bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Passage to Indonesia
Authors: Fasseur C.
Published: April 2010

A long story could be told about the educational institutions where young Dutchmen were trained for an administrative and legal career in the Indies. This educational process started with the foundation of the Javanese Institute (Instituut voor dejavaanse taal) in Surakarta in 1832. Ten years later this institute was closed and the training of Dutch civil servants was transferred to the city of Delft in the Netherlands. A Royal Academy for Engineers has been established in that town and was subsequently made subservient to this overseas task too. The study of language at an engineering academy reads strangely but was done for reasons of economy. In the words of the Minister of the Colonies (J.C. Baud) who was responsible for this decision: the arid and unpleasant study of Oriental languages could better be accomplished in a cold climate than in the hot climate of Java which was not at all conducive to hard work and study! In 1864 the instruction of civil servants for Indonesia was transferred to a state institution in Leiden (Rijks-instelling van onderwijs in Indische taal-, land- en volkenkunde). But the municipal authorities of Delft were unwilling to lose the young hopefuls for the Indies and their wealthy parents, many of them with a colonial background themselves, who, for the sake of the education of their children, had taken domicile in Delft after their retirement. In the same year 1864 the municipal council of Delft established a local Indies Institute (Indische Instelling) of its own that turned out much more successful than the Leiden state institute which soon disappeared. On the other hand, the training of Indies lawyers and judges became a firm monopoly of Leiden University after the passing of a new law on Dutch universities in 1876.
Belgium: A Colonial Power Becomes a Federal State
Authors: van Spaandonck Marcel
Published: April 2010

Although I studied, among other things like linguistics and anthropology, the history of Africa, I cannot be called ‘a real historian’. My view on decolonization, literally throwing away colonization – be it a very slow and sometimes painful process – has been initiated especially by a long experience in different fields. I am one of the rare, still surviving specimen who have lived (Congo 1952-1958) and worked (Railway BCK, Société Générale) in the colonial world, and later participated modestly in the Round Table Conference of 1960 which led to the independence of the Belgian Congo. On the other hand I have undergone, due to my African studies (Ghent 1958-1962), a complete change in knowledge and mentality. Having been involved in the birth of a ‘Vlaamse Vriendenkring’ (Kolwezi, former Katanga) and later in the open and sometimes heated discussions about ‘cultural autonomy’ in Belgium (1962-1965), I finally became in the seventies a fervent defender of international thinking, global education based upon interdisciplinarity and interculturality.
Europeans, Mestizos and Slaves: The Population of Colombo At The End Of The Seventeenth Century
Authors: Knaap Gerrit
Published: April 2010

In India under the English East India Company, it was said: “Necessity is the mother of invention and the father of the Eurasian”. This saying is based on the widespread belief that, during the first centuries of their presence in Asia, European men were to a large extent dependent on “non-white” women for their sexual contacts. The character of these early colonial settlements is therefore often described as non-European. Their population is characterised as a melting-pot of ethnic groups, dependent on the uneuropean institution of slavery. The cultural values this entailed were far from those of the mother countries, certainly not those of the (Calvinist) Netherlands.
The Intercontinental Long-Distance Trade. A Preliminary Survey
Authors: Geiss Immanuel
Published: April 2010

The author of the following paper is not an economic historian. As a general modern historian when teaching history under more global perspective, he became increasingly aware of the importance of the intercontinental longdistance trade by his interests in African history and the history of European expansion overseas. When working on a more elementary, but systematic introduction into world history for undergraduate students and high school pupils (‘Geschichte griffbereit.’ 6 vols. Reinbek b. Hamburg 1979/1983), he was struck by the frequent occurrence of long-distance trade in general, of what is here called ‘intercontinental long-distance trade’ in particular: even in the most superficial treatment of many regions, countries, places of historical importance (cities, ports, straits, isthmuses, rivers, isles and peninsulas) longdistance trade played a central role. If examined closely, it emerges that surprisingly much is known about long-distance trade in general. Direct and indirect consequences of the intercontinental long-distance trade are so manifold and complex in many spheres of history — economic, of course, but also political, naval, military history, history of ideas and religions — that it should become useful to make it a major theme of its own.
The New World and the Rise of European Capitalist Hegemony: Some Historiographical Perspectives
Authors: Green William A.
Published: April 2010

