Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black meet Natalie Zemon Davis outside the University Library in Leiden for lunch and an interview. Although Davis is eager to study a Sranan-German dictionary she retrieved from the library, the three of them sit down for an engaging conversation on the historian’s craft, its societal relevance and the future of early modern studies.

Exotic natural objects brought to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mutable and malleable things. They were constructed and assimilated into European world-views in a reciprocal process of change as they moved around early modern Europe. In particular, the provenance of natural objects and the associated rich symbolic resonances were central to their natural histories. The distinctions between Orient and Occident had divided the world since antiquity and were given a range of new senses in this period. The location of these two ‘Indies’, and their relationship to one another, were neither static nor always geographically defined. This article focuses on two rich examples of this natural historical construction in relation to images of the Indies: the Old World pangolin, or scaly anteater, and its New World counterpart, the armadillo. Initially, pangolins were understood as East Indian ‘scaly lizards’, armadillos as West Indian. But from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, their geographical identities and symbolic associations were entangled as these creatures came to embody colonial anxieties and resonances. The ‘India’ of the scaly lizard became the ‘Indies’ of the scaled mammals, both East and West. Examining the reception and treatment of examples such as these in European cabinets and natural histories, offers new insights into European relationships with regions of the world seen as distant and wonderfully bountiful.

Johannes Hoornbeeck (1617–1666) was a Dutch Protestant theologian, generally regarded as a member of the so-called Further Reformation in the Netherlands. He wrote a number of theological works in Latin and in Dutch. Most of his works have a polemical character, defending his orthodox protestant stance against a variety of heretical views. In De conversione Indorum et gentilium, based on disputations with students and published posthumously, he enters into a discussion with the ‘heathens’. To this end he carefully combines biblical and classical scholarship and also reflects on the latest ethnographical information collected by both Protestant and Catholic travellers and missionaries. The book is characterised by great erudition and by an openness for other people’s opinions that necessitates the constant appraisal of one’s own point of view. We argue that such an open engagement with heretical views ultimately carries the danger of a sceptical view of one’s own religion.

At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch Republic developed a trade empire of global proportions. The Dutch government played a substantial role in building and sustaining merchant enterprises by allowing chartered companies to act on its behalf. In the Mediterranean, however, the authorities relied on a variety of commercial-diplomatic agents to promote commerce. This article argues that Dutch consuls in the western Mediterranean transformed from merchant-consuls into state-representatives and played a crucial role in sustaining diplomatic relations with states in the Maghreb. By comparing the conditions under which consuls liberated captives in Algiers and Morocco during the first half of the seventeenth century, the article examines how consuls continuously had to adjust their mission to the interests of different institutions and individuals. The article concludes that the expansion of Dutch global commerce in the Mediterranean did not evolve according to a standard script but in consuls’ interactions with local conditions and customary practices. The article contributes to the New Diplomatic History that emphasizes how successful diplomatic relations in the early modern world depended on a range of different diplomatic actors who created forms of state diplomacy beyond treaty making and alliances.

The idea that the African Atlantic world was populated by Atlantic Creoles who crossed cultural divides with relative ease is appealing, and it lends itself well to studies of identity formation that highlight the talents and opportunities that emerged from processes of cultural blending. Yet an examination of how travelling Africans ascribed meaning to their spatial and emotional groundings underlines that creolization in the African Atlantic was less smooth than suggested by the figure of the Atlantic Creole. For Frederik Svane and Christian Protten, two Euro-African men born on the Gold Coast in the early eighteenth century, Creole conditions resulted in identity practices that ranged from the complete rejection of African culture to a celebration and redefinition of the significance of African origins in the Atlantic world.

This article analyses four accounts of mutinies and wrecks of Dutch East India Company ships: those of the Nieuw Hoorn, Batavia, Blydorp and Nijenburg. These stories can be read as worst-case survival manuals, which support the Company’s discourse of discipline. They advise readers that the best option in the event of disaster is to obey the officers’ orders and the Company’s rules, linking this advice to moral and religious ideas of endurance and divine providence that were common in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The accounts also link shipboard spatial protocols with proper social order. The stories present the Indies as a dangerous physical and moral testing ground, from which the ship provides a vital protective barrier, but only if the crew acts with disciplined solidarity and shows seamanlike virtues of cohesion and perseverance. Disorder among the crew, especially the breaching of spatial boundaries between officers and men, invites the dangers of the Indies to penetrate the safe space of the ship. Such breaches threaten all the boundaries on which the lives of the ship and crew depend: between the ship and the sea, between moral and immoral behaviour, and between Europeans and the non-European world. Where spatial boundaries break down, the stories show chaos and calamity following. Where the stories have ‘happy endings’, these are brought about by the re-establishment of proper spatial and social hierarchies.

Minh Hương—often translated as ‘Ming Refugees’, became a powerful interest group in Vietnamese commerce, colonization, and politics between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Curiously, they remain understudied and misunderstood by both Vietnamese and Overseas Chinese specialists. This results from confusion about Minh Hương identity and origins, which this article addresses by analyzing the evolution of the group’s identity and the interests and institutions that shaped it. Far from static, Minh Hương identity formed, metamorphosed, and all but disappeared due to the interplay between changing circumstances and adaptive responses that continually reshaped the content of Minh Hương identity whenever “outside” circumstances challenged them. In this way, the Minh Hương evolved from its merchant diaspora origins into a powerful merchant-bureaucratic class that exploited the institutions that Vietnamese matrilineage and Chinese patrilineage afforded them in order to advance its commercial and political interests. When their status eroded in the nineteenth century, the Minh Hương redefined their group as a minority ethnicity in defense of diminishing rights. Far from the powerless refugee minority image their name implies, their behaviour so reminiscent of merchant cultures from the Sogdians to the Swahili, the Minh Hương deserves greater consideration in the literature on merchant cultures in world history.