The Great War was indeed a world war. Imperial powers like Great Britain drew on their far-flung empires not only for resources but also for manpower. This essay examines one important (though still inadequately studied) aspect of British wartime exigency, the voluntary and coerced participation of the British Empire's coloured subjects and allies in military operations on the Western Front. With the exception of the Indian Army in the first year of the war, that participation did not include combat. Instead coloured troops, later joined by contract labourers, played major roles behind the lines. From 1916 onwards, well over a quarter million Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, South Africans, West Indians, New Zealand Maoris, Black Canadians, and Pacific Islanders worked the docks, built roads and railways, maintained equipment, produced munitions, dug trenches, and even buried the dead. Only in recent years has the magnitude of their contribution to Allied victory begun to be more fully acknowledged. Yet the greatest impact of British labour policies in France might lie elsewhere entirely. Chinese workers seem likely to have carried the virus that caused the Great Flu pandemic of 1918-19, which may have killed more people around the world than the war itself.

On 16 March 1792, King Christian VII of Denmark, his own incompetent hand guided by that of the young Crown Prince Frederik (VI), signed decree banning both the importation of slaves into the Danish West Indies (now the United States Virgin Islands) and their export from the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast, in what is now Ghana. To soften the blow to the planters of the Danish West Indies and to secure the continued production of sugar, the law was not to take effect for ten years. In the meantime, imports of slaves, and of women especially, would actually encouraged by state loans and favourable tariffs, so as, it was hoped, render the slave population capable of reproducing itself naturally thereafter.

Something exceptional happened first in England and later in Northwestern Europe beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century. Institutions, state and the ability to achieve technological breakthroughs all need to be taken into account in any satisfactory explanation as to why and where the Industrial Revolution took place. This essay attempts to situate the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Until the 1780s, this century was a period of economic expansion for the Ottoman Empire but the empire was surely not in a position to achieve an Industrial Revolution of its own or even an extended period of technological change and productivity increases. The essay also argues that the explanation for this state of affairs should be searched not in any external intervention or impact but n i internal structures and dynamics. In short, social and economic forces for change remained weak while the Ottoman state was strong enough to defend a traditional order.

The problem that I have been dealing with over the last few years is how it might be possible to create a historical context for the study of South Indian religion. Like a number of other South Indian historians I have been concentrating on the rise and development of new states and chiefdoms during the late pre-colonial period — that is in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of European expansion in the sub-continent which preceded the consolidation of British imperial rule. My own work has focused on the role of shrines and holy places within these pre-colonial domains and chiefdoms.

In India under the English East India Company, it was said: “Necessity is the mother of invention and the father of the Eurasian”. This saying is based on the widespread belief that, during the first centuries of their presence in Asia, European men were to a large extent dependent on “non-white” women for their sexual contacts. The character of these early colonial settlements is therefore often described as non-European. Their population is characterised as a melting-pot of ethnic groups, dependent on the uneuropean institution of slavery. The cultural values this entailed were far from those of the mother countries, certainly not those of the (Calvinist) Netherlands.

In 1767, settlers on the western frontier of Georgia in North America sent a dire petition to their governor begging for protection. They claimed that local Creek Indians had stolen their horses and planned imminently to destroy their livestock and to kill their families. Before the governor could respond, the settlers crossed the Indian boundary to loot and burn a Creek village. In doing so they galvanized the imperial legal order into action – not against Creek horse thieves but against settler vigilantes on Creek land. At the urging of London officials, the governor of Georgia had the settlers arrested and charged, first with a felony, and when that failed, with ‘abuse and misdemeanour at common law against government’. However, Georgia's jurors refused to hold them accountable on either charge.

Much more globally entangled than many global historians used to think, the so-called Spice Wars were not only a story of European expansion and Southeast Asian interaction, but had an inextricable northern link leading all the way to China. From the capture of a Chinese junk serving the Spaniards in Ternate by Cornelis Matelief in 1607, to the completion of the first manuscript of the incense compendium (Xiangsheng) by Zhou Jiazhou in Jiangnan in 1618, and eventually to the proposal of the strange monopoly policy by Jan Pieterszoon Coen to the Heeren XVII (Gentlemen Seventeen) in the Dutch Republic in 1622, these seemingly irrelevant events are in fact the fragments of an untold global history of cloves which was not westward bound to the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and Europe, but northward linked with the East Asian world via the Manila route.