The Columbian legacy also involved catastrophic demographic collapse and brutal exploitation. Within fifty years of Spanish occupation, native populations of the Caribbean archipelago verged on extinction; after eighty years, demographic decline in Mexico and Central America may have reached ninety percent. Although epidemiological transfers devastated American Indians, other aspects of inter-hemispheric biological exchange substantially enhanced the world's capacity to support human life. Eurasian grazing stock (goats, cattle, pigs, sheep) as well as animals of burden (horses and oxen) were introduced to the Americas while native American plants — not least, the potato, maize, tomato, various beans, and squash — were transferred to the Eastern Hemisphere. Precious metals were also conveyed to the Old World with effects that continue to be debated upon European economic growth, the distribution of wealth, the organization of power, and the conduct of war. Africa's portion of the Columbian legacy was to supply 5/6ths of the human migrants from the Eastern to the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1775 and to experience the domestic transformations dictated by the Atlantic slave trade. Taken together, the convergence of continents in the age of discovery would appear to have shaped the modern world, as Abbe Raynal implied. But did it? From Raynal's time to our own, how have historians related these developments to the advent of modernity or to the establishment of Europe's global economic paramountcy? Did the development of the Old World hinge upon the discovery of the New?
Locating the Age of Imperialism
Authors: August Thomas
Published: April 2010

The publication of Africa and the Victorians in 1961 challenged the prevaling orthodoxy regarding the European scramble for territory during the last decades of the nineteenth century. In it, Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher argued that what had been traditionally viewed as qualitatively new was merely a difference ol degree and not kind. Subsequent studies, especially the work of David Fieldhouse, effectively laid to rest the assumption that new developments in Europe were the cause of the rush for colonies after 1880. And yet historians generally have been reluctant to abandon the ‘age of imperialism’ as an appropriate epithet for late-Victorian Europe. The sheer amount of territory conquered by Europeans in so short a span ol time seemingly compels teachers ol modern history survey courses to view the period 1880–1914 from a traditional perspective and with resort to established nomenclature. Does the historical rubric, ‘age of imperialism’, still have pedagogic value? The answer is a qualified affirmative, provided that its chronological moorings are anchored elsewhere.
A Survey of Recent Italian Bibliography on Portuguese Expansion
Authors: Spallanzani Marco
Published: April 2010

The expansion of Portugal has never aroused as much interest in Italy as has the expansion of Spain. It is enough to mention the role of such charismatic figures of Italian origins like Christopher Columbus and the intensity of commercial relations between Italy and Spain to understand why Spain has dominated the Italian'view of the expansion of Europe. Nevertheless, some Italian scholars have worked on aspects of Portuguese expansion, and it is the purpose of this essay to review what has been done over the last fifteen years.
The Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla
Authors: Hoffman Paul E.
Published: April 2010

Protocolos or notarial acts are one of those historical sources that everyone talks about but few use. A few social historians such as James Lockhardt and Ruth Pike have assayed the rich ores of these documents (for Lima and Seville, respectively). Art historians have used them with profit, but only a few of an older generation of French historians and Louis-André Vigneras have done much with them for voyages of exploration. Yet they are the last truly rich source of historical information still awaiting study by students of the Expansion (1).
Fishing, Migrations and Inter-group Relations in the Gulf of Guinea (Atlantic Coast of West Africa) in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Olukoju Ayodeji
Published: April 2010

The Gulf of Guinea, home to numerous ethnic nationalities, stretches from the Republic of Senegal in the west to Nigeria in the east. There have been population movements and socio-economic interactions within and across the coastal belt over the past millennium. In response to their environment, the people have been engaged in fishing, salt-making, commerce and boat making. Fishing, the pivot of their economy, has taken the leading fishing groups – the Fante and Ewe (Keta) of the Republic of Ghana, and the Izon (Ijaw), Itsekiri and Ilaje of Nigeria – all over the entire West African coastline, where they have established many settlements.
A History of Trade in the Sea of Melayu
Authors: Andaya Leonard Y.
Published: April 2010

The first reference to a ‘Sea of Melayu’ is from an Arabic document dated c. 1000, which noted that travellers ‘reaching the Sea of Melayu, were approaching the area of China’. While the location of the Sea of Melayu is not specified, the practice of naming a sea after a dominant people surrounding its shores suggests that this particular body of water must have been the Straits of Melaka. This is clear in the only other known reference to the use of this name, which is found inDescription of Malacca, Meridional India and Cathaywritten in 1613 by Emanuel Godinho de Eredia, a Eurasian Jesuit born in Portuguese Melaka. Eredia refers to the Sea of Melayu as that ‘land-enclosed sea between the mainland of Ujontana [Malay Peninsula] and the Golden Chersonese [Sumatra]’. He was clearly referring to the Straits of Melaka, though it was obviously not yet called that by his contemporaries. Eredia's description of that ‘land-enclosed sea’ clearly reveals a commonly held assumption of the greater significance of a land mass over a body of water. But for Malays and many other sea and riverine peoples, the focus was on water, not land, and entities were formed by seas and rivers joined by short land passages.
The Specter of Las Casas: José Antonio Saco and the Persistence of Spanish Colonialism in Cuba
Authors: Schmidt-Nowara Christopher
Published: April 2010

