The close, reciprocal relationship between overseas expansion and domestic state formation in early modern Western Europe has long been understood. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Portugal, the Netherlands, and England used the resources arising from their Atlantic colonies and Asia trades to defend themselves against their respective Spanish and French enemies. Creating and sustaining a territorial or trading empire, therefore, enabled polities not only to survive but also to enhance their standing with-i n the hierarchy of European states. The proposition that success overseas facilitated state development at home points however to the opposite logic, that where kingdoms failed as colonial powers they might well suffer from inhibited state formation. Indeed, if the example of England demonstrated how empire augmented a kingdom's power, then the experience of its neigh-bour, Scotland, seemed to reveal one possible outcome for a country unable to access colonial expansion. In 1707 Scotland negotiated away its political sovereignty and entered into an incorporating union with England. The new British framework enabled the Scots to access English markets (both domestic and colonial) previously closed to them. This does not mean that the 1707 union was simply an exchange of Scottish sovereignty for involvement in England's economy. Pressing political concerns, not least the Hanoverian succession played an equal if not more important role in the making of the British union. The question of political causation notwithstanding, the prevailing historiography of 1707 still places Scotland in a dichotomous framework of declining continental markets on the one hand and the lure of more expansive trade with England' domestic and overseas outlets on the other.

The setting is 25 February 1603. At dawn the three ships under the supreme command of Jakob van Heemskerk spot a Portuguese carrack in anchor off the Eastern shores of Singapore Island. She was richly laden with wares from China and Japan. The battle for the carrack lasted for most hours of daylight, and as night was about to fall, the Portuguese captain, crew, soldiers and passengers surrendered. They forfeited ship and cargo for having their lives spared.

Scattered as it was over thousands of miles of African and Asian coastline, the Portuguese empire in the East had a peculiar shape when compared to the Spanish one in the New World. As one author of the early seventeenth century put it, ‘the king our lord does not have more than twenty leagues of land in all Asia, from Macao to the Cape of Good Hope’. Portugal was a small country with a population of one and a half million people, and it is no surprise that the Portuguese presence in Asia - a ‘network’ rather than an ‘empire’, as some authors claim - had to rely heavily on diplomacy. The wholesale ‘conquest’ (conquista) of the East was perceived as a theoretical right of the Portuguese crown, but in practice most relations with Eastern polities rested on a complex set of negotiated links of ‘friendship’ (amizade) or indirect submission (uassalagem).

Countless studies by historians, art historians and anthropologists have dealt with the early modern image of the South African Khoikhoi. Lacking everything that Europeans valued, they fell prey to the most contemptuous imagery available. The term ‘Hottentots’, by which they were known, was considered more or less synonymous with monstrous appearance, beastly habits and cultural ignorance. As such they were portrayed in official reports and travel journals, in prints and drawings. Few European artists and travel writers published their observations with any recourse to reality, however. They usually created their images in Europe in accordance with prevailing artistic and literary conventions, time and again reverting to stereotypes that were embedded in prejudice and based on incomplete and distorted knowledge. Thus far scholars have not discovered a single drawing by an eyewitness from the first two centuries of Khoikhoi-European encounters. As a consequence our insight into the mechanisms of stereotyping is far from complete. We neither know how the images were perceived by European viewers nor do we know if and how the stereotypes blurred the perception and judgement of eyewitnesses themselves.

During a parliamentary debate in April 1874, the Dutch conservative politician Nierstrasz made this provocative statement on the war in Aceh. He was supported by the former conservative Minister of Foreign Affairs, Van Zuylen van Nijevelt, who dismissed the negotiations held with Aceh on the basis of a strict ultimatum condescendingly as ‘negotiations à la Bismarck’, and unworthy of a Dutch statesman. Nierstrasz maintained the Dutch were pursuing a ‘utilitarian’ policy in Aceh which they would abominate seeing implemented on themselves in Europe. The Aceh War was a disgrace to a Christian nation. Furthermore, the moral issue put forward by the Dutch authorities: that the state of Aceh was guilty of piracy and slavery, was no more than a pretext.

In July 1796, Johannes Albertyn, a well-respected burgher of Stellenbosch, requested permission from Ryno van der Riet, landdrost of Stellenbosch, the chief administrative and legal officer of the district, to indenture four Khoikhoi children. He claimed that their mother, Catryn Paerl, had died recently and that before her demise, she had requested him in the presence of witnesses to raise her children and deny their biological father Jan Paerl any future role in their lives. Faced with the prospect of losing custody of his four children and having exhausted all possible avenues in seeking legal redress, including a visit to landdrost Van der Riet, the seemingly incomparable Jan Paerl hit the road and walked several kilometres from Stellenbosch to Cape Town. His destination: the Castle, in particular the office of the fiscal, otherwise known as the public prosecutor. In Cape Town, he urged the fiscal to intervene in the dispute and deny Albertyn the right to indenture his children. As their father, Paerl insisted that he, and not Albertyn, be granted sole custody of his offspring. By Paerl's demanding legal intervention at the highest level, the following encounter between Paerl, Albertyn and the Cape authorities exemplifies not only a classic struggle between master and servant, but highlights simultaneously the significance of ‘equality’ before the law in Cape society, at a time when burghers increasingly feared the possibility of gelykstelling at the end of the eighteenth century.

