Virtually every account of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire identifies ‘Europe’ with Christian civilisation, echoing, consciously or otherwise, the universalist claims of the Byzantine emperors, the popes and the western Roman emperors. Yet it is also the case that Islam possessed a European presence from the eighth century onwards, first of all in Spain and the Mediterranean islands, and later, from the mid-fourteenth century, in the Balkans, where the Turks were able rapidly to establish an empire which directly threatened Hungary and Austria. The lands ruled by Islam on the European land mass have tended to be treated by historians as European only in geographical identity, but in human terms part of a victorious and alien ‘oriental’ civilisation, of which they were provincial dependencies, and from which medieval Spanish Christians or modern Greeks and Slavs had to liberate themselves. Yet this view is fallacious for several reasons. In the first place, there is a valid question about our use of the term ‘civilisation’, which Fred Halliday has expressed as follows:

‘Civilisations’ are like nations, traditions, communities – terms that claim a reality and authority which is itself open to question, and appeal to a tradition that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a contemporary creation.

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.

Japan is a land where the lemons bloom. The earth yields three crops a year, and all sorts of animals, birds, and fish abound in this charming country. Water is plentiful – rivers, brooks, springs and hot springs – and there is a well in the large, fruitful, and beautiful garden attached to every house. The houses, made with excellent workmanship of wood, are built close to the ground on account of the windy climate. Their floors are remarkably clean, as they are covered with straw mats on which no shod foot is permitted to tread. There are no locks or bars on the doors.

It is common wisdom among the historians of the Dutch East Indies that everyone in the Dutch East India Company engaged in private trade. That is, ‘everyone’ traded in goods supposedly monopolized by the Company and ‘everyone’ abused his or her position to squeeze graft from the Company's trade. It was, supposedly, to get their hands on the private trade and graft that people joined the Dutch East India Company (VOC: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) in the first place. But back in the Netherlands the VOC's Board of Directors (the Heeren XVII) objected vociferously to private trade, which drained Company profits and shareholder revenue. To appease the Heeren XVII back at home, the various Governors-General and Councillors of the Indies (Raad van Indië), who represented the Heeren XVII in Asia, issued annual placards forbidding private trade while the High Court (Raad van Justitie) carried out infrequent desultory trials for private trade. But these prosecutions were inevitably doomed to failure, so the story goes, because everyone engaged in private trade would ‘cover’ for everyone else.

When I was invited to participate in the conference marking the twentieth anniversary of Leiden's Centre for Overseas Expansion and to contribute to the conference's retrospection of recent scholarship on the history of overseas expansion, I happily agreed. And I agreed specifically to contribute a paper on what was rather casually, I think, called ‘The Atlantic in the Ancien Régime’. Since I had been working, one way and another, in that area for a long time, I expected no difficulty in writing up a reasonable paper. But the more I thought about the subject, and the more I reviewed what had been done in recent studies of ‘the Atlantic in the Ancien Régime’ the more mysterious and interesting the question became and the more strongly I was led back to earlier antecedents in the literature. I had a growing feeling that something strange had happened, something that, oddly enough, I had myself been involved in without knowing it, something that I was in fact attempting to formulate in connection with an international seminar on Atlantic history that I will be directing over the next few years.

In 1899 C.T. van Deventer, a progressive Liberal from the Netherlands East Indies, published an article in the Dutch review De Gids titled ‘Een Eereschuld’ (‘A Debt of Honour’). The Dutch word schuld, however, has two different translations in English: debt and guilt. Van Deventer meant both. Half a century earlier, under the notorious Cultivation System, the Dutch government had extracted hundreds of millions of guilders from Java, amounting to nearly a quarter of all government revenue around the middle of the nineteenth century. According to Van Deventer, this transfer had to a large extent been illegal. Therefore, he argued, the Dutch were largely responsible for the ‘diminishing welfare’ among the Javanese at the turn of the century. They should return the illegally acquired millions and spend them on the material and immaterial welfare of the Javanese.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature of Dutch colonial policy at the turn of the twentieth century in what was then the Netherlands East Indies.’ Referred to in the historiography of this period as ‘the ethical policy’, it is usually characterized as a welfare or developmentalist government. More recent comparisons have drawn attention to similarities between twentieth-century colony policy and the New Order Indonesian policy with a focus on economic growth and the lack of individual ‘development’. ‘Ethical policy’ is not usually a term applied to the politics of other imperialist powers, which begs the question that somehow Dutch colonialism was different. Recent comparative research by M. Kuitenbrouwer, A. Stoler and J. Breman has questioned this assumption.

Au lendemain de la deuxième guerre mondiale, personne n'était en France prêt à envisager une perspective d'indépendance: ni l'opinion publique, ni les partis (pas même le parti communiste), ni le gouvernement. C'est une différence majeure d'avec la Grande-Bretagne: celle-ci avait été de longue date préparée à organiser l'indépendance de ses colonies – à la différence de la France vis-à-vis de l'Algérie. Depuis un demi-siècle elle négociait celle de l'Inde qui aboutit en 1947.

In June 1760 Nicolaas Heinsius, Dutch factor in service of the West India Company (WIC) on the Gold Coast, and commander of fortress Batenstein at Butri, took the law into his own hands. He pawned three slaves owned by the black woman Paraba, because she had, in name of her abusua (matrilineal descent group) appropriated the inheritance of his deceased African concubine and, what is more, she had told Heinsius that she intended to take care of the raising of his Euro-African son. In a letter to his superiors, who resided at Elmina castle, he accounted for his action. Heinsius explained that he acted not for himself but in his little son's interests, the latter being, so he thought, according to indigenous law, the sole heir to his mother's legacy. The reaction he received from the president and the council at Elmina contained a sharp reprimand. The WIC-authorities designated his claim on the inheritance as unlawful and contrary to customary law, and ordered him to immediately return the slaves.