The empire of absolutist Spain haunted the debates over the empire of liberal Spain. To take one example, José Arias y Miranda, an unemployed civil servant who would later work as the librarian for theMinisterio de Ultramar(Overseas Ministry), responded to the Real Academia de la Historia's query on the effects of the American empire on Spain's economy and society in words that would have been familiar to a seventeenth-centuryarbitrista.After reviewing America's drain on the sparse Spanish population and the corrupting effects of gold, silver, and land on Spanish work habits, Arias y Miranda concluded ‘that America was […] the determining cause of Spain's decadence’.
I. The Colonial Legacy and its Impact on Post-Independence Planning in India and Indonesia
Authors: Booth Anne
Published: April 2010

India and the island world of Southeast Asia were in close cultural andcommercial contact for many centuries before both came under the influence, and ultimately the domination, of the European colonial powers. In spite ofthe fact that the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago were the chief colonial possessions of two of the most advanced and wealthiest countries in West Europe, both emerged into independence in the aftermath of the second world war as extremely poor, technologically backward countries.But in both countries an indigenous political leadership had assumed power, which was determined to accelerate the pace of economic progress, and achieve a high level of development, in the shortest possible time. It is thus interesting to make a pairwise comparison of these two countries, both in respect of the colonial legacy they inherited, and in respect of their post-independence economic policy-making, in order to indicate the specific contributions of two different colonial systems to subsequent economic policy efforts and achievements. We begin with a brief discussion of the economic legacy bequeathed by the two colonial powers to independent India and Indonesia.
III. The Welfare Services in Indonesia, 1900–1942
Authors: Boomgaard P.
Published: April 2010

It was a reluctant Dutch government, representing an equally reluctant Dutch population, that had to recognize the independent Republic of Indonesia in 1949. The so-called decolonization process had been a traumatic experience for all parties concerned. The academic community in the Netherlands was no exception to this rule, and Dutch ‘Indonesian studies’ went into a long hibernation. This applies particularly to the study of the welfare services, an aspect of Dutch colonial rule that had been the pride and glory of civil servants and scholars alike (many of them former civil servants).
V. Nehru and Sukarno 1919-1942. An Essay in Comparison
Authors: Watson C.W.
Published: April 2010

In May 1934 Nehru and Sukarno were both in detention. Nehru was in Dehra Dun jail sentenced to two years after having been found guilty of making a seditious speech. Sukarno, also arrested for sedition, was in exile on the island of Flores. For both men it was a period of reflection and analysis, a time to review the progress of the nationalist movement and make some assessment of their own contributions to it. Nehru, more given to introspection than Sukarno, composed his autobiography during this time, and continued with the historical studies he had commenced during earlier prison terms. Sukarno in exile spent much of his time getting to grips with Islam, primarily, it would appear, to prepare arguments to convince the leaders of the Islamic movements in Indonesia of the compatibility of Islam with modernization and progressive political action. In this respect, like Jinnah, he was attracted to the figure of Kemal Attaturk whose general outlook on the relationship between state and religion he endorsed.
VIII. The Depression, 1930–1935: Its Effects on India and Indonesia
Authors: Goswami O.
Published: April 2010

This essay attempts to analyse the differential effects of the Great Depression on two very dissimilar economies bound only by the commonality of colonial overlordship. Though the motivation was noble enough, the quality and quantity of research that went into making this article has been well below par. For the Indonesian section, I was particularly hamstrung by my total ignorance of the Dutch language and also of the subtle intersectoral nuances of the economy. What I say about the archipelago is, therefore, much in the nature of broad, indicative statements culled from the data and interpretations available in English. Even these I say with all manners of qualification. This exercise in comparative economic history was thrust upon me in order to broaden my knowledge of other things in the universe. Perhaps, at the end of it all, I have become a trifle more knowledgeable. Nevertheless, writing this essay constantly reminded me of Daniel as he faced the lions: he was doing an extremely foolhardy thing under severe duress and with prayers on his lips.
X. The Modern Indonesian Intelligentsia as Protagonist of Political Modernization
Authors: Kartodirdjo Sartono
Published: April 2010

