhat amazing that, the study of the 1930s Depression apart, economic and social historians have not taken up this topic more eagerly during the last five years.

The uniqueness of Siam in being the only independent Southeast Asian country in the age of nineteenth-century colonialism is a mantra that persists largely to this day. It held that it was the calibre of the Siamese monarchs in particular King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910), the fifth reign of the present regnant dynasty, which saved the country from succumbing to the powerful and predatory west. By continuing his father King Mongkut's (1851–1868) foresight in adopting an open door policy by signing the Bowring Treaty (1855) and reforming the country's administration in conformity to their model of government, the king gained the recognition by the Europeans of Siam as a civilised country. As a tribute to the king's greatness, in particular for his benevolent rule and pivotal reforms, the ‘colloquial, affectionate, yet awesome’ title ‘Lord of Life’ (chao chiwit) was used by his subjects especially around this period, according to the royal family historian writing in 1960 who was a grandson of King Chulalongkorn. In 2003, another direct descendant of the king wrote that it was no less the ‘Lord of Life, Lord of the Realm, the fountain and embodiment of moral and spiritual power itself who recognised that survival in the face of colonialism necessitated engagement in diplomacy and internal reforms. By dint of such enlightened measures, the Siamese polity was transformed and strengthened. in political history, the emphasis has been on the efficiency and good governance made possible by the modernising administrative system.

In 1675, William Dampier set sail from Jamaica for the Bay of Campeche on Mexico's Yucatán coast to trade for logwood. Dampier, who would later become famous as a naturalist, a buccaneer, and one of the foremost chroniclers of the Golden Age of English buccaneering, recorded his experiences over the course of a year spent in English logwood communities near this Spanish settlement. The author's account gives a fascinating portrayal of a society beyond the margins of imperial control. In Laguna de Términos, an inlet just west of the town of Campeche (in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula), English sailors cut logwood, a popular dyestuff used in Europe for red, purple, and black clothing dyes and ink, that grew throughout the swampy tropical lowlands of the area. They traded their harvest with merchants who would ship it to ports as far away as Boston, London, and Amsterdam. Seeking an independent life separate from the arbitrary power of shipboard hierarchy, the loggers lived communally. They worked, hunted, and drank on their own schedule.

Andre Gunder Frank's latest work, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age definitely is a book with a message. Its author sets out to challenge what according to him are the received opinions in historiography and social science on the making of the modern world. He does so relentlessly and overturns the ideas of such influential scholars as Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein. As a matter of fact, of almost everybody who has ever touched upon the subject. All these misled if not downright misleading scholars are thought to suffer from Eurocentrism. Which of course is a Bad Thing. Frank uses the word to refer to people who profess to tell the history of the world but do so by preponderantly gazing at their European navel, unduly magnifying Europe's uniqueness and role in world history.

In this paper, I want to explore a very simple contrast which has many potential implications. China at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century was, by most measures, a very poor society. China in the latter part of the eighteenth century seemed – both to its own members and to most, though not all, visitors from abroad – a very rich society. So what happened in between?

The historiography dealing with the evolution of elementary education in the Spanish American colonial period is relatively abundant. However, a great part of the literature has a regional or national scope, and in general does not give an idea of tendencies or the scale of education, which makes a general evaluation difficult. This paper tries to present such an evaluation based on the available secondary sources, and covers the whole of Spanish America during the century prior to Independence. It attempts to describe concisely both the consolidation of the institutions which had been evolving since the Conquest, and the series of changes which, it concludes, anticipate the educational transformations of the nineteenth century.

The economist Hal Hill begins his authoritative survey of the Indonesian economy under Soeharto's “New Order” (Orde Baru) government with quotes from leading development economists, who are singularly pessimistic about the prospects for economic growth in Indonesia. A negative assessment such as that given by Swedish Nobel Prize Laureate Gunnar Myrdal is understandable as he was writing at the time of the severe economic crisis accompanying the eclipse of Sukarno's “Old Order” (Orde Lama) in the mid-1960s. More surprising is the verdict of Benjamin Higgins, known to have coined the expression “chronic dropout” for Indonesia. Higgins had spent quite a bit of time in Indonesia in the early 1950s as an advisor from the World Bank. Was his harsh verdict, akin to the oft-heard epithet “perpetual underachiever”, based on his own personal observations in the newly independent nation, or was his judgement also coloured by the near-collapse of the economy in the mid-1960s? The received dismal view of Indonesia's economic performance under Sukarno forms the logical point of departure for this article.

In 1879, the Danish Ministry of Domestic Affairs approved a proposal to construct a building in Copenhagen that was meant to function as a boarding house for Greenlanders while they were being educated in the metropole. The building, “Grønlænderhjemmet”, was used as a boarding house for Greenlanders in Denmark from 1880 until 1896, when the practice of sending Greenlandic men to Denmark for educational purposes came to a halt. While in use, “Grønlænderhjemmet” functioned as an instrument for the colonial administration, and the boarding house embodied a central aspect of the colonial administration's strategy for civilising Greenlanders: to control the civilising process in order to ensure that Greenlanders did not loose their connection with their Inuit background.