This article recounts the worldwide search for timber undertaken by the Navy Board, the administrative body under the authority of the Admiralty responsible for the supply of naval stores and the construction and repair of ships during the Napoleonic Wars. The closure of the Baltic by France and its European allies is considered the main factor in making British North America a timber colony. Yet the process through which the forests of the Laurentian Plateau and the North Appalachians came to fuel the dockyards of England and Scotland is taken for granted. To acquire this commodity, through merchants, diplomats, and commissioned agents, the power of the British state reached globally, reshaped ecological relationships, and integrated new landscapes to the Imperial economy. Many alternatives to the Baltic were indeed considered and tentatively exploited. Only a mixture of contingency, political factors, and environmental constraints forced the Board to contract in Lower Canada and New Brunswick rather than in areas such as the Western Cape, the Brazilian coast, or Bombay's hinterland.

On 4 June 2016, Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State University gave an all-day workshop on global history for graduate students and junior and senior scholars of the Universities of Dundee and St. Andrews in Scotland. The workshop consisted of three discussion sessions, each with a different theme, namely the conceptualization(s), parameters, and possible future(s) of global history. The central question was to what extent this fast-changing field required adjustments of “normal” historiographical methodologies and epistemologies. The workshop participants agreed that global history focuses in particular on connections across large spaces or long timespans, or both. Yet reconstructing these webs of connections should not obscure global inequalities. In the case of empires, many of the exchanges across space and time have been ordered in a hierarchical fashion—metropoles profiting from peripheral spaces, for example—and imposed by certain groups of people on others, resulting in, for example, the enslavement or extermination of indigenous peoples. As historians, we should also ask ourselves what we do about peoples or areas that were or remain unconnected, local, and remote. Where does globalization end?

Thanks largely to the work of Pierre van der Eng we now have quite a good picture of trends in growth of Indonesia's real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the twentieth century. There were two periods, each of around three decades when growth was positive in per capita terms. From 1900 to 1930, real GDP grew at 2.7 per cent per annum; if we assume that population grew over this period at around 1.2 per cent per annum, then annual growth in real per capita terms was 1.5 per cent per annum. This implies an increase over a thirty-year period in per capita GDP of around fifty-six per cent. Beginning in 1929, there was a sustained growth collapse which continued through the early 1930s; real per capita GDP in 1934 was only eighty-three per cent of the 1928 level in 1934 (Table 1). Some recovery occurred in the latter part of the 1930s, and by 1941 per capita GDP had returned to roughly the 1928 level. But the twenty-five years from 1941 to 1966 were characterised by foreign occupation, revolutionary struggle, and, after 1949, considerable macroeconomic instability culminating in hyper-inflation in the early and mid-1960s. In 1967, per capita GDP was estimated by Van der Eng to be only about seventy-five per cent of the 1928 figure.

French Colonial Minister Paul Coste-Floret presided over the interment of the remains of Adolphe-Sylvestre-Félix Eboué in the Pantheon of the Republic on 20 May 1949. This singular honour accorded only sixty others in the two centuries since the Great Revolution of 1789 placed Eboué among the greatest heroes and cultural luminaries of modern France. He now rests with Rousseau and Voltaire, the great men of letters Victor Hugo and Emile Zola and the political heroes of Republican France Jean Jaurès and Jean Moulin. Félix Eboué, however, is the only black Frenchman among these great thinkers, writers and leaders of the Republic. His inclusion among the heroes of France in 1949 was indeed in recognition of acts of great personal courage. It was also an expression of French hopes and fears for the future at a time when vast populations of colour under French rule in Africa, in Asia and in the Americas were asserting themselves politically and culturally on an unprecedented scale. In death, Eboué became the symbol of those in France who were most determined to preserve French hegemony over the seventy million souls spread over the globe who formed the French Empire. His life as a French national, a man of African ancestry and as the man whose actions in 1940 helped transform Charles de Gaulle from an obscure Brigadier General into one of the most important leaders of the Second World War made Eboué this symbol.

This article examines diverse practices in the establishment of marriage partnerships in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka,1 parts of which were controlled by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Family law was an area in which the attempt to transform local practices was conspicuously present, but not fully achieved. Lawful marriage was linked to conversion to Dutch Protestantism and to inheritance of property. In the authoritative space of the provincial board that heard the matrimonial disputes examined in this article, the Company did not proactively attempt to reform family life, an area where it could not easily dictate terms. It made a significant dent as the requirement for marriage registration was recognised by natives. But the limited reach of the introduced law is evident in the Company’s reluctant recognition that its two-step process of reading the banns and subsequent marriage ceremony created confusion and that locals still followed customary practices for forging unions. The VOC faced a normative order in the villages that was characterised by ritual underpinnings. Such local features went unrecognised in official law rules, but their perseverance is testimony to the pluralities in practice in an early colonial encounter in the Indian Ocean world.

