After spending two and a half months in the city-jungle of Johannesburg, I was finally able to go to Cape Town. The Cape Archives was one of the most important places for my research into the urban labour and race relations and the history of the Trade Union Movement in the Western Cape.

“Goa has never been other than fundamentally Indian …” J.M. Richards, 1982.

“The posteritie of the Portingales, both men and women being in the third degree, doe seeme to be naturall Indians, both in colour and fashion.” J.H. van Linschoten, c. 1590.

“Rich on trade and loot, Goa in the halcyon days of the sixteenth century was a handsome city of great houses and fine churches… In the eyes of stern moralists the city was another Babylon, but to men of the world it was a paradise where, with beautiful Eurasian girls readily available, life was a ceaseless round of amorous assignments and sexual delights”. G.V. Scammell, 1981.

In his article “Research on the 17th century Mission in China and the Chinese Reaction”, Prof. Eric Zürcher referred to Chinese documents owned by the Sinological Institute of Leiden University, including “some very interesting texts that show us “late Ming Christianity in action”, such as devotional texts, stories about miraculous happenings”; (p. 113 b). One of these was the Lixiu yijian, A Mirror to Encourage (self-)Improvement. In this paper, I intend to analyse this document in order to show the interaction between mission Catholicism and Chinese popular religion, to demonstrate one facet of the meeting of East and West.

In the production of tropical export crops, the factor labour has always overshadowed the two other factors, land and capital. In the days prior to the mechanisation of agriculture, that is to say, far into the second half of the 19th century, the factor capital almost coincided with labour. “Des bras, des bras, toujours des bras” as the saying went among the planters of the Mascareignes. However, it would be wrong to suggest that before the industrial revolution the relative importance of labour only manifested itself in the production of tropical export crops. There is a revered tradition in economic theory which considers labour to be the only source of wealth. Thus, Karl Marx proposed that the value produced by a labourer above the maintenance level should be designated as surplus value. For him, the control of this surplus lay at the basis of each “mode of production” (his term for a stage of development). Each mode of production was characterised by a specific set of social relations between the labourer, the ruling class that appropriates the surplus value, and the means of production. Labour and the labour process therefore were in his eyes a social phenomenon. One might add they are inherent to the tissue of authorities that constituate any social order.

When the Belgian Government was setting up the Archives Générales du Royaume, those papers held by three departments escaped centralisation, because they had already set up their own archival sections. These were the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defence and the Colonies. In the meantime the Ministry of Colonies has gone out of business, so that the papers it held came under the control of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For a long time, the archives were kept in the magnificent eighteenth century building of the old Ministry of Colonies, 7 Place Royale. This was most convenient for researchers, since that building also contains the library of the Ministry, now renamed the Bibliothèque Africaine and kept well up to date, and the Centre d'Étude et de Documentation Africaine (CEDAF). Unfortunately, about a year ago, in the interests of bureaucratic tidyness the Archives Africaines, as they are now known, were moved into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2 Rue Quatre Bras. There they share a small but comfortable and quiet reading room with the archives of the host ministry itself. Facilities for photocopying and microfilming are available.

After several attempts and failures, the Asociación Española de Americanistas was, at last, formally established in 1983. The association is now in the process of being affiliated to the European Council of Social Research on Latin America. In this way, Spain's americanistas are trying -with not much success, I would say - to organize themselves as a professional body, and also to create an institutional frame for coordination of their research, publications, library resources and representation of their common interests. There is no hope of the Asociación ever reaching the effectiveness of, for instance, the German Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutsche Latinamerika–Forschung in the early 1970s, but at least we start to think - if not to move - in the right direction, namely, of solidarity and cooperation on a national scale.

This article offers a preliminary outline of a theoretical concept to cover the precolonial phase of European overseas expansion. It considers the particular case of the Indian Ocean, which provides an exceptionally clear illustration of the need to link research into the expansion with the history of, and changes taking place within, the societies affected by it. What is necessary is to demonstrate the simultaneity and interaction of the region's social organi-sation with European Expansion. For this purpose I have used what may be called a systems approach.

The publishers “blurb” on the back cover informs us that Oral Historiography is a “major re-evaluation of the collection and interpretation of historical data.” This, it certainly is not. Rather, it is a concise re-statement of what can be found scattered elsewhere, much of the best of it in Professor Henige's own previous work and in History in Africa, the premier English language journal of historical fieldwork which Professor Henige edits. Characteristically Henige himself makes far more modest claims for the volume asking that “this should be regarded simply as an effort to draw together a few of the many strands relating to the prospects of oral historical research and the problems associated with carrying it out successfully.”

The wars in which Spain was involved in the nineteenth century were those of a declining, not an expanding imperialism. They were not frontier wars, nor wars of conquest but rather wars of national liberation, comparable to the War of American Independence, the Haitian Revolution or the wars of Latin American Emancipation at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In 1980–81 the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (N.J.) selected as its special research topic “The Comparative Study of Colonialism”. On the invitation of Professors Albert Hirschman and Clifford Geertz a number of scholars from various countries came together representing the disciplines of anthropology, economy, political science and history. Although each scholar was of course mainly occupied with his or her own research, a number of seminars and discussions were also organised where different ideas and approaches were exchanged. One of the conclusions was that further elaboration of this subject was not only interesting historically but was also relevant to the present day situation. Another conclusion was that especially the comparative study of India and Indonesia would be a most promising possibility within this field. The reasons for selecting this particular topic were both political and scientific. India and Indonesia are two of the most important countries in Asia, both politically and economically; they used to be the two most important colonies in Asia. The colonial impact was of long duration in both countries and both experienced the transformation from commercial capitalist exploitation to full colonialism. Even in pre-colonial times the histories of these two nations are in many ways comparable,

As a result of these considerations Prof. Dharma Kumar (Delhi School of Economics) and Prof. H.L. Wesseling (Leiden University) decided to study the feasibility of a long term research project on the comparative study of India and Indonesia and implicating Indian, Indonesian, British and Dutch scholars.