In the interwar years, the colonial powers of the day instantly saw long-range radio technology as an instrument to strengthen their empires as it enabled broadcasters in the European metropoles to reach audiences in the peripheries via the ether. This article focuses on the Dutch colonial station PHOHI, a company that pioneered global radio broadcasting. The station was founded by a group of influential entrepreneurs in order to strengthen ties between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies by reaching out to colonial expatriates. This case study shows how geopolitical and ideological considerations shaped both the organisation and the content of Dutch intercontinental broadcasting.

The statistical table is one expression of the settler colonial capacity and willingness to enumerate colonized “peoples” as “populations.” By examining four tables—from 1763, 1828, 1848, and 1850—in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia this paper illustrates the emergence of this powerful technique of representation during the same a period in which European states were developing their capacity to represent the social in statistical terms. In the colonial context, the rise of the notion of a “population” whose characteristics could be averaged contributed to the specifically administrative eclipse of native sovereignty, paralleling the jural/political demise of native sovereignty.

The development of a global perspective in anthropology is a very different kind of phenomenon from that in economics or economic history. In the latter disciplines, the field of enquiry may easily be extended to the entire world, or at least to large enough portions of it that systemic supra-society relations are clearly discernable. The periodic appearance of an intellectual orientation to global relations – from the mercantilistists to the dependency theorists – is clear evidence of the availability of the larger perspective. The more common focus on the nation state or, by abstraction, the “society”, as the locus of analysis and explanation has been a reflex of the emergence of national cycles of economic reproduction in the nineteenth century. Ricardo, Marx, Keynes and much modern development theory restrict the field of enquiry to the single society where all the necessary conditions of reproduction and thus, explanation, are thought to be located (Friedman 1976, 1978). Finally, with the emergence after World War Two of a center/periphery model of imperialism, a global perspective has again gained prominence.

On March 12 this year I gave an informal talk to the ‘overseas history group’ in which I tried to sketch in the development and atmosphere of major Southeast Asia programs in the USA and Australia, with particular reference to the influence of the social sciences on approaches to Indonesian history. My opinions were based on personal impressions and were utterly non-expert; it was therefore with some reluctance that I agreed to try and summarize my talk for Itinerario. No historian should publish without doing some research, but since I was assured that the very informality and casualness of my approach was a recommendation, I will do my best.

In the production of tropical export crops, the factor labour has always overshadowed the two other factors, land and capital. In the days prior to the mechanisation of agriculture, that is to say, far into the second half of the 19th century, the factor capital almost coincided with labour. “Des bras, des bras, toujours des bras” as the saying went among the planters of the Mascareignes. However, it would be wrong to suggest that before the industrial revolution the relative importance of labour only manifested itself in the production of tropical export crops. There is a revered tradition in economic theory which considers labour to be the only source of wealth. Thus, Karl Marx proposed that the value produced by a labourer above the maintenance level should be designated as surplus value. For him, the control of this surplus lay at the basis of each “mode of production” (his term for a stage of development). Each mode of production was characterised by a specific set of social relations between the labourer, the ruling class that appropriates the surplus value, and the means of production. Labour and the labour process therefore were in his eyes a social phenomenon. One might add they are inherent to the tissue of authorities that constituate any social order.

This article examines five wars that occurred on the Malay-Thai Peninsula in the period 1785–1838 and the deep impact they had upon women's lives during and after the conflicts. Constituting the majority of surviving refugees, women rebuilt their lives in the wake of war through business and trade in Malaya, as Islamic teachers in Mecca and Southeast Asia, and as servants and slaves in Bangkok. In each of these settings, women encountered new forms of agency and newfound challenges, shifting cultural values that regulated decisions and actions, and evolving perceptions of the qualifications for leadership. Focused upon the political demise of the Patani Sultanate, a state with a long history of female rule, this study is of particular relevance to scholarly debates concerning women in contemporary warfare because of its transnational focus with keen attention to women in a variety of Islamic spaces and contexts, its aim of dispelling the pervasive notion of Muslim women as lacking agency, and as a point of comparison for the present armed conflict still raging in Southern Thailand that has claimed more than five thousand and continues to impact women and gender dynamics in the region.

