From the early modern period onwards, European dynasties sought to expand their power in South and Southeast Asia, establishing localised institutions that incorporated both European models and precolonial Asian practices. Studies on local resistance to imposed bureaucratisation overlook how locals navigated the bureaucracy for societal or political change. In this special issue, historians of colonial India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia investigate how knowledge products of European bureaucracies provided unintended opportunities for local agents to navigate the imperial state, and moreover to alter said knowledge products or bureaucracies. The authors critically engage with the concept of the “looping effect,” coined by the late Canadian philosopher of science Ian Hacking, to describe a process where administrative practices led to social mobilisation in colonial contexts.

This paper considers the utilisation, appropriation, and renegotiation of colonial knowledge in the form of land and population registers by local litigants in eighteenth-century Dutch colonial Sri Lanka. Using a database compiled from thirty-three civil court cases held before the Landraad rural council of Colombo, I highlight how Lankan litigants frequently used the colonial thombo registers as evidence to have their property recognised. Moreover, I show that these registers were not just utilised but also altered through this process, particularly through the promotion of alternative knowledge in the form of local witness testimonies and ola palm leaf documents during court cases. I subsequently argue that we should reconsider how we view colonial knowledge. Rather than a static, top-down view from a foreign bureaucracy on a colonised society, this knowledge could be appropriated and even altered through the acts of local agents, in turn changing what was known by the colonial state and thus creating a “looping effect” of knowledge production.

This article describes the evolution of the commercial connections between China and the southern Sulawesian port of Makassar from the beginning of the seventeenth century until 1669, when the Dutch Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie conquered Makassar. It attempts to show that these connections went through several transformations. Initially direct Chinese shipping supplied Makassar with Chinese goods, but this direct trade lasted only about a decade. However, commerce carried by Macanese ships and trade in Indochinese ports that were frequented by both Sulawesian and Chinese vessels maintained the commercial connection. This connection in its different forms allowed Makassar to act as an entrepôt that supplied Chinese goods and Japanese copper to more distant parts of Southeast Asia, especially those in the eastern Indonesian archipelago. The article concludes by arguing that after the conquest of Makassar, Banjarmasin in southern Borneo developed as a new regional entrepôt connecting China to the eastern archipelago.

The field of Atlantic history initially focused exclusively on the Anglo-American North Atlantic, largely ignoring the South Atlantic and Africa. This approach, dominant after World War II, portrayed a “Western civilization” based on North Atlantic liberal values, akin to a postwar Mediterranean. Over time, historians of the Anglo-American Atlantic criticized this narrow focus, recognizing the broader interconnectedness of the Atlantic world. Recent decades have seen a shift, with more historians acknowledging the Atlantic as a complex, interconnected space involving four continents. Particularly notable is the rise of studies on the South Atlantic, especially regarding science and empire in the Iberian world. These studies highlight the significant role of Spain and Portugal, challenging the previously North Atlantic-centered narrative. This research has revealed that the Atlantic world was as much, if not more, shaped by Spanish and Portuguese influences as by English ones. The reviewed works exemplify this shift, focusing on the South Atlantic's imperial entanglements and the African diaspora in the Caribbean.

Logwood, a dyestuff extracted from its namesake tree native to the Yucatán Peninsula, was a commodity valued in the textile centres of early modern Europe. The trade in logwood began as an extractive endeavour attempted by merchants and former pirates on the margins of Spanish colonial authority, but by the late eighteenth century it had expanded to become a wide-reaching activity with connections to broader trends on both sides of the Atlantic. In the New World, the trade's growth fuelled Anglo-Spanish imperial rivalries and led to the introduction of slave labour to harvest dwindling logwood stands. The ecological consequences of human exchange also spread logwood's range to Caribbean islands, turning a frontier trade into a domesticated plantation industry. In the Old World, logwood was a versatile dye source that contributed to a range of hues. Initial regulations to protect consumers eased as dyers improved the quality of logwood dyes. The logwood trade expanded global textile supply chains and brought innovation to Europe's proto-industrial textile industry. It gave the continent's dyers new ways to meet consumer demand and spurred the development of mechanical methods to expedite refining.

