On 2 January 1625, the English ambassador Robert Anstruther met with King Christian IV of Norway and Denmark and requested his participation in a union of Protestant states against Emperor Ferdinand II and the Catholic League in Germany. Within three days, King Christian proposed to contribute five thousand soldiers for one year, as part of an army of almost thirty thousand men. In early June, despite opposition from the Danish Council of State, reluctant to put a huge amount of money into foreign affairs, Christian decided to join what he called “the war for the defence of Lower Saxony”. He then headed an army of mercenaries southwards through Lower Saxony, secured all crossings over the river Weser and prepared to confront the Catholic forces. On 29 November, it was decided that Denmark would be in charge of military operations in Northern Germany, whereas England and the United Provinces would provide a monthly subsidy. The political and military prospects for Denmark were excellent, to say the least. It had the fourth strongest navy in Europe (after Spain and the two new allies), and only a few years before the Danish warships had been described by a French observer as “merveilles de l'océan”. A small standing army of two regiments had recently been established and Denmark was the fourth European state to do so after France, Spain and the neighbouring Sweden.

The crossroads of nationalist historiographies in sub-Saharan Africa and of the history of developmentalist attempts that characterise the European late colonial states, have left us with very incomplete images of important trajectories. In the seemingly more “liberal” large colonial empires—notably the French and British—sails were set by 1945 towards a policy of investment and economic change. Some of the scholarly debates question whether this investment was genuine or just a last resort to avoid (rapid) decolonisation; others put the emphasis on inadequate routines of development implemented in these territories, many of which have apparently been continued since decolonisation.

In this context, we encounter a clear lack of understanding about how decisions made by individual actors on the administrative level interacted with the larger panorama of social conditions in colonial territories, and of the consequences that these interactions had for the paths towards decolonisation. For a smaller empire such as the Belgian colony of Congo-Léopoldville, these processes are still more obscure; and for the colonies ruled by authoritarian metropoles, as in the cases of territories under Spanish and Portuguese rule, stagnation and absence of change are often taken for granted. In other words, these territories, which were under the rule of metropoles regarded as rather weak in economic terms, are treated as unrepresentative of the broader, European movement towards change in colonial policies. However, the conditions of change towards economic and social modernisation in this latter group of empires, even when inhibited by lack of funding and weak professionalisation of the administration, are frequently very telling for the broader range of challenges that the late colonial states faced.

The survival of the Spanish empire after the loss of the mainland American colonies is a neglected subject, and no part of it is more neglected than its economic features. General histories of Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rarely touch on overseas matters, although the colonies do occasionally appear centre stage, as in 1868, when the Cuban Creoles rose in rebellion; in 1898, when Spain lost most of her colonies as a result of war with America; in 1921, when the Berber tribes of Northern Morocco defeated the Spanish army; and in 1936, when General Franco and his coconspirators raised the standard of rebellion against the Republic in North Western Africa. But these references are episodic and essentially political, indeed military in nature. There is little structural analysis of what the colonies meant to Spain, least of all in the economic field.

Feeding into current debates on ethnic identities in colonial South Asia, this article questions to what extent Dutch institutions articulated and impacted social categories of people living in coastal Sri Lanka during the eighteenth century. A thorough analysis of three spheres of Dutch bureaucracy (reporting, registering, and litigating) makes it clear that there was no uniform ideology that steered categorisation practices top-down throughout the studied colonial institutions. Rather, the rationale of the organisation as such affected the way people were classified, depending to a large extent on what level of bureaucracy individuals were dealing with, and what the possible negotiation strategies were for the people recorded. Future research should perhaps not ask “when” certain ethnicities were “made up,” but strive to understand the process in which they were created, the institutional contexts in which they were recorded, and how changing bureaucratic practices not only articulated, but also transformed, social categories in the long run.

While a thick vein of scepticism marked Enlightenment thinkers’ studies, such investigations cannot be divorced from their concurrent quest to merge the wondrous and the rational. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in philosophers’ investigations of merpeople. Examining European gentlemen’s debates over mermaids and tritons illuminate their willingness to embrace wonder in their larger quest to understand the origins of humankind. Naturalists utilized a wide range of methodologies to critically study these seemingly wondrous creatures and, in turn, assert the reality of merpeople as evidence of humanity’s aquatic roots. As with other creatures they encountered in their global travels, European philosophers utilized various theories—including those of racial, biological, taxonomical, and geographic difference—to understand merpeople’s place in the natural world. By the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers integrated merpeople into their explanation of humanity’s origins, thus bringing this phenomenon full circle.

This introductory article explores the recent turn in Asian history towards work that foregrounds mobility, circulation, and cosmopolitan connections, decentring colonial territoriality and postcolonial geo-bodies as the primary units of historical analysis. In it, and to frame our own special issue on Muslim movements in Southeast Asia, we point out that some of this mobility was coerced via projects of state territorialisation that actively displaced select, targeted Muslim actors whose presence in the polity was deemed problematic by states seeking to consolidate their power. Echoes of this displacement can be traced in the politics of the Muslim movements that these actors created, as we argue in this article and throughout the special issue.