Numerous writings on intellectuals as learned or professional middle class have been published since the sixties for the obvious reason that this social group played a central role in the struggle for independence from which they emerged as the new leaders or ralers of new nations. Furthermore, being protagonist of change the intelligentsia showed their pre-eminence in giving their society a modern shape. Those studies show clearly the striking similarities of the characteristics of the intelligentsia from various developing countries. Their emergence was closely related to the expansion of western education, their marginal socio-historical location created the propensity to protagonize modernization, their oppositional role was inherent in their being a counter-elite in the colonial power structure. More similarities or parallel development can be brought up in our comparative study between India and Indonesia by asking the following questions: (1) Within the frame-work of the colonial setting what kind of factors were at work in creating the intelligentsia; (2) To what extend did endogenous factors impede the mobility and dynamics of the intelligentsia; (3) Did the intelligentsia's social origin put constraints on their capacity to accommodate themselves to new situations; (4) In fulfilling their function as intellectuals did they succeed in playing their leadership role in the nationalist movement; (5) Which structural conduciveness was necessary in order to provide a leverage to antagonize the establishment; etc. What kind of political commitment one came across among the intelligentsia? Were new ideologies quite instrumental in endorsing the intelligentsia's political role? Did they succeed in realizing political modernization?
An Ill Wind? Rethinking the Angolan Crisis and the Portuguese Revolution, 1974–1976
Authors: Macqueen Norrie
Published: April 2010

Just before midnight on 10 November 1975 Portugal's high commissioner in Angola, along with the last remnants of the Portuguese army in Africa, embarked for Lisbon. Earlier in the day he had formally transferred sovereignty not to a successor government but to ‘the Angolan people’, a formulation which permitted Portugal to ‘decolonise’ without taking sides in the civil war which was at that time reaching its climax in Angola. Immediately the perfunctory ceremony in Luanda ended, the Portuguese officials left at speed for the harbour and the relative safety of their ships which departed immediately. Thus ended Portugal's 500-year empire in Africa. It is tempting to see Portugal's indecorous withdrawal from Angola as an emblematic climax to an increasingly destructive relationship with the former jewel in its African crown. In this view, the chaotic circumstances of Angola's road to independence had brought Portugal's own fragile and unstable post-revolutionary state to the point of destruction. Yet a quite different view can be proposed. The political and diplomatic challenges thrown down by the Angolan crisis might be seen, on the contrary, to have had a ‘disciplining’ effect on a revolutionary process in Portugal which was threatening to spin out of control as a result of its own internal pressures. Arguably, rather than exacerbating these pressures, the demands of events in Angola had a unifying effect on an otherwise fragmenting state.
A Question of Quality: The Commercial Contest between Portuguese Atlantic Spices and Their Venetian Levantine Equivalents during the Sixteenth Century
Authors: Smith Stefan Halikowski
Published: April 2010

The old debate amongst historians as to whether the testimony of the sixteenth century really bears out Adam Smith's claim that the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope constitutes ‘one of the two and most important events in the recorded history of mankind’ was, it seems, put to sleep with Niels Steensgaard's thesis of 1973. Steensgaard argued that ‘a structural revolution’ and which truly sounded the death-knell of the old overland caravan trades competing with the sea borne routes, was not effected by the Portuguese from 1498 but awaited the Dutch. The debate, however, was couched very much on the theory of the operation run by the Portuguese, and which was typologised as reactionary in that it relied upon the threat of force rather than commercial competitivity. Whilst price movements between Portuguese and Red Sea pepper on the European market have been analysed by historians such as Herman Van Der Wee and Rene Gascon, nobody has really stopped to consider the complex of factors intervening on the demand side. Pepper, like ginger, was not a unitary good as misleadingly assumed by Douglas Irwin in his attempt to analyse the Anglo-Dutch rivalry for the East India trade with the Brander-Spence analysis of duopolistic export competition. Price lists suggest that pepper came in manifold shapes, sizes and qualities, let alone competing species, all of which rendered the market remarkably heterogeneous with up to seven-fold price divergences between, for example, the different products that would pass as ‘pepper’. This article discusses some of the factors that made for market variegation, and focuses on the market consequences of a Portuguese policy of transportation in the open ship's hold. It suggests that quality was one of the demand factors that shaped the competition between the Adantic and Mediterranean spice trade.
II. The ‘Meanings’ of Pan-Islamism: The Growth of International Consciousness Among the Muslims of India and Indonesia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century
Authors: Evans D. H.
Published: April 2010

A commentator on Muhammad Iqbal, the great poet-philosopher of.Muslim India, once wrote that ‘Pan-Islamism is not actually defined anywhere’. If true, it has not been through want of trying. Since the term ‘Pan-Islamism’ became common currency in the late nineteenth century, a variety of European journalists, colonial officials and academic researchers (not to mention Muslims themselves) have striven to offer a precise interpretation of the phenomenon. But they have failed to develop any consensus, even on basic questions: what was Pan-Islamism? why was it? or even, has it ever existed? Some have considered it an essentially religious drive, others as a political mobilisation. Some observers have presented it as a movement, as a disciplined, and perhaps clandestine, organisation with active members and fixed purposes. Others have dismissed it as mere sentiment, as nothing more than the vaguest of emotional attachments between co-religionists. A number, believing that Pan-Islamism seeks to re-create a past perfection, have argued that it aims to regroup Muslims under one sovereign authority much as they had enjoyed during the Prophet's lifetime. Others, on the other hand, have sensed more modern connotations, claiming that it intends to forge an exclusive international federation of Islamic states with the very real potential for threatening non-Muslim countries. At least one Marxist writer has distinguished between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ strains.3 This suggests that Pan-Islamism might both nurture the longings for some distant past and be responsive to the demands of the present.
VIII. Multiplying Masses: Nineteenth Century Population Growth in India and Indonesia
Authors: Boomgaard P.
Published: April 2010