This article traces Hacking's “looping effect” in colonial policies and practices of taxation, coerced labour, and governance in Indonesia. It argues that knowledge production for the purpose of taxation was a two-way, interactive process which was in particular influenced by complexes of local indigenous social organization, institutions, mentalities, and behaviour as expressed through adat (Indonesian systems of political-social norms and customary law). Such patterns and systems, the article reveals, were internalized into and started working reciprocally with colonial policy, knowledge production, and administrative practices. Taxation made up and changed people, but underlying strategies to categorize and “make known” subjects were also recognized and actively used, evaded, or influenced by these subjects and by local intermediaries. Consequently, colonial knowledge created an institutional framework that reoriented the self-perception of these subjects and intermediaries, which then changed and reconditioned popular responses to the colonial state. Systems of colonial knowledge were thus modified to eventually fit the realities they were supposed to describe, influence, and legitimize, creating a looping effect between colonial, “made up,” and actual social realities.

This article explores three instances of the looping effect by studying colonial resistance in the Moluccas in 1817. It focuses on the relations between Dutch colonial officials and the sultan of Ternate in the North Moluccas, and between Dutch officials and the regents of Ambon in the Central Moluccas. The first instance of the looping effect revolves around how Ambonese regents, who adhered to Calvinism, used Christian principles to contest Dutch rule within the Moluccas. This became evident in 1817 when a revolt broke out against the reestablishment of Dutch rule within the Moluccas. The leaders of this revolt used religious precepts of Calvinism, previously introduced by the Dutch, to argue that the reestablishment of Dutch rule should be rejected. The article continues with a second instance of the looping effect, reconstructing how Ambonese rulers used instructions issued by the colonial state in 1818 to mitigate claims from the colonial government. Finally, a third instance of the looping effect can be perceived in how the sultan of Ternate used contracts, signed with the Dutch colonial state in 1817, to request Dutch military assistance against internal uprisings and thereby increased his authority throughout the region.

Drawing inspiration from Ian Hacking's claim that new modes of description generate new possibilities for action, this essay explores the impact of changes to the mode of description through the 1901 Census in Ceylon. It begins by exploring the modes of description used in the censuses prior to 1901 to demonstrate that in Ceylon, the census was yet to emerge as the critical tool of colonial governance claimed by dominant scholarship around colonial census taking. This leads to an exploration of how the changes that Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the first Ceylonese Census superintendent, made to the Census Ordinance, Census Manual, and Census Report impacted the function of the census as a mode of description. It then explores the possibilities for action generated by these changes in the mode of description, paying particular attention to the ways in which the census shaped elite, indigenous activism leading to the first major reforms of the colonial governance structure in Ceylon, including the introduction of limited franchise. Thus, Ceylon's 1901 Census affords a unique opportunity to examine the impact that shifts in modes of description have on possibilities for action.

This essay aims to give an account of the untold and unexpected events faced by the crew of the Compton, one of the East India Company's vessels that set out on a routine trade voyage from Deptford to Bombay in April 1723. Under the command of Captain William Mawson, scrupulous compiler of the logbook, the ship proceeded along the known routes indicated by the East India Company (EIC) charts, and through the passages recommended by the navigation manuals. Finding consonance with recent research suggestions on “alternative histories” of the EIC, this article brings to light the narrative potentialities of the logbook, which is therefore considered not only a technical device, but also a tool for reconstructing the actual experience of navigation. This is the approach of the historical geodatabase of European global navigation Global Sea Routes (GSR), which bases its research method on ship's logs and other primary sources produced by the practitioners themselves. In order to provide a richer account of the known history of the EIC's shipping in the early modern age, this essay will analyse Mawson's logbook, highlighting its peculiarities as a container for a wealth of information useful for creating a narrative construction.