Historians have approached the Indian Ocean from a variety of vantages in their attempts to explain the modern history of this huge maritime arena. Some scholars have concentrated on predation as a linking theme, charting how piracy connected a broad range of actors for centuries in these dangerous waters. Others have focused on environmental issues, asking how patterns of winds, currents, and weather allowed trade to flourish on such a vast, oceanic scale. These latter historians have appropriated a page out of Braudel, and have grafted his approaches to the Mediterranean to fit local, Indian Ocean realities, such as the role of cyclones and mangrove swamps in both helping and hindering long-distance commerce. Still other scholars have used different tacks, following trails of commodities such as spices or precious metals, or even focusing on far-flung archaeological remains, in an attempt to piece together trans-regional histories from the detritus civilisations left behind. All of these epistemological vectors have shed light on the region as a whole, though through different tools and lenses, and via a variety of techniques of inquiry.

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 importance of the Atlantic Ocean during the Early Modern period has been stressed in a growing number of studies since the 1960s. However, some aspects of the contacts between different cultures and continents have enjoyed little attention. One of these is the role of individuals behind the Atlantic economic system: merchants, businessmen and entrepreneurs.

This article analyses the influence of confessional divides in the construction of a Mediterranean frontier between the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb at the very beginning of the early modern period. Questioning the influence that religious difference had on the geopolitics of the early modern Mediterranean could seem superfluous since historians have traditionally depicted the Mediterranean world as a space of confrontation between two confessional empires, the Ottoman and the Habsburg. Nevertheless, by focusing on a selection of diplomatic negotiations from the Western Mediterranean it appears that several actors envisioned a scenario where religious and political frontiers were far from coincide. This article will analyse the diplomatic negotiations promoted by different Muslim communities from the Maghreb to voluntarily enter under the rule of the Catholic Monarchs in the framework of the Spanish imperial expansion at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In studying these negotiations from an actor-based approach my aim is not to deny the religious or the political divide existing between the Christian and the Islamic shores. I will argue, however, that this frontier was constructed through the interaction of a wide array of agents such as local elites, royal officers, military men, religious actors, and rulers, with changing agendas towards religious difference.

Exotic natural objects brought to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mutable and malleable things. They were constructed and assimilated into European world-views in a reciprocal process of change as they moved around early modern Europe. In particular, the provenance of natural objects and the associated rich symbolic resonances were central to their natural histories. The distinctions between Orient and Occident had divided the world since antiquity and were given a range of new senses in this period. The location of these two ‘Indies’, and their relationship to one another, were neither static nor always geographically defined. This article focuses on two rich examples of this natural historical construction in relation to images of the Indies: the Old World pangolin, or scaly anteater, and its New World counterpart, the armadillo. Initially, pangolins were understood as East Indian ‘scaly lizards’, armadillos as West Indian. But from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, their geographical identities and symbolic associations were entangled as these creatures came to embody colonial anxieties and resonances. The ‘India’ of the scaly lizard became the ‘Indies’ of the scaled mammals, both East and West. Examining the reception and treatment of examples such as these in European cabinets and natural histories, offers new insights into European relationships with regions of the world seen as distant and wonderfully bountiful.

In 1729, an enslaved woman named Juana Isabel Curazao fled the island of Curaçao, a small Dutch entrepôt in the southern Caribbean, and made her way across calm waters to the northern coast of the nearby Spanish American mainland (present-day Venezuela), just forty miles down-current and downwind. After ostensibly converting to Catholicism Juana Isabel obtained her freedom and acquired a small plot of land in Curiepe, a town of free blacks which the Spanish had founded in 1721 to protect the coast from the incursions of English, French, and Dutch privateers. Juana Isabel planted cacao trees, hoping to profit from Europe's growing taste for chocolate. Defying Spanish colonial law that prohibited trade with foreigners, thousands of people like Juana Isabel surreptitiously sold cacao pods to Curaçaoan traders, usually small-scale Sephardic Jewish merchants or seafarers of African descent. The traders smuggled sacks of the pods back to Curaçao, where enslaved dockworkers loaded them onto large ocean-going vessels and shipped them to Dutch processing firms across the Atlantic. A generation later, in 1765, Juana Isabel's niece and heir, a free black woman named Ana María Mohele, began a long legal battle to retain the grove, which by then had grown into a 1,000-tree plantation. Spanish colonial authorities challenged Ana Maria's ownership of the land, claiming that her aunt's manumission and property grant both were invalid. Nevertheless, they only confiscated half the property, and allowed Ana Maria to keep the rest.