A comparison between the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago is for several reasons a rather awkward venture. The sheer difference in size alone, and all that such a difference implies, is enough to deter even the most cautious researcher. Another cause for hesitation is the varying quality of the population data: good statistics for most regions of the subcontinent from 1881 onward, bad statistics for almost all'regions before that date, compared to fairly good statistics for Java for the entire nineteenth century, but virtually worthless data for the Outer Islands during the same period. Finally considerations of a more personal nature can not be regarded as unimportant: I am familiar with the peculiarities of Javanese statistics, much less confident where the Outer Islands are concerned, and more than entirely ignorant of all things Indian. Fortunately I could rely on recent studies regarding the subcontinent, but research on nineteenth century population statistics for the Indonesian Outer Islands is all but non-existent. The sorry state of nineteenth century statistics for the Outer Islands makes one wonder whether anybody can be so foolhardy as to even start sorting them out. So it is hot without serious misgivings that this article has been written.
XI. A Century of Rural Expansion in Assam, 1870-1970
Authors: Richards J. F. , Hagen J.
Published: April 2010

The seven districts of present-day Assam state, comprising 7.8 million hectares (78,496 km2), lie in the valley of the Brahmaputra river in the extreme northeast of India. On the map they form an extended finger of riverine land pointing toward the mountain boundary. Assam has been a steadily developing frontier region since the middle decades of the nineteenth century. One arm of this development has been that of the plantation economy devoted to tea production in the highlands. British capital, British managers, and Indian coolie labor formed the essential elements in this growing export-oriented economy. From 1870 another settler-based frontier society emerged when peasant migrants from Bengal and ex-tea-laborers took up government-owned wastelands along the Brahmaputra and its tributaries to grow paddy rice. Together these two forces have transformed the face of the land and created a new society in Assam over the past century. The British colonial regime's policies generally favored the development and growth of both the estate and the smallholder sectors of Assam's economy. In this process the indigenous Assamese — whether peasant cultivators or tribal hill peoples — have faced immense pressures on their society and way of life. The purpose of this essay is to delineate the transformations in the land and the agricultural economy that accompanied this process in Assam.
XIV. Handicrafts in India and Indonesia in the Nineteenth Century: Some Tentative Observations
Authors: Krishnamurty J.
Published: April 2010

When one looks at the phenomenon of declining handicrafts either in terms of the impact of modern technology or in terms of the onslaught of imperialism, India and Indonesia are obvious cases to examine in relation to the nineteenth century. For India there is a well developed literature, much of t i of contemporary nineteenth and early twentieth century vintage; the literature for Indonesia, however, appears somewhat thin in comparison. On closer examination there appear to be many questions of a common nature raised by the literature on the two countries and potentially fruitful issues awaiting investigation in a comparative perspective. To illustrate these possibilities and to stimulate discussion I attempt in this paper to draw upon some work I am doing on two major Indian handicraft industries, textiles and rice processing, and relate some findings of mine and of others to what has been done (or can be done) on these industries in Indonesia.
XVI. Peasant Insurgents Revisited: A Comparative Study of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Peasant Movements in India and Indonesia
Authors: Kartodirdjo Sartono
Published: April 2010

Dealing with peasant rebellions as a universal historical phenomenon, it is quite appropriate to raise the problem whether despite great differences in cultural settings those phenomena still show common characteristics. A multitude of peasant studies in general, and on peasant movements in particular, will facilitate our comparative study on the same subjects in India and Indonesia.1 The very nature of such phenomena lends itself very well to a comparative investigation. Guided by some general findings of previous studies we will be able to sort out general characteristics of peasant rebellion in both countries. Our comparative study immediately calls for an analytical framework, referring to concepts such as: (1) theologies, religious beliefs and ideologies; (2) leadership and the kind of authority it possesses; (3) the mobilization system including the kind of leader-follower relationship; (4) the structure of organization; (5) the rationale behind the action. This cluster of conceptual tools will assist in unravelling the complex currents of historical events, and also ‘in looking beyond the trees at the wood’. Without disregarding the unique character of every single case, for our purpose we have to concern ourselves with the general features. It would not be superfluous to say that doing comparative history methodologically implies an analytical approach.
Should we really ReORIENT?
Authors: Vries Peer
Published: April 2010