The Foreword to this special issue of Itinerario describes the historical questions that inspired the Global Sea Routes project, from which the essays in the issue derive. It then illustrates the particular sources used in the project, namely logbooks, specifically those of the English East India Company, whose characteristics and interpretation problems are briefly presented. Then, it illustrates the digital tools used in the analysis of those sources and to obtain the digital graphic and cartographic representation of the research results; and finally, it introduces each individual essay contained in the issue.

The role played by the East India Company in European expansion in early modern Asia is of such importance that it has generated a large body of scholarly literature. However, the logbooks of the East Indiamen, compiled by their captains, are largely overlooked as a primary source for the history of navigation, despite the wealth of information such firsthand, “from below” documents could provide about those voyages. As part of the Global Sea Routes (GSR) project, this essay analyses the voyage of the Nassau (1781–85) along four main themes: the peculiarities of navigation during the Age of Sail, when the duration of a voyage was difficult to predict and subject to a range of possible accidents; the concrete reality of life on board, oscillating between the various activities of the crew and the episodes of desertion and insubordination that broke its daily routine; her military deployment, as the Nassau was directly involved in operations related to the Second Anglo-Mysore War; and, finally, her commercial activities, from the port cities of India to the seas of China.

European navigation in the age of sail owes much to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the development of instruments and advanced mathematical techniques. Important though these developments were, it is argued here that close observation of the environment: of the weather, ocean currents, clouds, birds, mammals, and a host of other factors played a far more important role in safe navigation from one part of the globe to another.

Research into maritime history using digital tools is a growing field, with projects that in recent years have focused on the role of sea spaces in the dynamics of globalisation on an economic and juridical level as well as on a cultural level, with respect to the circulation of knowledge. In this introduction to our special issue, we offer some historiographical observations on the codification of knowledge in seafaring practice, emphasising how the use of digital tools to process and represent primary sources may encourage historians to formulate new questions about the relationship between European culture and the sea during the early modern age. In order to present the articles in this issue and the original contribution they make to the field, we also focus on the historical and cultural significance and methodological challenges posed by primary sources such as logbooks. We illustrate how the analysis of logbooks in a digital environment such as Global Sea Routes (GSR), a project conceived and coordinated by Guido Abbattista, can foster a better understanding of the role of routine navigations in early commercial globalisation.

Islands have played a much larger role in global history than their small size may suggest. The study of islands, once a part of maritime history, has since 2006 grown into its own interdisciplinary field of “island studies.” The three books analysed in this review all stand to contribute to the new field. The books under review are The Boundless Sea (2019), A World at Sea (2020), and África y sus islas (2021). Island-specific topics advanced by these books include islands as nodes in trade networks, the detrimental influence of colonisation on island environments, the use of islands as locations to escape from slavery, ethnographic descriptions of islands, and indigenous knowledge produced by islanders.

Over the past two decades, the relatively young field of global history has generated remarkable excitement among students, scholars, and readers who want to read scholarship that crosses borders and brings many worlds to a single methodological framework. Global perspectives have been particularly fruitful for telling political histories that have defined the modern world. Today, there is increasing scholarly interest in writing global intellectual histories of decolonisation and anti-colonialism. In the pages that follow, I consider new work, situated in several disciplines, that pushes the methodological boundaries of historical inquiry into our connected pasts. These works include Daniel Elam's World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth; Madhumita Lahiri's Imperfect Solidarities; Peace on Our Terms by Mona L. Siegel; and The Fury Archives by Juno Jill Richards.

Over the last twenty years, global history has experienced a considerable boom, breaking with traditional historical approaches that privileged the national framework and very often adopted a Eurocentric perspective. This triumphalist discourse about the field of global history should not, however, obscure the local and national specificities of this field of research, be they epistemological, institutional, thematic, or historiographical, nor the disciplinary, political, and economic obstacles with which researchers are confronted. This conversation explores the intellectual and structural specificities and constraints of global history.

