When we intone the words ‘Unity in Diversity’, we know we are faced with a problem. At best these words express an aspiration rather than a reality — otherwise it would hardly be worthwhile to utter them. But most of all they seem to be an incantation meant to exorcize the threat of both disruptive diversity and oppressive unity. It is, in other words, a mantra that owes its expressiveness to the neatly concise formulation of an unresolved paradox. It is concerned with the cosmogonic conundrum of the One-and-the-Many that has exercised the mythopoeic imagination of the Vedic seers and their likes as well as the rational mind of present-day physicists. Our mantra, then, evokes the riddle of the cosmic order which must encompass its opposite, disorder, so as to be truly universal. It is not surprising, therefore, that we should encounter the same paradox on the more mundane level of the political order. The manyfold diversities undermine the integrity of the whole. Unity, in its turn, threatens to extinguish diversity and to replace it with deadening sameness. Between them, unity and diversity provide for an unpredictable dynamic, and it is a fitting tribute to the dangers involved that our mantra has been enshrined in its Indonesian form in the Republic's armorial motto: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.

The Portuguese Empire was the stage for one of the largest movements of enslaved people during early modern times. Almost two millions enslaved humans were violently carried from Africa in Portuguese vessels in the eighteenth century alone. Yet, in contrast to British or French slave traders based in Europe, for which a vast literature is available, little is known about the Lisbon traders. This paper aims at filling this gap by paying attention to the trajectory of two Lisbon slave traders: Domingos Dias da Silva and José António Pereira. In recounting their biographies and their business in Africa, Brazil, and Asia, we draw attention to the active role Lisbon-based slave traders played in the financing, organisation, and carrying of slave traffic, as well as the different institutional conditions they confronted when profiting from the commerce in humans. Domingos Dias da Silva became a key state contractor in spite of his poor origins, while Pereira featured as a global broker, connecting different markets in four continents. These two agents and their diverse characteristics help shed light on the slave trade, the context in which it expanded, and on the people who conducted this infamous commerce.

Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black meet Natalie Zemon Davis outside the University Library in Leiden for lunch and an interview. Although Davis is eager to study a Sranan-German dictionary she retrieved from the library, the three of them sit down for an engaging conversation on the historian’s craft, its societal relevance and the future of early modern studies.

Let us begin with a drawing, depicting the river mouth of Batavia. We see a lively scene. Europeans and Asians are fishing, peddling, rowing, riding, walking, and sitting along the waterway. A small prauw on the left appears to be manned by Javanese and Chinese. Behind the Waterkasteel, on the right, large numbers of oceangoing vessels are anchored before Batavia. In the middle of the drawing, we see three men on the path along the waterway, the “jaagpad,” pulling a flat cargo boat. The clothing indicates that these are “Moor” sailors. On the boat, we see three other sailors with turbans.

This scene, drawn by Johannes Rach in 1764, places the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in its Asian context. In previous decades, increasing attention has been paid to the structure of the “Asian” or overseas organisation of the VOC. Even more so, research has shown the importance of the Company's participation in the intra-Asian trade. From 1500 onwards, European trading companies not only became important in intercontinental European–Asian trade, but they came to dominate maritime trade within Asia as well. The VOC was one of the largest merchants active in intra-Asian shipping for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the VOC, however, it was not only its presence overseas that built the link between the Company and its Asian context. The VOC and its Asian context became intrinsically interwoven. Leonard Blussé, for example, emphasises the character of Batavia, the headquarters of the VOC in Asia, as a “Chinese colonial town.”

Through its focus on the question of circulation, world history attained a central position amongst the historical configurations in the last decade. Indicative of our fundamentally changing world, the past thereby reveals itself to have been shaped by commercial, human and intellectual flows of global dimension. The history of science has been particularly receptive to such methodological developments, especially with regard to works influenced by a markedly social approach to science and knowledge, which has focused for some time on the analysis of intellectual networks. From the French provincial Enlightenment to Athansius Kircher's circles—including the relationships of patronage of mathematicians and court philosophers—social, intellectual and epistemological configurations have been designed, allowing us to consider different scales in the circulation of knowledge.