Andre Gunder Frank's latest work,ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Agedefinitely is a book with a message. Its author sets out to challenge what according to him are the received opinions in historiography and social science on the making of the modern world. He does so relentlessly and overturns the ideas of such influential scholars as Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein. As a matter of fact, of almost everybody who has ever touched upon the subject. All these misled if not downright misleading scholars are thought to suffer from Eurocentrism. Which of course is a Bad Thing. Frank uses the word to refer to people who profess to tell the history of the world but do so by preponderantly gazing at their European navel, unduly magnifying Europe's uniqueness and role in world history.
A Report from the Archives of Sri Lanka
Authors: Paranavitana K.D.
Published: April 2010

Sri Lanka is an island in the Indian Ocean situated to the south-east of the southern point of India. It was colonised by an Aryan race that came from North India in the 6th century B.C. It has a recorded history of twenty-two centuries. Until the beginning of the 15th century it had political contacts mainly with the sub-continent of India. In 1518, the Portuguese captured a part of the maritime coastal area of Sri Lanka and started their own system of administration. The Dutch ousted the Portuguese from Galle in 1640 and established the administration of the Dutch East India Company along the same coastal region by 1656. They were active until they ceded to the British in 1796. The British administered the same coastal area from 1796 to 1815. The Kandyan kingdom was subsequently annexed in 1815 and the British gained complete control over the entire island. Sri Lanka regained independence from the British in 1948 and in May, 1972 it became a Republic within the British Commonwealth. Since February, 1978 it has been an Independent Republic with its first executive President.
A Brief Introduction to the South Seas Research Institute, University of Amoy, China
Authors: Blussé Leonard
Published: April 2010

During the winter of 1980-1981 I visited China as a guest-lecturer and researcher on the invitation of both the Chinese Ministry of Education and Amoy University. The lecture schedule took me from Peking University to the southeastern coastal province of Fukien where short visits were paid to Fuchou, Ch'üanchou, and Changchou before settling down for a fortnight's stay at Amoy University. This introduction will be solely devoted to the Nanyang Institute, the only place where I spent enough time to acquire more than a superficial impression of what is going on. I do not think many people will have an opportunity to visit Amoy - which is a shame, since foreign visitors are very cordially received. Consequently it is of no use to offer a guide to visitors. Rather, I would like to raise a few points about the activities of the institute itself and Chinese research facilities for foreigners in general.
The Nanyang Research Institute, Xiamen (Amoy) University
Authors: Zhisheng Wu
Published: April 2010

Nanyang Research Institute (i.e. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies) was founded in 1956. It is one of the earliest Chinese research institutes on international affairs. It focuses its attention on the politics, economy and history of Southeast Asian countries (particularly the five ASEAN countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines), as well as problems of overseas Chinese.
Surinam Plantations in Dutch Archives
Authors: Boomgaard Peter
Published: April 2010

The 1979 issue of Itinerario, (no. 2) opened with “A note on Suriname Plantation Archives at the University of Minnesota”, in which Richard Price of the Johns Hopkins University reported his discovery of some 2,000 manuscript pages on a number of Surinam plantations in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. This, of course, is very good news. It is perhaps still better news that the Dutch archives contain vast and almost untapped (resources on a 200-odd plantations! I am, however, certainly not the first tone to make this ‘discovery’: Mrs. M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz not only mentioned it in her Ph.D. dissertation “Asian trade and European influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630”, but she even ordered part of the archives herself. It must be the unbridgeable gap between scholars interested in the East Indies /and those who study West Indian history, that her enthusiastic remarks on the availability of plantation material went unheeded. When nine years later Th. Mathews published his article “Los estuadios sobre historia economica del Caribe (1585 - 1910)”2, he mentioned the Dutch West Indies as a blank on the Caribbean map as far as economic (plantation) history is concerned. Since Mathews wrote his article the historiographic situation has improved only slightly, and it is an ironic comment on Surinam historical scholarship that tiny Curaçao's XlXth century plantation economy by now has found its historian, while the Surinam plantations are still in search of an author.
Problems of Ottoman Economic History and the Core-periphery model
Authors: Kotenbach Astrid
Published: April 2010

The discovery of new areas beyond the Atlantic Ocean and the pioneering of a new searoute via the Cape to the Indian Ocean led to expansion of western Europe in the sixteenth century. There of course followed the development of trade routes to the new areas outside Europe, but there was also a significant expansion of trade inside Europe and the Middle East, as well as changes in existing trade and production patterns. These are the subject of this paper.
White Supremacy
Authors: Ross Robert
Published: April 2010

