From the early modern period onwards, European dynasties sought to expand their power in South and Southeast Asia, establishing localised institutions that incorporated both European models and precolonial Asian practices. Studies on local resistance to imposed bureaucratisation overlook how locals navigated the bureaucracy for societal or political change. In this special issue, historians of colonial India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia investigate how knowledge products of European bureaucracies provided unintended opportunities for local agents to navigate the imperial state, and moreover to alter said knowledge products or bureaucracies. The authors critically engage with the concept of the “looping effect,” coined by the late Canadian philosopher of science Ian Hacking, to describe a process where administrative practices led to social mobilisation in colonial contexts.

The Foreword to this special issue of Itinerario describes the historical questions that inspired the Global Sea Routes project, from which the essays in the issue derive. It then illustrates the particular sources used in the project, namely logbooks, specifically those of the English East India Company, whose characteristics and interpretation problems are briefly presented. Then, it illustrates the digital tools used in the analysis of those sources and to obtain the digital graphic and cartographic representation of the research results; and finally, it introduces each individual essay contained in the issue.

This paper considers the utilisation, appropriation, and renegotiation of colonial knowledge in the form of land and population registers by local litigants in eighteenth-century Dutch colonial Sri Lanka. Using a database compiled from thirty-three civil court cases held before the Landraad rural council of Colombo, I highlight how Lankan litigants frequently used the colonial thombo registers as evidence to have their property recognised. Moreover, I show that these registers were not just utilised but also altered through this process, particularly through the promotion of alternative knowledge in the form of local witness testimonies and ola palm leaf documents during court cases. I subsequently argue that we should reconsider how we view colonial knowledge. Rather than a static, top-down view from a foreign bureaucracy on a colonised society, this knowledge could be appropriated and even altered through the acts of local agents, in turn changing what was known by the colonial state and thus creating a “looping effect” of knowledge production.

Research into maritime history using digital tools is a growing field, with projects that in recent years have focused on the role of sea spaces in the dynamics of globalisation on an economic and juridical level as well as on a cultural level, with respect to the circulation of knowledge. In this introduction to our special issue, we offer some historiographical observations on the codification of knowledge in seafaring practice, emphasising how the use of digital tools to process and represent primary sources may encourage historians to formulate new questions about the relationship between European culture and the sea during the early modern age. In order to present the articles in this issue and the original contribution they make to the field, we also focus on the historical and cultural significance and methodological challenges posed by primary sources such as logbooks. We illustrate how the analysis of logbooks in a digital environment such as Global Sea Routes (GSR), a project conceived and coordinated by Guido Abbattista, can foster a better understanding of the role of routine navigations in early commercial globalisation.

This article explores three instances of the looping effect by studying colonial resistance in the Moluccas in 1817. It focuses on the relations between Dutch colonial officials and the sultan of Ternate in the North Moluccas, and between Dutch officials and the regents of Ambon in the Central Moluccas. The first instance of the looping effect revolves around how Ambonese regents, who adhered to Calvinism, used Christian principles to contest Dutch rule within the Moluccas. This became evident in 1817 when a revolt broke out against the reestablishment of Dutch rule within the Moluccas. The leaders of this revolt used religious precepts of Calvinism, previously introduced by the Dutch, to argue that the reestablishment of Dutch rule should be rejected. The article continues with a second instance of the looping effect, reconstructing how Ambonese rulers used instructions issued by the colonial state in 1818 to mitigate claims from the colonial government. Finally, a third instance of the looping effect can be perceived in how the sultan of Ternate used contracts, signed with the Dutch colonial state in 1817, to request Dutch military assistance against internal uprisings and thereby increased his authority throughout the region.

European navigation in the age of sail owes much to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the development of instruments and advanced mathematical techniques. Important though these developments were, it is argued here that close observation of the environment: of the weather, ocean currents, clouds, birds, mammals, and a host of other factors played a far more important role in safe navigation from one part of the globe to another.

This article examines the corruption scandal that exploded in 1889 with the apprehension of Arthur Crawford and the dismissal of several Mamlatdars in colonial western India. Using Ian Hacking's concept of “making up people” and the “looping effect,” this article demonstrates the instability of categories such as corruption and suggests that the everyday life of empire was undergirded by the colonial construction of deviancy to normalize the exceptionality of foreign rule. Additionally, the Crawford-Mamlatdar corruption scandal undercut the imperial ideology of the modernizing state. The corruption network revealed the simultaneity of imperial bureaucratic rationality along with the traditional patronage structures based on indigenous sexual and filial (caste) ties. It was precisely the British investigation that also revealed the reality of the homosocial empire and its privileging of caste recruitments. The Indian challenge to the case brought together rural and urban groups signalling the ascendance of a nationalistic solidarity. The Indians queried the imperial claims of moral superiority. At the same time, they acknowledged “native vulnerabilities” towards corruption, confirming the British stereotype of Indians as inherently corrupt. These selective claims, indicative of the emergence of upper caste, urban, and bourgeois notion of public virtue, signified the iterative nature of the “looping effect.”

This article traces Hacking's “looping effect” in colonial policies and practices of taxation, coerced labour, and governance in Indonesia. It argues that knowledge production for the purpose of taxation was a two-way, interactive process which was in particular influenced by complexes of local indigenous social organization, institutions, mentalities, and behaviour as expressed through adat (Indonesian systems of political-social norms and customary law). Such patterns and systems, the article reveals, were internalized into and started working reciprocally with colonial policy, knowledge production, and administrative practices. Taxation made up and changed people, but underlying strategies to categorize and “make known” subjects were also recognized and actively used, evaded, or influenced by these subjects and by local intermediaries. Consequently, colonial knowledge created an institutional framework that reoriented the self-perception of these subjects and intermediaries, which then changed and reconditioned popular responses to the colonial state. Systems of colonial knowledge were thus modified to eventually fit the realities they were supposed to describe, influence, and legitimize, creating a looping effect between colonial, “made up,” and actual social realities.

