In our last issue, Enid Perlin's article ‘Ragi, Rice, and Four-yard Dhoties’ has, apart from the usual share of printing errors, suffered from a more substantial omission of several lines, which made page 41 unintelligible. We apologize for this unfortunate mistake.

After some inevatable deloys caused by Inc sloverest of south Dutch and overcas response to the questionaires concerning current resources which we enclosed with the first issuse of Itinerario in June 1977.

If the earlier workshops organized by the Centre, ‘Expansion and Reaction’ (1975) and ‘Reappraisals in Overseas History’ (1976), aimed at producing, respectively, a survey of some of the main problems involved in modern studies of the history of European expansion and a bibliographic overview of the same field as it appears to us to-day, the third colloquium at last got down to work on a specific historical issue. True, the theme of the trading companies of the ancien regime is a vast one, but the purpose of the workshop, as of the centre itself, was primarily comparative, and for this approach the theme chosen proved eminently fit.

In the nineteenth century, enthusiasm for colonialism was not uniform in Europe. There were many individuals, of all ranks, who took no interest in the acquiring of new colonies or in the governing of existing ones. Those who did take such an interest might be a fairly small group with common backgrounds and common aspirations, but it is not easy to discern precisely what drove individuals to become involved in colonial matters. Perhaps the easiest and most fruitful method is to approach the problem through the study of parliamentarians, since they are conspicuous figures whose position on these matters is easily determined, who presumably represent some section or other of, at least, the elite and about whom there is generally a considerable amount of biographical information. It is thus frequently possible to generalise as to what differentiated those who did busy themselves with colonial matters from those who did not.

On the first day of the Conference Professor M.A.P. Meilink Roelofsz spoke briefly of a distinguished historian of maritime trade who was at that moment far away in America.

In recent years, there has been an increase in attention devoted to the study of the Indonesian Revolution from the perspective of the various parts of the sprawling Indonesian archipelago rather than from the national stage at Jakarta. Such studies are of course very feasible. Many of the participants in the Revolution are still alive in their fifties or sixties or even older. Regional studies of the Revolution have also been given a further boost when most of the Dutch archival records for the period till 1950 were declared open in 1969. I believe that in addition to field work in Indonesia itself, a research stint in the Dutch archives will be of tremendous assistance. However most researchers cannot afford to stay in the Netherlands for months on end for one reason or the other. To ease the researchers' task of having to spend time exploring the archives themselves, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the archival collections that would be relevant for the study of the Indonesian Revolution.

The publication of the Oost-Indische Spiegel by Rob Nieuwenhuys in 1972 was not only a heart-warming event for many former inhabitants of Indonesia in Holland. It was also a valuable addition to historical knowledge about a particular aspect of Dutch overseas expansion. The Dutch Indian belles lettres offered a glimpse on the sociologically curious society of those days, on colonial relations and conditions within indigenous society. This last element is particularly present in Maria Dermouts writing on the Moluccas, that of S.Lulofs on Deli and a figure such as Tjoet Nyak Dien, and of Dubekart on the region of Kediri around 1870.

In 1974-5 I had the opportunity to travel throughout South Sulawesi to read historical documents and to record oral traditions from different areas. During this period I was continually impressed by the openness of the people and the pride with which they discussed their history, customs and culture. Even the smallest village possessed its own unique history and traditions which have been jealously preserved by the elders of the community as a heritage of the ancestors. For these people to neglect their history is tantamount to disregarding their ancestors and surrendering their identity.