The system of apartheid in modern South Africa is in large measure camouflage for the maintainance of white supremacy. In the first place it entails the division of the South African population into what are euphemistically known as ‘national groups’, which.in practice come down to racial segments: white, the so-called ‘coloured’ - those of mixed race, and the descendants of the Cape colony's slaves - Indians and the Blacks. The last group, the indigeneous inhabitants of most of the land area of South Africa, form a vast majority of the country's population, but, with the so-called ‘coloureds’ and the Indians, have been systematically excluded from any real share in political and economic power. The official policy has stressed that what is intended is the creation of separate zuiien, or pillars of society. According to the ideology, South Africa is now a plural society, to such an extent that the title of the ministry formerly known as ‘Bantu Affairs’ is now ‘Plural Affairs’. In hard reality, there is geen spraak - no question - of equality between the various groups, but rather a rigourously maintained hierarchy. The whites are vastly more prosperous and control almost all sectors of the economy, through their exclusion of other races from the processes of political decision making.
A Note on Western Impact on Dutch Formosa, 1624–1662
Authors: Heyns Pol
Published: April 2010

Taiwan, one of the four Asian Tigers, has become renowned for its economic miracle in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. However, few know that the arrival of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) on the island heralded the beginning of an earlier, long forgotten economic miracle. It was on this beautiful island, which seventeenth century Europeans called Formosa, that the VOC established its first major land colony. In just a few decades a tiny trading factory set up on spit of land in Tayouan (Tainan) expanded into a prosperous and flourishing colony, which covered large parts of the island. To establish this colony the VOC attracted thousands of colonists, few of which were European. Although most VOC employees were Europeans, most of these left the island upon expiration of their work contract. The bulk of the colonists that the VOC attracted were Chinese of all walks of life: farmers, masons, inter- national traders, fishermen, hunters, peddlers, sailors etc. But why was the Company so successful in attracting Chinese colonists, and how did these colonists contribute to Dutch Formosa's economic miracle?
Goa during the First Century of Portuguese Rule
Authors: Pearson M. N.
Published: April 2010

“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.
A Survival Kit for Field Research:
Authors: Papstein Robert
Published: April 2010

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.”
East and West in the Development of the Modern World-System
Authors: Sanderson Stephen K.
Published: April 2010

In recent years the notion of ‘Eurocentrism’ has become a major theme of modern scholarship, especially in the study of the historical development of the modern world. More and more scholars seem to be coming to the viewpoint that modern historical scholarship has been crippled by the bias of a Eurocentric perspective. Europeans have overstressed their own importance, it is claimed, and have failed to notice that the contributions of non-Europeans to the development of the modern world have been just as great as those of the Europeans. The charge being made really consists of two parts. First, it is claimed that much of the non-European world, Asia in particular, was, economically speaking, at least on a par with Europe in the centuries before AD 1500, and in some ways even more advanced. This claim is then coupled with the assertion that there was nothing especially distinctive about Europe, no particular qualities that set it apart from the rest of the world, nothing that gave it some sort of special dynamic. In this article I wish to argue that these claims are overstated. The first claim has some truth to it, but in and of itself it is highly misleading. In some ways the non-European world was as advanced as Europe in die year 1500, but by that time Europe had become economically different from the rest of the world in a way that would prove decisive for the historical development of die next five centuries. The second claim I believe is manifestly false. Europe indeed had distinctive qualities that set it apart and that gave it a dynamism that was lacking elsewhere. Elsewhere, that is, except for one other part of die world, namely Japan. Japan was surprisingly like Europe in several important ways and it is no accident that Japan is today the most economically and industrially advanced society in die non-western world. One of the most important things I want to do in this paper is to show what features Europe and Japan shared that eventually allowed them to leave the rest of the world behind.
Eurocentric Views of Universal Languages from 1605 to 1828
Authors: Mikosz David
Published: April 2010

This paper will examine how a group of theorists in the European tradition of language study was influenced by non-European and intra-European comparisons of language. These theorists were primarily based in Great Britain, although North American perspectives will also be considered. I shall trace this tradition of understanding from Francis Bacon to the American lexicographer Noah Webster. This way of considering language was initially a tool in the attempt to create a universal language that would enable Europeans to discuss and explain the new worlds then being explored. The context of Europe, however, proved significant in changing this outward looking view, resulting in an attempt to vernacularize the concept of a universal language and to make the English language an international language of discovery.
Beyond the ‘Civilized’ World: Pampean Indians between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Authors: Mandrini Raúl José
Published: April 2010