In a collection of essays concerning the inevitably diverse vicissitudes of the representatives of that phenomenon collectively known as ‘the Company's servants,’ the inclusion of Nicolaas Witsen may come as a surprise. In our democratic age, he undoubtedly would have termed himself a ‘servant’ of the Dutch East India Company; in his own, more hierarchical times, he will have considered himself one of the Company's masters, as indeed he was. Whatever the powers of the Heren XVII may actually have been, Witsen for many years was one of the directors of the Amsterdam Chamber, the Company's most powerful division, and one of Amsterdam representatives to the bi-annual assembly which actually directed the Company's affairs at home, and tried to do so abroad, in its far-flung commercial empire, where other servants often held far greater, and less controlable power.

When judicial department officials at Bombay began to enforce the British East India Company’s (EIC) authority over the production and authentication of certain types of legal documents in the late 1830s, qāẓīs (Islamic judges) like Sayyid Aḥmad Ḥusain of Bharuch, objected to their loss of authority. In petitions sent to the Governor in Council from the edges of empire, these legal intermediaries objected to the Company’s interference with their livelihoods. Although the qazis’ complaints did not yield the desired results, by demonstrating the utility of their record-keeping abilities, qazis were able to retain discrete rights. The effects of these negotiations demonstrate the ways in which the intersections of expanding Company policies and local legal activity contributed to the growth of imperial power. Attending to the particularities of local legal practice, captured in the writings of these qazis, this article highlights the material mechanisms by which the EIC co-opted existing documentary cultures to extend state surveillance over local populations and challenges prevailing histories of legal translation and codification by focusing on the social ramifications of changing legal definitions at the moment such relations were first articulated in writing.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, remarkable developments in the realm of law were witnessed throughout the world. They expressed and paved the way for a new type of dispensation. For those parts of Asia and the Middle East with a substantial European presence, the legitimate rules, principles, and procedures for resolving disputes were progressively assimilated into systems of state-sanctioned legal pluralism. The process—at once gradual, charged, and punctuated—coincided with the initial consolidation of European imperial dominance and the emergence of Europe's modern global empires.

Though these changes in the realm of law date from the nineteenth century, the European presence there had long preceded them. This was perhaps most notable in maritime Asia. The Europeans in this region tended to cluster in their factories or in certain quarters of the towns and cities dotting the Indian Ocean rim. Notwithstanding differences between, say, a Mocha and an Aceh in size, location, and form of government, all these settlements had one quality in common: each was able to profit from the traffic conducted along the coast or across the high seas. As for the sovereign justice on offer, the dispensation that governed it in early modern times was far removed from its later analogue. This stemmed in large part from the rationale and basis for the European presence. In particular, Europeans could not dominate maritime Asia's provincial and imperial powers, especially those located inland, and the great majority of those arriving from western Europe intended to return as soon as possible; despite some involvement in racketeering and other forms of surplus extraction—famously in attempts to introduce and enforce a system of passports in maritime transport and travel—their interests were mainly commercial, oriented towards trade and shipping; the indigenous populations remained on the whole large and resilient; and many of the skills and techniques vested in livelihoods long associated with the region retained their primacy. As a result, the only realistic option for Europeans in maritime Asia was to reconcile themselves to the prevailing order. And this they did, with most of the region's fundamentals, not least in the realm of law, continuing to develop along what were essentially indigenous lines.

Reflecting broader trends in the study of colonial British America, historians have increasingly recognised the transatlantic nature of Protestant mission work. Both homeland and colonial participants shared a common worldview and goal when it came to the conversion of Native Americans. However, historians frequently present a bifurcated process: British-based mission boards and agencies provided funding and broad parameters, while colonial agents, ministers, and officials dictated the ways in which the missionaries themselves operated. In general, this is an accurate reflection of the reality of the Atlantic world, given the communication times and the normal inability of British sponsors to visit any work in progress. These limitations often led to a disconnect between goals laid out in Britain and practices on the ground in the colonies. An exception to this practice can be found in the early attempts of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) to establish a mission presence in New England.

Has Europe grown rich because it expanded overseas? According to recent scholarship the answer must be no. During the period between 1500 and 1750 Europe's economy did not provide its inhabitants with a per capita income that was significantly higher than that in other parts of the world. Europe – and only the Western part of it – started to become richer after the Industrial Revolution from 1750 onwards. This far most attempts at linking the expansion of Europe to the Industrial Revolution have failed.

This article contains a sweeping summary of Indonesia's macro-economic growth and development experience since 1880, largely on the basis of quantitative data from published research. It sets the scene for some of the other papers in this special issue. The paper identifies phases of economic expansion and contraction and some of the broad factors relevant to understanding the phasing of the development process that spans 120 years. Despite the halting progress in the country's development experience, the article underlines the continuity of economic change in Indonesia, beyond the years that demarcate the end of the colonial era. It also addresses the fact that in comparative terms Indonesia's growth experience during the twentieth century was remarkably fast.