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 the Ministerio 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-century arbitrista. 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’.

In the recent debates gripping the Australian national psyche regarding the ‘Stolen Children’ (the often forcible removal of Aboriginal children of mixed European descent from their Aboriginal mothers practiced for most of the twentieth century under Australian Federal law) little credence is given to now outdated notion of ‘half-caste’ which inspired the original legislation. Today, self-identification, regardless of colour and heritage, determines Aboriginal ethnicity. But ‘half-caste-ness’ constituted a powerful concept in the process of nation formation in colonial Australia and in other colonial contexts.

In the above quotation, the Jesuit, Manuel da Nóbrega, chose a lingua (Gonçalo Alvares) as interlocutor for his Dialogue on the Conversion of Pagans The expression lingua (literally: tongue), in the sense of interpreter, or a person with a gift of oratory in Tupi-language, usually appears in Jesuit letters and catalogues as an attribute of some of its members. For example, in the catalogue of priests and brothers of Bahia, 1566, it is said that Gaspar Lourenco ‘acts as the lingua of Father Antonio Pires’, then vice-provincial of the Mission in Brazil. In another list of Jesuits in the Province of Brazil, in 1600, there are fifty-eight names qualified as linguas, almost one-third of the general members.

What is, and was, South Africa? This is clearly not a question which has a single answer, nor has it ever had one. On the one hand, there is a constitutional answer. In these terms, South Africa did not exist before the creation of the Union in 1910 and since then has been the state created then, transformed into the Republic of South Africa in 1961 and transformed once again with the ending of white minority rule in 1994. On the other hand, there are innumerable answers, effectively those to be found in the minds of all South Africans, and indeed all those foreigners who have an opinion about the country. Nevertheless, these opinions are not random. Clearly, there are regularities to be found within them, such that it is possible, in principle, to describe at the very least the range of answers to this question which were held within particular groups of the population, either within the country or outside it, and also to use specific sources, emanating from a single person, or group of individuals, as exemplary of the visions held by a far wider group.

On 16 March 1792, King Christian VII of Denmark, his own incompetent hand guided by that of the young Crown Prince Frederik (VI), signed decree banning both the importation of slaves into the Danish West Indies (now the United States Virgin Islands) and their export from the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast, in what is now Ghana. To soften the blow to the planters of the Danish West Indies and to secure the continued production of sugar, the law was not to take effect for ten years. In the meantime, imports of slaves, and of women especially, would actually encouraged by state loans and favourable tariffs, so as, it was hoped, render the slave population capable of reproducing itself naturally thereafter.

In the late nineteenth century, the distance from Qui Nhon to Kontum – a trip of about two hundred kilometers – was nearly insurmountable. The route most travellers took led from the port town in southern Annam out across a narrow coastal plain of cultivated fields before crossing rivers and gorges, and ascending rocky mountains. Then the path leveled out on a high plateau of extreme weather and dense forests where fever, tigers, and unwelcoming local communities intimidated even the hardiest of travellers. Though well within the borders of French-controlled Annam, there was little Vietnamese – and even less French – about these highlands. The region was inhabited almost exclusively by a variety of indigenous groups like the Sedang, the Bahnar, and thejarai, who were both ethnically distinct from the majority Vietnamese population of Annam, and politically independent from the emperor in Hué as well as the French colonial administration. The region was so isolated from the rest of the colony that Frenchmen invoked the Vietnamese name for the area, calling it the Pays Moï– ‘savages' country’ – and even the missionaries, the only Europeans to live in the region until the early 1900s, referred to their headquarters in Kontum as the ‘Mission des Sauvages’. It was an unlikely focal point for one of the most divisive controversies in the French empire.