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.

As was the norm with frontispiece illustration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the figures personifying the four continents on the title page to Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum were allegorical stand-ins, representing both a geographical place and its identifying features, symbolised by their appropriate accoutrements (fig. 1). They were not meant to serve as documentary evidence of diverse peoples, which partially explains why the personifications of the four continents are generalised and generic and adopt classicising ideals for body type and posture. In contrast, Willem and Joan Blaeu's map of Africa from 1655 includes ethnographic images as border decorations (fig. 2). These are more naturalistic and taken from contemporary travel accounts, suggesting the presence of factual information sources. Yet both the title page and the map share a visual language that signalled culturally-specific meaning to the viewer.

In response to increasing academic interest, Cambridge University Press launched a new journal in 2006, entitled the Journal of Global History. To inaugurate the endeavour, the editors asked economic historian Patrick O'Brien to write an introductory essay to serve as a prolegomenon for this newly invigorated field of study. O'Brien began by noting that it is no mere coincidence that interest in global history should be growing, given the global challenges entailed in current-day economic, political and environmental issues. From this perspective, we might take “global history” to refer both to the field's geographical reach and its attempts to relate a global range of seemingly diverse phenomena. Both understandings require us to stretch beyond the narrow specialisms in which we were trained and invite increasing willingness to collaborate. Along these lines, O'Brien applauded those historians who have reached outside their own discipline to draw on the insights and methods of the natural sciences, as well as natural scientists whose work is shedding new light on historical development.

In 1675, William Dampier set sail from Jamaica for the Bay of Campeche on Mexico's Yucatán coast to trade for logwood. Dampier, who would later become famous as a naturalist, a buccaneer, and one of the foremost chroniclers of the Golden Age of English buccaneering, recorded his experiences over the course of a year spent in English logwood communities near this Spanish settlement. The author's account gives a fascinating portrayal of a society beyond the margins of imperial control. In Laguna de Términos, an inlet just west of the town of Campeche (in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula), English sailors cut logwood, a popular dyestuff used in Europe for red, purple, and black clothing dyes and ink, that grew throughout the swampy tropical lowlands of the area. They traded their harvest with merchants who would ship it to ports as far away as Boston, London, and Amsterdam. Seeking an independent life separate from the arbitrary power of shipboard hierarchy, the loggers lived communally. They worked, hunted, and drank on their own schedule.

In 1879, the Danish Ministry of Domestic Affairs approved a proposal to construct a building in Copenhagen that was meant to function as a boarding house for Greenlanders while they were being educated in the metropole. The building, “Grønlænderhjemmet”, was used as a boarding house for Greenlanders in Denmark from 1880 until 1896, when the practice of sending Greenlandic men to Denmark for educational purposes came to a halt. While in use, “Grønlænderhjemmet” functioned as an instrument for the colonial administration, and the boarding house embodied a central aspect of the colonial administration's strategy for civilising Greenlanders: to control the civilising process in order to ensure that Greenlanders did not loose their connection with their Inuit background.

Historians of science and technology—with much assistance from the work of world historians, environmental historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists—have begun to develop some promising scholarly apparatus for decentring European science in world history. But we are still a long way away from developing a comprehensive, accessible frame in which European science is simply one (albeit very successful) way of conceptualising the natural world.

In the years after its foundation in 1814, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands witnessed the emergence of several new sites where natural history—the study of naming, describing and classifying plants, animals and minerals—was carried out. These new sites, such as the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (National Museum for Natural History), founded in 1820, the Rijksherbarium (National Herbarium) and the colonial site Nederlands-Indië (Netherlands Indies) had not existed in that form and in that combination before. The Rijksmuseum and the Rijksherbarium, established in Brussels in 1829, were the first national and fully state-funded natural historical institutions in the Dutch kingdom. In the course of the nineteenth century, both institutions rapidly developed into well-known centres for natural historical research in Europe. Significant parts of their collections derived from the Malay Archipelago, a region the Dutch kingdom regained from the British for strategic reasons in 1814. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Malay Archipelago, which had remained a terra incognita to European naturalists and colonial administrators, witnessed an unprecedented run on its natural wealth—initiated and propelled by both the emerging Dutch colonial state and the natural historical institutions in the Netherlands.