L'Inde, on le sait, compte parmi les exemples de choix de ce qu'on appelle de nos jours le sous-développement. Le motif n'est pas récent. On le retrouve depuis le XVIIe siècle déjà dans les rapports et mémoires des Européens, employés des compagnies ou autres voyageurs. Tel ce directeur du comptoir hollandais à Surat qui s'indigne de l'inefficacité, de l'insouciance et de la corruption des autorités. Lors d'un incendie sérieux dans la ville aucun des notables ne fait quoique ce soit. D'ailleurs qu'est-ce qu'ils auraient pu faire en l'absence totale du matériel nécessaire? Pourtant Surat n'est pas un bled quelconque, mais une ville riche et importante. Plus grave encore, personne ne s'inquiete de ce que son ports'ensable progressivement à cause des alluvions apportées par la rivière. Non seulement personne ne s'en inquiète, mais on aggrave encore les choses en déchargeant le lest dans la rivière. En fin de compte notre témoin doute fort qu'aucune ville placée sous le régime des Mogols puisse durer pour longtemps). Est-ce le sous-développement pur et simple? Ou est-ce qu'il y a autre chose qui joue?

Japan's opening up in the mid-1850s and the ensuing spread of Western influence caused a fundamental dislocation in the country's socio-cultural life. Values and habits were rocked to their core after centuries of isolation, and people were quite helpless for how to come to terms with this rapid influx of foreign things. Faced with abrupt and severe changes, they felt deeply disoriented and their self-awareness was considerably shaken. This soon led to differentiation in attitudes toward the Western challenge. Some insisted that people should reconstruct their identity just by adjusting to Western standards. Modernisation was the only choice in their eyes and they believed that Japan should make efforts to adopt Western ways into every aspect of the nation's life. Customs and manners had to be reexamined based on this new criteria and reformed accordingly or, if this was ever impossible, abolished. Others, however, saw in it nothing more than shameful mimicry. They believed that the nation's self-confidence would be lost if people were absorbed in Westernisation. Instead they thought that Japan's cultural backbone should build on the country's long-standing rich traditions, rather than being dazzled by the superficial affluence of Western civilisation.

In July of 1633, Captain Sussex Camock set sail from London with around 50 men to establish an English outpost on the mainland of Central America. His voyage was sponsored by members of the Providence Island Company, recent founders of a Puritan colony on two small islands 150 miles off the coast of Nicaragua (fig. 1). Company adventurers—so called because they ventured their capital—instructed Captain Camock to establish a “Colony upon the Mayne” and to start a trade with local Indians. The group was directed to “carry themselves wislie and modestlie towards the Indyans, for the honor of our Religion and nation”. They were to endear themselves “to the Indyans…and by some reasonable guise to winn their Friendship”. In case the Indians did not have sufficient commodities to trade, Camock's men were implored to investigate the region for any and all potential resources, “or to give ye full Intelligence of the possibilities of that designe”. The adventurers specifically sought information about:

Minh Hương—often translated as ‘Ming Refugees’, became a powerful interest group in Vietnamese commerce, colonization, and politics between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Curiously, they remain understudied and misunderstood by both Vietnamese and Overseas Chinese specialists. This results from confusion about Minh Hương identity and origins, which this article addresses by analyzing the evolution of the group’s identity and the interests and institutions that shaped it. Far from static, Minh Hương identity formed, metamorphosed, and all but disappeared due to the interplay between changing circumstances and adaptive responses that continually reshaped the content of Minh Hương identity whenever “outside” circumstances challenged them. In this way, the Minh Hương evolved from its merchant diaspora origins into a powerful merchant-bureaucratic class that exploited the institutions that Vietnamese matrilineage and Chinese patrilineage afforded them in order to advance its commercial and political interests. When their status eroded in the nineteenth century, the Minh Hương redefined their group as a minority ethnicity in defense of diminishing rights. Far from the powerless refugee minority image their name implies, their behaviour so reminiscent of merchant cultures from the Sogdians to the Swahili, the Minh Hương deserves greater consideration in the literature on merchant cultures in world history.

An Ethiopian man named Surūr appeared before the British Consul at Addis Ababa in December 1933 and told a remarkable story. He had just returned to Ethiopia after enduring more than five years of slavery in the Arabian (Persian) Gulf where he had been forced to work as a pearl diver. When he was eleven years old and out tending cattle in the Wallamo region of Ethiopia around 1925, he was seized by kidnappers who took him to Tajura on the Somali coast and shipped him along with fifty other captives to Jedda, where he was sold to a man who took him to Qatar and eventually sold him to a pearl merchant who engaged him as a diver. As Surūr explained to the consul, he tried twice to escape from his master. The first time, he fled to the British Residency Agent, ‘Isa bin ‘Abdullatīf, in Dubai, who promised to protect him, but then returned him to his master, who severely beat him. Shortly after, he fled to the British agency office in Sharjah, only to find that the Residency Agent was the same ‘Isa bin ‘Abdullatīf, who again returned him to his master, who this time beat him until he was unconscious. Surūr finally managed to escape by fleeing to a boat bound for Basra. There, he met some Somali men working as stokers on a British steamer who assisted him in getting to Djibouti by way of Muscat. When he arrived in Djibouti he was interrogated by port officers, and his story was passed on to the British consulat Addis Ababa who interviewed him and forwarded his story to the Political Agent at Muscat.