The subject of this article is Indian society in the Pampas and neighbouring territories in Argentina. I will focus on the deep changes that Indian societies experienced in their economy and socio-political structure during the period that followed Hispanic settlement on the Río de la Plata shores at the end of the sixteenth century. The original hunter-gatherer bands had transformed into truechiefdomsby the middle of the nineteenth century. How, when, and why they changed are the questions that I, and other scholars in Argentina, have tried to answer.
Sources for the Study of European Expansion in the Catholic Documentation Centre in Nijmegen
Authors: Soetaert Paul
Published: April 2010

The Catholic Documentation Centre (KDC) was set up in 1969 by the Catholic University of Nijmegen. Its task is to collect, order and describe documentation on the Catholic life of the Netherlands in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and so to make it available for research. The Centre has three departments: an archive, a library and a so-called categorical documentation department.
‘King of West Africa’? Bernard Bourdillon and the Politics of the West African Governors' Conference, 1940–1942
Authors: Olukoju Ayodeji
Published: April 2010

The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and the collapse of French resistance to the German onslaught a year later were momentous events which had far-reaching implications for France, Britain, and their colonies. In West Africa, the war affected existing patterns of inter-state relations within and across the French/British imperial divides, which were further complicated for the British by the emergence of two blocs in the French colonial empire – Vichy and Free French. It was in this context that the West African Governors' Conference was created in 1940 to coordinate the war effort and to manage relations with the French colonies.
The Stranger-Effect in Early Modern Asia
Authors: Fernández-Armesto Felipe
Published: April 2010

The Nias sense of space is a curious one. Lest anyone suspect me of harbouring a complaint about the size of the rooms on the famous campus in Wassenaar, let me insist at once that I am thinking not of NIAS, the delightful research institute, but Nias, the island off Sumatra. There, space to build the splendid houses for which the islanders are justly celebrated is allocated, not according to notions of the proper relationship between authority or status and centrality or ‘social distance’, but on a system of priorities established by symbolic directions. ‘Upriver’ — a direction which only sometimes corresponds to the flow of a nearby waterway — is ennobling, whereas ‘downstream’ is demeaning. Beyond the confines of the village, ‘downstream’ designates the world of increasing remoteness. Its outer reach is the horizon, the abode of the monstrous and evil. In conjunction with the inveterate hostility the islanders have always exhibited towards intruders, this seems suggestive. The horizon, though contemplated with reverence in some cultures, is not always divine. Distance does not always lend enchantment – or if it does, the ensorcelment may be malign. Different cultures have contrasting attitudes to intrusions from far away and, therefore, different strategies for receiving the sojourner, entertaining the traveller, accommodating the migrant, and absorbing the invader.
Imperialism and the Dilemma of Slavery in Eastern Arabia and the Gulf, 1873–1939
Authors: Hopper Matthew S.
Published: April 2010

An Ethiopian man named Surūr appeared before the British Consul at Addis Ababa in December 1933 and told a remarkable story. He had just returned to Ethiopia after enduring more than five years of slavery in the Arabian (Persian) Gulf where he had been forced to work as a pearl diver. When he was eleven years old and out tending cattle in the Wallamo region of Ethiopia around 1925, he was seized by kidnappers who took him to Tajura on the Somali coast and shipped him along with fifty other captives to Jedda, where he was sold to a man who took him to Qatar and eventually sold him to a pearl merchant who engaged him as a diver. As Surūr explained to the consul, he tried twice to escape from his master. The first time, he fled to the British Residency Agent, ‘Isa bin ‘Abdullatīf, in Dubai, who promised to protect him, but then returned him to his master, who severely beat him. Shortly after, he fled to the British agency office in Sharjah, only to find that the Residency Agent was the same ‘Isa bin ‘Abdullatīf, who again returned him to his master, who this time beat him until he was unconscious. Surūr finally managed to escape by fleeing to a boat bound for Basra. There, he met some Somali men working as stokers on a British steamer who assisted him in getting to Djibouti by way of Muscat. When he arrived in Djibouti he was interrogated by port officers, and his story was passed on to the British consulat Addis Ababa who interviewed him and forwarded his story to the Political Agent at Muscat.
Refugiés Or Émigrés? Early Modern French Migrations to British North America and the United States (c. 1680 – c. 1820)
Authors: Van Ruymbeke Bertrand
Published: April 2010

Historians have traditionally paid relatively little attention to the French migrations to America. Although in the early modern period France was a demographic giant, had a deep – yet not enough recognized – maritime tradition, had many colonies in the Americas from the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence to the Amazon, and suffered from a tumultuous political history comparatively few of its people migrated to British North America and the United States. France has therefore and to some extent understandably enjoyed minimal visibility in the American ethnic landscape. There is, however, a long tradition of French migrations to America, beginning with the Huguenots at the end of the seventeenth century. At times these influxes were important in terms of number and influence, indeed in 1690 and in 1790 French was spoken in the streets of Charleston and of Philadelphia.