That territorial expansion was not necessarily good business had been succinctly stated by Governor-General Jacob Mossel eight years before Hartingh: ‘What the lord spends, the merchant has to pay.’ In fact, concern about the price of territorial expansion had been voiced almost from the beginning, especially in the Board of Directors in Holland, witness Coenraad van Beuningen's analysis of the dual nature of the Company in 1684, in which he decried the territorial role of the Company as detrimental to its true function as a trading company. Also the underlying cause for the eventuel decline of the Company has by contemporaries as well as later observers often been blamed on this almost congenital defect of mixing trade and government in one body.

One of the classical accounts on the coming and first establishment of Islam in Indonesia runs as follows: Already a long time before the birth of Islam a mighty stream of colonisation started from Hindustan towards Java and surrounding islands. This stream definitely dominated the culture of this area and its influence is felt until today. After part of the Hindus had accepted Islam, these Indian Muslims were active in the trade with the archipelago and part of them also settled in this area. These traders and emigrants brought Islam into the Indian Archipelago. It is true, that already before this period some other Muslim nations sought articles of trade from the East-Indies and even established small settlements there: surely there resulted no permanent religious influence from these settlements. Islam, such as received by the Indonesians, therefore already experienced a process of adaptation towards the world of Hinduism. This made it easier for this new religion to accommodate itself once again to a degenerated Hinduism. Islam in the East-Indies unmistakably shows the signs of this Indian origin.

In 1888 Brazil abolished slavery as the last country in the Americas to do away with the ‘peculiar institution’. The following four essays study the widely varying impact of abolition on the economies and social structures of the ex-slave societies.

The problem that I have been dealing with over the last few years is how it might be possible to create a historical context for the study of South Indian religion. Like a number of other South Indian historians I have been concentrating on the rise and development of new states and chiefdoms during the late pre-colonial period — that is in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of European expansion in the sub-continent which preceded the consolidation of British imperial rule. My own work has focused on the role of shrines and holy places within these pre-colonial domains and chiefdoms.

The computer is rapidly gaining ground in the history of European overseas expansion. Vast amounts of systematic data are being processed with the aid of a whole host of automatic routines and programming devices. Use of modern computer technology may allow expansion historians to tackle problems on a larger scale and to furnish arguments with a more solid empirical foundation than was possible in previous days. Yet the road towards computerization is one full of pitfalls. The variety of available software options is truly bewildering and the accumulated knowhow in the field is not easily accessible. On the level of the individual researcher, there is a constant trade-off between investments in new skills and the actual processing of data and reporting of results. There is no single optimal path leading to maximal sophistication with a minimum of effort.

The nature of the relationship between the metropolitan world and the colonies and of its impact on the economic development of each of the two sides has been the subject of intense debate and controversy over a very long period of time. As far as the role of the colonial relationship in the development of the West is concerned, an important viewpoint has been that it would be wrong to assign a significant role to this factor in explaining European industrialization. In some recent economic literature on ‘Modern Imperialism’ it has been argued that neither in the field of capital formation in the metropolitan countries, nor in that of finding a market for the foods manufactured there, can an important role be assigned to the colonial factor. Only in highly specific cases such as textile manufacturing in Britain during the nineteenth century could the export market in the colonial world have been of some significance.

The reason to compare the recent histories of India and Indonesia was that they were the scenes of the two most extensive and populous colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The decision to push back the comparison to the pre-colonial era meant loosing track of the vital focus of the enterprise. Moreover, pre-colonial India presents a unity in only some respects whereas Indonesia as a territorial concept did not even exist then. The tendency of Indonesianists to focus, for convenience's sake, on the island of Java seems to become inescapable. This confronts those on the Indian wing of the comparison with the dilemma to what extent they are entitled to give up Indian unity and if they do, what part of India compares best with insular Java. Especially fit for comparison seem the regional states of South India: Vijayanagar, Madurai etc. Both the rice-based economies of the South Indian states and their size suggests this. Although Java became the core region of one of the colonial empires, whereas the South Indian states would stay at the periphery of the other, such a comparison could well be fruitful.

Certain stages of the European expansion process into Asia during the Age of Commercial Capitalism lend themselves well to the comparative historical approach because of the startling similarities and contrasts they offer. The Dutch and English commercial leaps forward into the Orient, for instance, occurred at the same time in the organisational framework of chartered East India Companies - the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) — which, moreover, chose the same theatre of action: Southeast Asia (Banten, Spice Islands) and South Asia (Surat and Coromandel). But although the aims, modes of operation and organisation of the two companies had much in common, these nonetheless each finally carved out their own sphere of influence in the trading world of Asia - the Dutch in Southeast Asia and the English in South Asia. While this consolidation process was taking place, the EIC and VOC gradually shed their semblance of being purely maritime trading organisations and, towards the second half of the eighteenth century, acquired the character of territorial powers. A shift in the balance of power also occurred between the two companies: if the Dutch were still paramount in the seventeenth century, the English totally overshadowed them as powerbrokers in Asian waters during the eighteenth. Did this transition of maritime hegemony occur gradually or should we rather speak of a ‘passage brusque et rapide’ as Fernand Braudel has suggested? Was it, as the traditional explanation has it, the inevitable outcome of the decline of the Dutch Republic to a second-rate power in Europe, or were local Asian developments, be they political or commercial, also involved?