About seven years ago the journal Itinerario issued a special volume on the Ancien Régime in India and Indonesia that carried the papers presented at the third Cambridge-Leiden-Delhi-Yogyakarta conference. The aim of the conference was a comparative one in which state-formation, trading net-works and socio-political aspects of Islam were the major topics. Thumbing through the pages of this issue (while preparing this essay) I had the impression that the results of the conference went beyond its initial comparative goals. Directly or indirectly, several papers stressed that during the early-modern phase India and Indonesia were still part of a cultural continuum that was only gradually broken up by the ongoing process of European expansion during the nineteenth century. It appeared that even after the earlier course of so-called ‘Indianisation’ – a designation that unjustly conveys an Indian ‘otherness’ – India and the Archipelago shared many characteristics, especially in terms of their political and religious orientation. More importantly, these shared traits were shaped by highly mobile groups of traders, pilgrims and courtiers who criss-crossed the Bay of Bengal, traversing both the lands above and below the winds.

Recent approaches in global history and postcolonial studies have pointed to global aspects of colonialism and suggested that the history of colonialism should not be described just as a unidirectional history of power, because the reverberations of colonialism within the metropolis were also important. If we reflect further, we might ask not only if the metropolis and the colonies were entangled, but also if different colonial contexts had connections to one another. Pursuing this in the case of missionary activities, Rebekka Habermas recently demanded that scholars connect missionary history and global history so as to examine the global entanglements of the mission. She drew attention to missionary societies’ active on a global scale. It stands to reason that missionary societies, as global actors, pursued similar politics in different regions and, therefore, different regions and contexts were thereby connected. But is it possible to show direct entanglements between individual mission contexts? Can we explain certain practices and discourses in colonial situations better if we look at other regional contexts?

In testing these questions, the case of the so-called “emigrant mission” (Auswanderermission), directed at Germans emigrants to Brazil by a sister organisation of the Protestant Rhenish Missionary Society, is instructive. Strangely, Habermas mentioned neither the Americas nor the emigrant mission when she proposed the analysis of global entanglements of the mission, as if there had been no missionary activities in the Americas. But it is exactly this kind of entanglement that seems most interesting, the entanglement between regions with apparently different histories. This paper tries to address this lacuna by asking if the history of the emigrant mission in Brazil can be linked with “normal” missionary contexts of, for example, missions directed at non-Europeans, in order to understand why certain discourses were circulating in Brazil. In this instance, the former German colony of Southwest Africa and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Nias serve as classical missionary examples, as the Rhenish Missionary Society was very active in these regions. In considering relations between German emigrants in Brazil, the German colony in Africa, and the German mission in a Dutch colony, one must remember that Brazil, although it figured very prominently in German colonial debates of the nineteenth century, was not a formal German colony.

The German scholar Georg Marcgraf was the first trained astronomer in the New World and co-author of the earliest published natural history of Brazil, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden and Amsterdam 1648) (Fig. 1). Arriving in the Americas in 1638, Marcgraf took his place among a remarkable group of scholars and painters assembled at the Brazilian court of the German count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679), the governor-general of Dutch Brazil from 1637–1644.1 Dutch Brazil was established by the Dutch West India Company (WIC), which was created in 1621 to engage in trade, conquest, and colonisation in the Americas and Africa. Except for Marcgraf, the most important members of the Count's entourage were Dutch and included the painters Albert Eckhout (c. 1610 - c. 1666) and Frans Post (1612–1680) and the physician Willem Piso (1611–1678). The rich group of scientific and visual materials they created are comparable in both scope and importance with the works created by Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, and others during the Pacific voyages of Captain Cook in the eighteenth century.2 The Count's support of natural history, astronomy, and scientific and ethnographic illustration during his governorship was highly unusual, setting him apart from other colonial administrators and military leaders in the seventeenth century. Indeed, he is responsible for establishing both the first observatory and the first botanical garden in the New World, sparing no expense in creating a princely empire for himself in the Brazilian wilderness.

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.

It seems no exaggeration to say that the Caribbean used to ‘eat’ people. The autochthonous inhabitants of the region, the Amerindians, estimated to have numbered about one million before Columbus, quickly embarked on a course of rapid demographic decline after the intrusion of the Europeans. Around 1700 all Amerindians had virtually disappeared from the islands and only a fraction of them remained in the hinterland of the Guianas.

The Nias sense of space is a curious one. Lest anyone suspect me of harbouring a complaint about the size of the rooms on the famous campus in Wassenaar, let me insist at once that I am thinking not of NIAS, the delightful research institute, but Nias, the island off Sumatra. There, space to build the splendid houses for which the islanders are justly celebrated is allocated, not according to notions of the proper relationship between authority or status and centrality or ‘social distance’, but on a system of priorities established by symbolic directions. ‘Upriver’ — a direction which only sometimes corresponds to the flow of a nearby waterway — is ennobling, whereas ‘downstream’ is demeaning. Beyond the confines of the village, ‘downstream’ designates the world of increasing remoteness. Its outer reach is the horizon, the abode of the monstrous and evil. In conjunction with the inveterate hostility the islanders have always exhibited towards intruders, this seems suggestive. The horizon, though contemplated with reverence in some cultures, is not always divine. Distance does not always lend enchantment – or if it does, the ensorcelment may be malign. Different cultures have contrasting attitudes to intrusions from far away and, therefore, different strategies for receiving the sojourner, entertaining the traveller, accommodating the migrant, and absorbing the invader.