The conquest of Olinda in 1630 by forces of the Dutch West Indian Company (WIC) was the beginning of a period that has become known as Dutch Brazil. The enterprise flourished after the board of directors of the WIC, the gentlemen XIX, appointed Count Johann Moritz von Nassau in 1636 as Governor General. Recife, the present capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, became the administrative centre of an area reaching from the state of Alagoas to the state of Maranhāo. The uprising of a large part of the Portuguese population in 1645, a year after the departure of Nassau, turned Recife into a beleaguered fortress that surrendered itself and all other WIC possessions in Brazil on 26 January 1654.

It is a well-known fact that the reconstitution of the English East India Company in the 1660s caused a significant revolution in its Asia trade. Coincidently with this improvement, the Company also attempted to expand its trade to East Asian countries, using its Bantam Agent, its only base in Southeast Asia, as a springboard for launching this strategy. Around 1668 the Court of Committees in London was looking for an appropriate opportunity to re-open relations with Japan through the channel of Cambodia. The plan of re-entering the Japan trade – in this the directors in London might have been influenced by their officials in Bantam or they themselves had overestimated its prospects – was then put into practice at the end of 1671. Forthe Company itself, trading with Japan would obviously be profitable, as it had observed at first hand the considerable success of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) over the last decades. The English in the East also grew convinced that the regional trade between Japan and other areas would reap extra profits for the Company. Among the selected targets was Tonkin, present-day northern Vietnam. At that time, its silks and other textiles were highly valued and could fetch good prices in Japan. Traders who took Tonkinese silks to Nagasaki were then able to purchase Japanese silver and copper. These precious metals would be brought back to invest in local merchandize at other factories to keep up the flow of the Japan trade and to supply marketable goods for Europe. The ultimate aim of the English in tradingwith Tonkin was, therefore, to create the so-called Tonkinese silk-for-Japanese silver trade, like that successfully undertaken by the Dutch since 1637. Besides, the search for new markets for English manufactured goods was another reason that spurred the Company on to carry out this plan.

Western expansion in Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth century resulted in two different groups of Asian countries: those which fell victim to European colonialism and those which managed to maintain the basis of their sovereign rights. This contribution will concentrate on the second group, including not only the countries of the so-called Far East but those of the Middle Eastern Ottoman Empire as well. The link between these two otherwise separate worlds is the concept of consular jurisdiction. It originated in the Islamic world and was transplanted by the West to China, Japan and Siam in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, it became the touchstone in the relations of the Asian countries with the West in their struggle for equality.

On 3 May 1638, Anthonie van Diemen, Governor-General of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company, met Hamzah, Sultan of Ternate, in the roadstead of Kambelo. Kambelo was one of the principal settlements on the west coast of Hoamoal, the western peninsula of the island of Seram. As such it was part of the Ternatan dependencies in the Amboina Islands, present-day Maluku Tengah. Van Diemen had arrived in Amboina at the end of February with a capital fleet of seventeen ships, carrying about 1,700 men on board. After he had been apprised that Hamzah had not yet arrived, in March Van Diemen continued his journey to the Banda Islands to inspect and arrange the VOC affairs in that area. In April he returned to Amboina, where, after a short stop at Hila, he sailed to Kambelo because word had reached him that some fifteen ‘junks’ from Java and Sulawesi had arrived there. As these ships were considered to be interlopers, suspected of carrying away cloves, thus violating the VOC monopoly, Van Diemen planned to attack them. However, as soon as Hamzah arrived, accompanied by a fleet, a hongi, of ten kora-kora, indigenous galley-like war vessels, the proposed action was postponed. For the time being diplomacy won the upper hand over violence. There was hope that the meeting of ‘these two great personalities’ could resolve long-standing conflicts in the area.

Even after the passing of the ‘Free Trade’ acts in Europe and America between 1765 and 1803, colonisation still meant trade for European mercantile and maritime powers which were beginning to think of themselves as liberal in the politico-economic sense. As before, the only suitable way of obtaining profits appeared to be economic exploitation, albeit within a politico-institutional structure. This ideal had inspired the inflexible system that had dominated the relations of both Spain and Portugal with their respective transatlantic colonies. Likewise, ever since their first incursions into the New World, northern Europeans had encouraged the creation of commercial companies dedicated to monopolising any of the goods that colonies might possibly have to offer. Dutch, English and French merchants developed farreaching private and state programmes designed to direct trade and colonisation and to encourage the populating of the new lands. During the seventeenth century, some of these companies achieved considerable success. They were able to settle, with or without permission from the Spanish monarchy, in territories formally under Spanish control, such as Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, coastal Venezuela or Guiana, regarded as areas eminently suited to business projects.

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?