Certain European notions of the nature of the Asian economies — especially the peddling character of Asian trade and its contrast with the rational capitalist business organization which was supposed to be a purely European enclave superimposed by conquest on the peddling, precapitalist basis of Asian production and exchange — were formulated most clearly of all by Dutch sociologists and economists from their experience of Netherlands India of the nineteenth century and of the Eastern Archipelago in the age of Portuguese and Dutch voyages. They were not unaware of the existence of Chinese and Indian business groups in Southeast Asia with some of the features of early modern capitalism, but these were regarded as the bastard offspring of developed European capitalism. Such immigrant Asian groups were supposed to have sprung from the need of the Europeans for intermediaries to deal with the economically innocent natives and were thought to be completely dependent on servicing the European enclave with no autonomous business concerns of their own. This essay focusses on the Chinese financiers and Chetti bankers operating long distance credit networks in the Southern Ocean (Nanyang) before and after the opening of the Suez Canal (1869). The aim is to show that these immigrant business groups derived from a sophisticated financial and mercantile background in their home countries and that they conducted autonomous operations in the Eastern Archipelago with their own capital and business techniques: a large volume of such operations were conducted within a purely inter-Asian framework quite apart from the colonial trade with Europe, and in their dealings with the Dutch and the English banks and corporations, these towkays and nagarathars showed a strength and resilience which made ‘dependence’ and ‘collaboration’ a mutual process.

On 20 February 1637/38, the Virginia House of Burgesses, ‘called by his Majesty's appointment’, convened to consider five ‘Propositions’ offered by Charles 1 for the reformation of their colony's tobacco trade. An investigation into the career and context of this ‘Assembly’ better informs us of the character of that monarch's government and, correspondingly, on English ‘state formation’ and empire in the first half of the seventeenth century. We learn that, as in its three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the Crown and its officers experienced little joy in their efforts to clear the lines of authority connecting Whitehall with the rest of the king's domains.

In July 1796, Johannes Albertyn, a well-respected burgher of Stellenbosch, requested permission from Ryno van der Riet, landdrost of Stellenbosch, the chief administrative and legal officer of the district, to indenture four Khoikhoi children. He claimed that their mother, Catryn Paerl, had died recently and that before her demise, she had requested him in the presence of witnesses to raise her children and deny their biological father Jan Paerl any future role in their lives. Faced with the prospect of losing custody of his four children and having exhausted all possible avenues in seeking legal redress, including a visit to landdrost Van der Riet, the seemingly incomparable Jan Paerl hit the road and walked several kilometres from Stellenbosch to Cape Town. His destination: the Castle, in particular the office of the fiscal, otherwise known as the public prosecutor. In Cape Town, he urged the fiscal to intervene in the dispute and deny Albertyn the right to indenture his children. As their father, Paerl insisted that he, and not Albertyn, be granted sole custody of his offspring. By Paerl's demanding legal intervention at the highest level, the following encounter between Paerl, Albertyn and the Cape authorities exemplifies not only a classic struggle between master and servant, but highlights simultaneously the significance of ‘equality’ before the law in Cape society, at a time when burghers increasingly feared the possibility of gelykstelling at the end of the eighteenth century.

In order to understand the value of any theory, one has to know its origins and background. This is especially true of the various dependency theories, which have always been more than just ‘theories of theorists for theorists’. Dependency theories can only be understood against the background of Latin American politics in the 1960s. Taking this into account, there was an obvious connection between the Cuban Revolution on the one hand, and the unfulfilled expectations of development caused by the failure of modernisation efforts, on the other. The basic idea behind dependency theories is the explanation of the historically unequal relations between Latin America and the North Atlantic economies (Europe and the United States). Dependency theories are essentially attempts to justify government policies to acquire control of national development.