The European overseas enterprises that began to push into Asian waters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were maritime organisations geared towards commerce and seaborne warfare. As such, they looked very different from the powerful territorial states like Mughal India that traditionally dominated early modern Asia, and they were able to create a new kind of empire consisting of a network of fortified ports and trading centres connected by long sea routes. The construction of these empires was initially driven and subsequently sustained by maritime technology. To borrow Carlo Cipolla's words, guns, sails, and empire were always bound tightly together in this period. European vessels held a significant advantage over local shipping; neither the wealthiest groups of merchants nor the most formidable Asian states were in a position to field maritime forces that could challenge them on the open ocean. In virtually every encounter at sea, ships from Europe were able to inflict overwhelming defeats on the fleets assembled to oppose them. Since it represented their most significant advantage, Europeans made frequent use of maritime violence: against competing merchant groups (in order to disrupt commercial networks and to gain a dominant position), and against Asian states (to pry open port cities and improve trading conditions). This article explores the role played by maritime violence in the relationship between European overseas enterprises and two powerful territorial states, Mughal India (1526-1757) and Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), in the first half of the seventeenth century.

The plural and particularised expressions of colonialism remain a central concern for post-colonial studies. This paper will discuss the role of the Norwegian Lutheran mission in colonial Madagascar in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The case of a Protestant mission from a small European country operating in a French colony provides an interesting opportunity to explore the implications of inter-European dynamics in colonial politics and the role of religion in the relationships between missionaries, colonial subjects, and colonial powers.

The main square of Mexico City, known as the Zocalo, occupies a central place in the make-up of the city, the nation, and even the national identity of Mexico. As we all know, the conquistadors built Mexico City on the site of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire. Indeed, the ruins of the Great Temple of the old city lie hidden under the square itself. This essay deals with the moment when the native past began to emerge from beneath the plaza, when a viceroy had the ground paved, and undertook a series of public works to solve the problems of drainage and water channelling which had existed throughout the history of the city. In his effort to modernise, the viceroy brought his contemporaries face to face with a long-buried past. For amidst the construction work two great archaeological pieces were discovered in 1790. These findings were subsequently studied by the multi-talented Creole, Antonio León y Gama, one of the most steadfast representatives of the Enlightenment in New Spain. By examining elements of Leon y Gama's work, I want to do a bit of historical excavation myself and reveal the existence of what we might describe, following Mary Louise Pratt, as a contact zone—one in which contemporary tools for investigatively ordering time and space were brought to bear on natural and cultural phenomena alike, in order to situate Mexico and its cultural heritage historically as well as geographically.

As the decolonisation process began after World War II, new ties developed between independent countries, international organisations and donors of development aid. While the former colonial powers were prominent providers of aid to their former colonies, Sweden and Norway took pride in their lack of a colonial past, and considered themselves to be particularly suitable aid donors for this very reason. Norway established its first aid project in 1952; but despite this relatively early beginning, aid transfers remained low through the 1960s. Since the 1970s, however, both Sweden and Norway have been among the most generous aid donors. The countries have been comparatively active in the development policy area, both bilaterally and on an international level, encouraging international co-operation and co-ordination.

In late 1874, the Colonial Government of the Gold Coast passed an abolition measure which was designed to end slavery, all other forms of compulsory labour, and slave trading in the colony. The measure took the form of two laws: the Gold Coast Slave-Dealing Abolition Ordinance (1874) and the Gold Coast Emancipation Ordinance (1874). The Gold Coast Legislative Council passed the laws on 17 December 1874 and they received the assent of the Governor on 28 December. On 30 December 1874, the measure was proclaimed. The first of the ordinances absolutely and immediately outlawed the importation of slaves into the Gold Coast, and abolished slave dealing and pawning. The other ordinance provided for the emancipation of slaves by abolishing the legal status of slavery and empowering slaves to leave their owners at will.

Karl Gützlaff set up the Chinese Union in 1844, which was a missionary society based on the principle that China's millions could never be converted to Christianity by foreign missionaries: Chinese Christians themselves must carry out the evangelisation of the empire while Western missionaries would serve as instructors and supervisors. Ever since the founding of the Chinese Union, the effectiveness of this evangelistic methodology has given rise to heated debates among contemporary missionaries and subsequent generations of Christian mission historians. Both Jessie G. Lutz and Wu Yixiong discussed the employment of this evangelistic methodology from the perspective of foreign missionaries, such as Gützlaff's evangelistic thought, the founding and development of the Chinese Union, and its crisis. By making use of more substantial mission archives, Jessie G. Lutz's research is more detailed; she even included Gützlaff's European tour from 1849 to 1850. It was Gützlaff's absence from Hong Kong that gave the other missionaries, such as Theodor Hamberg (1819-54) of the Basel Mission, Gützlaff's co-worker, the opportunity to investigate the function of the Chinese Union, and which eventually caused the dissolution of the Chinese Union during 1852 to 1853. How Gützlaff came to the idea of utilising native agency to evangelise the Chinese and how he managed to maintain his enterprise are quite clear. Although it did not come to a respectable result in his time, this idea of “self-propagation” was inherited by the missionaries who were sent to China by the other missions. Yet how did the Chinese evangelists carry out the evangelistic work independent from the missionaries? This is a question Jessie G. Lutz focused on for years.