In the introduction to her work on ‘colonial practice’ in the Ne Indies, the Dutch-American historian Frances Gouda quotes from sation in Harvard between Christopher Hitchens and Simon Schama the latter a renowned historian of the Dutch past. Hitchens posed a to Schama: how was it possible that Dutch culture, though reprc a ‘model of highly evolved religious tolerance and political plurali rently gave birth to a diaspora (he has Indonesia, Surinam and So1 in mind) that is ‘so disfigured by violence and bigotry’? Schama pointed out that Dutch political and religious tolerance was actually predicated on the need to foster profitable trade: it was a practical consideration rather than an idealism. We could add here that so much is almostcommon-sense in the Netherlands. However, Schama pointed out a tendencyof Dutch ‘self-invention’ that first expressed itself in the rise of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century and then in the rise of Afrikanerdom Africa. As Gouda rightly points out, following Schama's own work, the Dutch Republic rose from a ‘Protean feat of self-creation’ out ofan ‘amorphous assemblage of towns and villages’, in an act resembling parthenogenesis. She then adds that this ‘unique Dutch habit of self-invention may have also taken place elsewhere in the world.

It would be hard to find a more fundamental question in economic history than the one professor Landes asks in his latest book: why are some nations so rich and some so poor? To every economist and economic historian analysing this problem is an immense intellectual challenge. Landes however does not merely tackle it from a strictly intellectual perspective. He also hopes that by writing the book under review he can contribute to an answer and thereby help the poor to become healthier and wealthier. He approaches his subject historically. He does so not just because he is a historian, but also because he thinks the best way to understand a problem is to ask: How and why did we get where we are?

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.

Before World War II, French Indochina little concerned American policymakers. The idea of sending half a million men to fight a war there would have seemed as fantastic as sending a man to the moon. Even after John F. Kennedy decided that the United States should - and could - send a man to the moon, the idea of sending half a million men to Vietnam still seemed fantastic. When George Ball expressed fears that such a possibility indeed existed if matters were allowed to continue until incremental creep became an avalanche, the president was astounded. ‘George’, Kennedy admonished him, ‘you're just crazier than hell. That just isn't going to happen.’ Historians still debate whether Kennedy would have followed the same path Lyndon Johnson took in Vietnam, thereby fulfilling George Ball's seemingly absurd prophecy. My purpose here is not to rehearse the arguments in that debate. Instead, I want to talk about the American ‘cause’ in Vietnam, and how, beginning in World War II, a generalised concern with the problem of closed economies and the creation of a post-colonial world order finally became focused on Vietnam.

For those historians and anthropologists who study shamanism, Altai represents the ‘motherland’ of this institution. For their inspirations scholars who want to explore ‘classical’ cases of shamanism usually turn to this area, located in south-western Siberia, at the intersection of Russian, Mongolian and Chinese borders. At the same time, many of these scholars, who are concerned with a quest for ‘ideal’ and ‘traditionalist’ shamanism, ignore almost one-hundred years of contacts between native Altaians and the Russian Orthodox mission that considerably affected indigenous culture and ideology. For instance, some Russian anthropologists have stressed that despite Christian activities, natives still clung to their traditional beliefs at the turn of the twentieth century. N.A. Alekseev emphasised the superficial character of native Christianization and stressed the persistence of indigenous religion. In his recent work, Potapov, another prominent Altaian scholar, similarly concluded:

David Landes addresses in his latest book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor (London 1998), an issue at the very heart of the global economic history of the latter half of the millennium now coming to a close. This issue is an analysis of the circumstances that have brought into existence a world characterised by a fast-growing disparity in economic performance and levels of living across its different segments. According to Angus Maddison, one hundred and fifty years ago the gap in mean per capita share of gross domestic product between the richest and poorest global regions, namely Western Europe and Africa, was probably three to one. Today this gap between a rich country such as Switzerland and a poor country such as Mozambique is a mind boggling four hundred to one. How this state of affairs has come about is the basic question asked by Landes.

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 true chiefdoms by 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.