In July 1752, two days after their arrival at a roadstead in Saint Augustine's Bay on the south-western coast of Madagascar, ‘theGreat Island’, two junior merchants of the Dutch East India Company ship Schuylenburch headed for the residence of king Ratsimandresy (Ramanrasse in the Dutch sources). They were Philip Boomgaard and Dirk Westerhoff, responsible for commercial affairs and on a trade mission for the Company. On the way to the king's residence, about two miles inland from ‘Toulier’ (Toliara), they were welcomed by Ramanrasse's son, ‘crovmprince Revenoe’, and they offered him a few gifts they had brought along. However, upon taking a closer look at the presents Revenoe disdainfully threw astring of beads on the ground replying ‘that the Dutch were nothing more than traffickers, and that he expected them upon their arrival to present him with proper gifts just like the British and French traders that frequented his father's court were accustomed to do’.

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.

‘One does not write history with value judgements.’ Van Leur made this remark, countering the ‘Dutch refrain’ sung by Godée Molsbergen, which indicted the corruption of the VOC-servants as a cause of the Company's downfall. Van Leur explained that the standard for a modern officialdom was only created with the Napoleonic state and ‘it was therefore anachronistic to apply this standard to the 18th century’. Criticism of the integrity of the Company servants in this century is a post facto criticism. But if history cannot be written with value judgements, it cannot do without any judgements at all. Van Leur judged ‘the achievements of a Hartingh, a Von Hohendorff, a Mossel, a Van der Parra, and, on the Indonesian side, of a Mangkubumi, a Mas Sahid, a Cakraningrat certainly on par with those of Speelman, a Van Goens, and a Aru Palakka’.

As we pass the Quincentennial of the founding of the Spanish empire we stand within two years of marking the centennial of its demise in Asia and the New World in 1998. In recent years, much research has focused on the changes wrought on indigenous populations at the time of initial contact, but little consideration has been given to the material legacy of this empire. This study will examine the material aspects of two Spanish colonies, the Philippines and Puerto Rico at the end of nearly four centuries of Spanish colonization. Archaeological evidence from the two colonies is compared and contextualised within the economic order of the nineteenth century in order to better evaluate the nature of the physical manifestation of late Spanish colonialism.

In an essay of extraordinary range and depth, which it is difficult to summarise without distortion, Jacob van Leur is above all making an appeal for the autonomy of Asian history in relation to that of Europe. He was reviewing volume IV by Godée Molsbergen of Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië, which dealt with the eighteenth century. To Molsbergen the activities of the V.O.C. in Asia in the eighteenth century had characteristics distinct from those of the seventeenth-century Company or from what was to follow in Indonesia in the nineteenth century. These characteristics essentially reflected those of the Netherlands during the eighteenth century. Assuming that eighteenth-century European history has unifying characteristics (an assumption that he was inclined to question), Van Leur asked: ‘Is it possible to write the history of Indonesia in the eighteenth century as the history of the Company?’ His answer was a resounding ‘no’. In giving his answer he widened the issue from Indonesia to Asia as a whole. ‘A general view of the whole can only lead to the conclusion that any talk of a European Asia in the eighteenth century is out of the question, that a few European centres of power had been consolidated on a very limited scale, that in general – and here the emphasis should lie – the oriental lands continued to form active factors in the course of events as valid entities, militarily, economically and politically.’ He concluded that diere was an ‘unbroken unity’ of Asian history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Until well into the nineteenth century Europe and Asia were ‘two equal civilisations developing separately of each other’.

