In our last issue, Enid Perlin's article ‘Ragi, Rice, and Four-yard Dhoties’ has, apart from the usual share of printing errors, suffered from a more substantial omission of several lines, which made page 41 unintelligible. We apologize for this unfortunate mistake.

After some inevatable deloys caused by Inc sloverest of south Dutch and overcas response to the questionaires concerning current resources which we enclosed with the first issuse of Itinerario in June 1977.

If the earlier workshops organized by the Centre, ‘Expansion and Reaction’ (1975) and ‘Reappraisals in Overseas History’ (1976), aimed at producing, respectively, a survey of some of the main problems involved in modern studies of the history of European expansion and a bibliographic overview of the same field as it appears to us to-day, the third colloquium at last got down to work on a specific historical issue. True, the theme of the trading companies of the ancien regime is a vast one, but the purpose of the workshop, as of the centre itself, was primarily comparative, and for this approach the theme chosen proved eminently fit.

In the nineteenth century, enthusiasm for colonialism was not uniform in Europe. There were many individuals, of all ranks, who took no interest in the acquiring of new colonies or in the governing of existing ones. Those who did take such an interest might be a fairly small group with common backgrounds and common aspirations, but it is not easy to discern precisely what drove individuals to become involved in colonial matters. Perhaps the easiest and most fruitful method is to approach the problem through the study of parliamentarians, since they are conspicuous figures whose position on these matters is easily determined, who presumably represent some section or other of, at least, the elite and about whom there is generally a considerable amount of biographical information. It is thus frequently possible to generalise as to what differentiated those who did busy themselves with colonial matters from those who did not.

On the first day of the Conference Professor M.A.P. Meilink Roelofsz spoke briefly of a distinguished historian of maritime trade who was at that moment far away in America.