This essay aims to give an account of the untold and unexpected events faced by the crew of the Compton, one of the East India Company's vessels that set out on a routine trade voyage from Deptford to Bombay in April 1723. Under the command of Captain William Mawson, scrupulous compiler of the logbook, the ship proceeded along the known routes indicated by the East India Company (EIC) charts, and through the passages recommended by the navigation manuals. Finding consonance with recent research suggestions on “alternative histories” of the EIC, this article brings to light the narrative potentialities of the logbook, which is therefore considered not only a technical device, but also a tool for reconstructing the actual experience of navigation. This is the approach of the historical geodatabase of European global navigation Global Sea Routes (GSR), which bases its research method on ship's logs and other primary sources produced by the practitioners themselves. In order to provide a richer account of the known history of the EIC's shipping in the early modern age, this essay will analyse Mawson's logbook, highlighting its peculiarities as a container for a wealth of information useful for creating a narrative construction.

The role played by the East India Company in European expansion in early modern Asia is of such importance that it has generated a large body of scholarly literature. However, the logbooks of the East Indiamen, compiled by their captains, are largely overlooked as a primary source for the history of navigation, despite the wealth of information such firsthand, “from below” documents could provide about those voyages. As part of the Global Sea Routes (GSR) project, this essay analyses the voyage of the Nassau (1781–85) along four main themes: the peculiarities of navigation during the Age of Sail, when the duration of a voyage was difficult to predict and subject to a range of possible accidents; the concrete reality of life on board, oscillating between the various activities of the crew and the episodes of desertion and insubordination that broke its daily routine; her military deployment, as the Nassau was directly involved in operations related to the Second Anglo-Mysore War; and, finally, her commercial activities, from the port cities of India to the seas of China.

Drawing inspiration from Ian Hacking's claim that new modes of description generate new possibilities for action, this essay explores the impact of changes to the mode of description through the 1901 Census in Ceylon. It begins by exploring the modes of description used in the censuses prior to 1901 to demonstrate that in Ceylon, the census was yet to emerge as the critical tool of colonial governance claimed by dominant scholarship around colonial census taking. This leads to an exploration of how the changes that Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the first Ceylonese Census superintendent, made to the Census Ordinance, Census Manual, and Census Report impacted the function of the census as a mode of description. It then explores the possibilities for action generated by these changes in the mode of description, paying particular attention to the ways in which the census shaped elite, indigenous activism leading to the first major reforms of the colonial governance structure in Ceylon, including the introduction of limited franchise. Thus, Ceylon's 1901 Census affords a unique opportunity to examine the impact that shifts in modes of description have on possibilities for action.

Several studies have shown how a system of social classifications influenced the bureaucracy of British India when dealing with Indian society on a day-to-day basis. We know less, however, about how representatives of Indian society engaged such classifications and the information accompanying it to advance their own political agendas. This article examines how the classification of “minorities,” along with data connected to it, impacted discourse of Indian political actors in the early 1930s. The article presents a novel method to analyse first-person speech for themes and information content. It then applies the method to interventions by Indian delegates to the Sub-committee on Minorities of the India Round Table Conference, held in London, 1930–2. The article places the empirical investigation within a conceptual frame inspired by Ian Hacking's “looping effect.” Hacking attempts to capture how those classified negotiate imposed designations to advance agendas beneficial to themselves. The following study shows how Indian delegates engaged minority classification in a variety of ways in their political argumentation. The study also shows how information related to the minority classification was “looped” in speech by Indian actors to advance political claims and consolidate identities.

Crossing the North Atlantic was one of the world's most important oceanic voyages by the eighteenth century. By then, ships built and owned in the British North American colonies and, late in the period, the United States were crossing this dangerous and often-fickle ocean in large numbers. The surviving logbooks of such vessels can serve as unique source material for understanding the Atlantic experience for scholars prepared to interpret and exploit them. Recording the Atlantic passages of the small schooner Sultana, the snow George, and the brig Reward in the Global Sea Routes (GSR) database creates a record for future researchers with a broad array of interests, but only after the obstacles to interpretation are overcome, to the extent possible. I will discuss what those obstacles are, laying out the information to be found in these logs, how it is entered and why, and what it has to tell us about the Atlantic and those who used it at the time. I will make the case that what is contained in these sources justifies the acquisition of the technical and historical expertise necessary to use them.

Note: the snow rig was popular among mid-size ocean-going Atlantic merchant ships by the mid-eighteenth century. It is similar to the two-masted brig, as opposed to the three-masted ship, but it has a small “try-mast” just behind the main mast (the after mast), on which the mizzen sail was hoisted.

Over the past two decades, the relatively young field of global history has generated remarkable excitement among students, scholars, and readers who want to read scholarship that crosses borders and brings many worlds to a single methodological framework. Global perspectives have been particularly fruitful for telling political histories that have defined the modern world. Today, there is increasing scholarly interest in writing global intellectual histories of decolonisation and anti-colonialism. In the pages that follow, I consider new work, situated in several disciplines, that pushes the methodological boundaries of historical inquiry into our connected pasts. These works include Daniel Elam's World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth; Madhumita Lahiri's Imperfect Solidarities; Peace on Our Terms by Mona L. Siegel; and The Fury Archives by Juno Jill Richards.