This article reconstructs the voyage of the Swimming Lion to the Caribbean in 1595 and the court battle to which it gave rise. The Master mariner Gillis Dorenhoven was accused of piracy by Pedro d'Arana, contador of Havana, who sued his employers before the Middelburg Admiralty Court in 1609–1610. Johan Boreel, the eldest son of one of the defendants, sought expert advice from his friend Hugo Grotius. The author of Mare Liberum, published in April 1609, became involved in the case at various levels. Pressure was put on the States General to revise their instructions for the Admiralty Court. Grotius also tried to convince the Admiralty judges that freedom of trade and navigation was a fundamental right of Dutch merchants in the West Indies and that Dorenhoven's actions should be seen in this light. For political reasons, he could not refer to the Americas in Mare Liberum. Yet the case of the Swimming Lion reveals just how expansive his notion of freedom of trade and navigation really was.

During his first term in the White House, President Ulysses Grant attempted to annex the Dominican Republic to the United States. Support for the proposed treaty came from both countries. The United States pressed the annexation plans motivated by the prospects of acquiring hegemony in the Caribbean, by the likelihood of increasing its commercial avenues, by the possibility of establishing a black state, by opportunistic entrepreneurs, and by the idea of the Manifest Destiny Doctrine intermingled with the Monroe Doctrine. On the other hand, the Dominican government supported annexation with the intention of annihilating a rebellion backed by the Haitian government, and by the desire to satisfy personal financial interest among the government elite. Moreover, the typical colonial structure of the country assisted the government's efforts toward annexation.

After some decades of historical debate about the early modern Atlantic, it has become a truism that the Atlantic may better be understood as a world of connections rather than as a collection of isolated national sub-empires. Likewise, it is commonly accepted that the study of this interconnected Atlantic world should be interdisciplinary, going beyond traditional economic and political history to include the study of the circulation of people and cultures. This view was espoused and expanded upon in the issue of Itinerario on the nature of Atlantic history published thirteen years ago—the same issue in which Pieter Emmer and Wim Klooster famously asserted that there was no Dutch Atlantic empire. Since this controversial article appeared, there has been a resurgence of interest among scholars about the role of the Dutch in the Atlantic. With Atlantic history continuing to occupy a prominent place in Anglo-American university history departments, it seems high time to appraise the output of this resurgence of interest with an historiographical essay reviewing the major works and trends in the study of the Dutch in the Atlantic.

British private investors were not inclined to view the leaders of newly independent Indonesia with much confidence. In 1949, when the transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands to the Republic of Indonesia was imminent, the chairman of the United Serdang (Sumatra) Rubber Plantations disclosed the following opinion to the firm's shareholders at a gathering in London's Great Tower Street: “The Republican leaders are mainly ambitious men, whose records are well known, striving for personal aggrandizement. The measure of their interest in the welfare of the country is to be gauged by their policy of wanton destruction of life and physical assets, such as estate factories and ancillary buildings, which are essential for the restoration of the economy of the country once the political problem has been settled.” This article is about how a British enterprise dealt with the significant uncertainties prevailing in the business environment of Indonesia during the early independence period, in particular the 1950s.

The economic situation in newly independent Indonesia was a peculiar one. As a major exporter of primary products in high demand such as oil and rubber, prospects were generally bright for the Indonesian economy during and after the Korean War. Just as under colonialism, a modern, large-scale sector accounting for almost 25 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product) was still dominated by Dutch firms and British and American multinationals. Eight large Dutch trading companies handled 60 per cent of consumer goods imports. Nevertheless, the business climate had changed dramatically for foreign firms operating in Indonesia. The 1950s saw a gradual shift away from moderate policy-makers towards an increasingly vocal economic nationalism. The former were acutely aware of the country's dependence on foreign capital and know-how, whereas the latter relentlessly pushed for full decolonisation, that is not only in political but in economic terms. Nationalist sentiments gained the upper hand during the first cabinet of Ali Sastroamidjojo (July 1953–July 1955), culminating with the takeover of virtually all remaining Dutch-owned enterprises in Indonesia from December 1957 onwards, eventually followed by formal nationalisation in 1959. Although economic nationalism in the 1950s primarily targeted Dutch enterprises, British foreign firms were affected as well. At a later stage, in the context of the Indonesian military confrontation with Malaysia (1963–6), they were also seized, albeit not nationalised.