Before discussing Vietnam, I would like to begin in a more general mode by citing a recent instance of remembering and retelling which, as is always the case, also involves as much forgetting and silencing. Last year, the history of the Khmer Rouge occupied television news and newspapers on the occasion of the unmourned death of Pol Pot. With only one exception that I have seen – the British journalist John Pilger's report for the Nation magazine, every press account of Pol Pot's death referred to the support the Khmer Rouge received from Thailand and China.

The year 1998 saw the publication of a new and impressive handbook on the history of Dutch economic expansion and political domination in Asia and the Indonesian Archipelago in particular: J.J.P. de Jong's De waaier van het fortuin (The fan of fortune). Its almost seven hundred pages are packed with information about the Dutch in the Indonesian archipelago in the period between 1595, when the first Dutch ships departed for Asia, and 1950, when the Dutch colonial presence in Indonesia (with the exception of Dutch New Guinea) came to an end. De Jong, an official at the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs, who obtained his doctorate with a thesis on the Indonesian decolonisation in 1988, has undoubtedly delivered his magnum opus with this new study. The book does not only tell the story of the Dutch expansion in Indonesia, it also gives a number of new or partly new interpretations of Dutch colonial history in the archipelago. It is divided into five parts: I: The Era of the Dutch East India Company; II: ‘Plantation Java’; III: The Era of Changes, 1870–1918; IV: The Modern Colony, 1918–1942; and V: ‘Denouement’, 1942–1950.

Since this conference is a small and intimate affair, the question I want to raise today is a modest: Why did President Kennedy in July 1963 appoint Henry Cabot Lodge Jr as the American Ambassador to Saigon?

The question is not only modest, Professor Gardner might say that it is redundant. In Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam, Gardner writes about Kennedy's decision to replace Frederick Nolting and nominate Lodge, that the new ambassador could offer him ‘protective coloration’ against Republicans attacking the Administration's Vietnam policy.

El que se aventurare a echar el dado con la Fortuna, quando se pierda a sý mismo dará la culpa. Esto acustumbravan los antigos como de poca experiencia y que se ariesgavan mucho a ganar o perder, como vemos la poca considerasion que tuvo Alexiandre Magno en cortar el nudo de la cuerda que estava pronosticado que quien le desatasse, sería Señor de la mayor parte del mundo; y él, como no le pudiesse desatar, sacó la espada y cortóle. Susediole tan bien como sy le ubiera desatado. El contrario acontesio a el Rey de Portugal que quiso tan ynpensadamente yr a conquis-tar las Yndias Orientales, bisonho en reynar en el mundo, y más moderno Rey que avia entonces. Pues fue Conde de Lorayna que por su buen servicio le dio el Rey d'Espanha, Affonso, su hija Doña Tarresa y en casamiento a Portugal el año 1100. Y como su sususor Don Juan el Primero comensó a tomar la ynpresa de la Yndia Oriental, donde mandó lo mejor de la tierra, veniendo Cristóval Colombo el año 1490 a su susesor el Rey Don Manoel, mostrándole lo que eran las Yndias Osidentales, la Nueva Amériqua, como él estava enpennado con tanta fuerça en la Yndia Oriental, no pudo acudir a tanto.

Although the United States granted the Philippines formal independence in 1946, American influence in the former colony did not disappear overnight. In the decades following independence, American policymakers continued to play key roles in Philippine politics; American businessmen, presidents, legislators, and bureaucrats and US-based international money lending agencies continued to have a considerable impact on the Philippine economy; and American popular culture continued to penetrate Philippine society and culture (as it did elsewhere). But perhaps no sector of Philippine society was as profoundly influenced by Americans as the academic one, and no subdivision of the Philippine academy bore the American imprint as visibly as Philippine social science. This paper examines the academic career, writings, institution-building efforts, and scholarly agenda of the US-born scholar who arguably had the greatest impact on post-war Philip- pine social science: Father Frank Lynch, a Jesuit professor of anthropology and sociology at Ateneo de Manila University.