Based on Japanese and Portuguese sources, this paper aims at recovering local categories of bondage in order to identify mechanisms by which people were subjected to bonded labour in early modern Japan. The analysis focuses on crossing local forms of bondage, here referred to as genin, and the processes of subjecting individuals to this condition, the so-called called geninka, with the European notion of slavery and enslavement. Local forms of subjection to bondage are drawn from the analysis of early seventeenth-century Tokugawa legislation dedicated to the suppression of human trafficking networks. These documents use a number of labels such as genin, hōkōnin, wakatō, chūgen, hikan, and komono, all references to people subjected to various forms of bondage. At the same time, a crucial debate among members of the Society of Jesus in India offers the opportunity to scrutinise the application of the historical and legal European concept of slavery and enslavement to Japan, a region beyond the secular authority of colonial empires. Ultimately, slavery reveals itself as one of the many categories used by early modern actors to interpret and regulate labour arrangements in the budding Christian communities created by missionaries in the Iberian world.

This article discusses recent work on cross-cultural interactions between missionaries and Central Africans, including Images on a Mission by Cécile Fromont, Religious Entanglements by David Maxwell, and “What Is Religion in Africa?” by Birgit Meyer. These works adopt an entangled approach, examining how Christianisation engendered interconnections between Central Africans and missionaries and between Central Africa and Europe. In this way, the works paint a nuanced image of the cross-cultural interactions that occurred in the framework of the Christianisation of Central Africa, showing us how an entangled approach can help examine such interactions afresh. By contextualising the manifold ways in which Westerners and non-Westerners, the West and the non-West were entangled, we can better understand the (power) dynamics and outcomes of cross-cultural interactions. By reading sources in an entangled manner, we can get a completer view of the wide array of interactions between Westerners and non-Westerners. By acknowledging how historical entanglements shaped the analytical concepts we use, we can decolonise our scholarly practice. This article shows how the study of a fundamentally cross-cultural phenomenon—Christianity in the non-Western world—can inspire global and imperial historians to study cross-cultural interactions in a truly cross-cultural manner.

This article examines two different missionary areas where the Society of Jesus was sent to evangelise the native population: the Andean territories previously under Inca domination and the remote Mariana Islands in the Pacific Rim. The gathering of “other barbarians” living outside “civilised” societies was a tool of early modern colonisers within Europe and beyond. The English did so in sixteenth-century Ireland and the Spanish began reducing the so-called American Indians to new settlements in New Spain and Peru. In this paper, I want to compare the methods used to concentrate the natives of the Viceroyalty of Peru, where the Jesuits actively collaborated, with the borderland mission of the Marianas, where the Jesuits worked as parishioners of a much less sophisticated people: the CHamoru.1 As I will demonstrate, this policy of gathering souls was not an isolated one, but part and parcel of a universalistic principle of spreading God's word that was irremediably embedded in colonial structures of coercion and political control in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.

Museums which display all of their colonial collections are rare, and those which offer clear information on collection provenances and colonial histories in displays are rarer still. Absence and silence surrounding the colonial past in Europe's museums places them at odds with international pressure to account for the custodianship of colonial-era collections. This is examined here through investigating the silent heritage of the Ruxton Nigeria Collection, held at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London. Ruxton collected as a military official during Britain's conquest of Nigeria. His collection is typical of assemblages throughout European ethnographic museums, dominated by “everyday” material heritage, not the “treasures” of elites which monopolise restitution discourse. How can provenance research be conducted upon quieter collections dating from the colonial era with little accompanying documentation? What are the potential impacts of such research upon restitution debates? From the available evidence around the Ruxton collection, it is clear that silences are more fundamental than just a matter of archival gaps, and if silences remain even after provenance research (which many museums are unable to conduct on all of their collections), then we need to question not only why and how collections are displayed, but how museums justify having them at all.