What was seventeenth-century Dutch expansion in Southeast Asia all about? In the traditional historiography, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was predominantly presented as a multinational corporation and non-state colonial actor. Recent research, however, has significantly challenged this view, stressing instead the imperial aspects of VOC rule. This article aims to break new ground by analysing the vocabularies used in seventeenth-century reasoning about Dutch expansion overseas. Focusing on three critics of the VOC from the 1660s and 1670s, Pieter van Dam, Pieter de la Court, and Pieter van Hoorn, the article shows how voices within and outside of the ranks of the Company tried to make sense of the many-faced VOC as a commercial company that was also, in different ways, a state. In an on-going debate that centred on the issues of colonisation, conquest, free trade, and monopoly, the VOC was characterised as a distinctive political body that operated as an overseas extension of the state (Van Dam), as a competitor of the state (De la Court), or as a state as such (Van Hoorn). Following Philip J. Stern's recent analysis of the English East India Company, the VOC should therefore be considered to be a particular political institution in its own terms, which challenged its critics to think about it as a body politic that was neither corporation nor empire, but rather a Company-State.

The Great War was indeed a world war. Imperial powers like Great Britain drew on their far-flung empires not only for resources but also for manpower. This essay examines one important (though still inadequately studied) aspect of British wartime exigency, the voluntary and coerced participation of the British Empire's coloured subjects and allies in military operations on the Western Front. With the exception of the Indian Army in the first year of the war, that participation did not include combat. Instead coloured troops, later joined by contract labourers, played major roles behind the lines. From 1916 onwards, well over a quarter million Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, South Africans, West Indians, New Zealand Maoris, Black Canadians, and Pacific Islanders worked the docks, built roads and railways, maintained equipment, produced munitions, dug trenches, and even buried the dead. Only in recent years has the magnitude of their contribution to Allied victory begun to be more fully acknowledged. Yet the greatest impact of British labour policies in France might lie elsewhere entirely. Chinese workers seem likely to have carried the virus that caused the Great Flu pandemic of 1918-19, which may have killed more people around the world than the war itself.

This article examines some of the core holdings within the Archive for Contemporary Affairs at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Prominent amongst this material are the papers of the National Party (NP), the political party that formalised the structures of apartheid. Paying particular attention to the papers of what Hermann Giliomee has termed ‘The Last Afrikaner Leaders’ alongside recently acquired material concerning post-colonial politics, we argue for the importance of this archive for scholars studying Afrikaner nationalism, at both national and regional level, the rationales and discourses of apartheid and the history of the country more broadly.

The Swedish East India Company has been studied mainly from an economic standpoint, but throughout the eighteenth century its employees played a crucial role in Swedish knowledge production on China. This article studies travel writings, speeches, and eulogies by the employees of the Swedish East India Company, noting in which ways they produced knowledge on China, and discusses reasons for choosing these particular ways. The company employees' production of knowledge is found to have strong links with their constructions of masculinity. Consequently, this article discusses the political implications of a connection between masculinity and knowledge for men employed in a non-colonial East India Company from a militarily weak country, and the role that the perceived and presented knowledge of China and its inhabitants played in this intertwining of gender construction, natural history, and power.

As the Portuguese settlement of Macau came to occupy an important position in the emerging global commercial web, it became a crossroads where peoples from disparate parts of the world—in particular, Portuguese and Chinese—came together to engage in a profitable trade. Historians have often treated Macau as a prototypical example of cross-cultural interaction and hybridity: a point where East and West converged and blended; an “Intercultural City,” in the words of one scholar. Yet, the notion of Macau as a place of intermingling and blending obscures some of the ways in which Macau's inhabitants did not quite “come together.” Here, I focus on the asymmetry in linguistic communication that developed in Macau: members of Macau's Portuguese mercantile elite did not become fluent in any of the Chinese dialects, and did not learn how to read or write the Chinese script, while a number of the Chinese who came to live in Macau—whether as merchants, tradesmen, labourers, servants, or slaves—became proficient in Portuguese. Drawing from a range of sources in Portuguese and Chinese, I argue that this asymmetry developed for several reasons, including the difficulty of the Chinese language, the Chinese government's approach to foreign relations and maritime, and the political and economic power of the Portuguese within their Lusophone enclave. I also consider how the Portuguese reliance on others for assistance with cross-cultural communication—most notably, Jesuit missionaries and Chinese jurubaças (interpreters)—shaped the evolution of the multicultural community.

On the outbreak of war, men from the Dominions were scattered across the British Empire. As each Dominion began recruiting their expeditionary forces at home, the issue arose whether these expatriates, especially those resident in the United Kingdom, should join the British Army or be able to enlist in their Dominion's force. Canada and New Zealand allowed recruiting for the CEF and NZEF in the UK. Many Anglophone White South Africans joined a “colonial” battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. The Australian Government refused to allow Australians in the UK to join the AIF, despite the repeated requests of the Australian expatriate community. This paper examines the questions of British and sub-Imperial Dominion identities as well as the practical policy considerations raised by this issue. It argues that there is some evidence of nascent Dominion nationalism—the Canadian High Commission in London issued what became known as “a Certificate of Canadian Citizenship” to expatriates— but that Dominion Governments generally based their decisions on this issue based on cost and domestic political considerations.

Virginia was founded with a certainty of common humanity that had disastrous consequences for its native peoples. The English established Jamestown in 1607—in what was to become their first permanent settlement in America—with all the mixed motivations of benevolence and grasping desire of any colonial enterprise. Yet they firmly believed the peoples that they found there, whom they called Indians, were as human as themselves. Convinced that they possessed an absolute truth valid for all peoples in all times and places, they desired to embrace and mould these Indians into their own ideal vision of humanity. It was this inclusive embrace of the Indians, and not any cynical attempts to exploit them or to denigrate them as “other,” which led to the destruction of their way of life. The tragedy of the colony was due to the most benevolent of intentions.

In 1914, most New Zealanders welcomed the opportunity to stand together with the British Empire. Historians have long recognised that for a small country the contribution to the war effort of pakeha New Zealanders was substantial. Much less well recognised is the contribution of Māoris who served at Gallipoli and on the western front. In the face of opposition from within the Māori community and from British High Command, a determined group of Māori leaders argued forcefully for sending Māoris into action. Many young Māori men responded with enthusiasm to the recruitment drive and the First Māori Battalion sailed to Egypt in February 1915. This paper explores the tensions that resonated within the Māori community around the recruitment of Māori men and argues that the debates were shaped by different understandings of nationhood. Māoris who opposed recruitment believed that volunteering to fight in a foreign war distracted Māoris from dealing with the difficulties in their own communities. Conversely those who argued for participation in the war believed that their contribution to the war would lead to utu (justice), and that only by including Māoris as soldiers in fighting units could all New Zealanders claim to belong to an authentic nation.

On November 15, 1865, the French inhabitants of New Caledonia gathered together with a number of the island's natives to celebrate the lighting of the lighthouse. It was scheduled to coincide with the saint day of the Empress Eugénie, and the imperial vision rang loudly through Governor Guillain's inaugural address that evening

If, transporting ourselves in thought into the different regions of the civilized world, we examine the events transpiring there, the most magnificent panorama is unrobed before our eyes. Everywhere,—and this will be the glory of our epoch,—everywhere, great works are being executed to bring the peoples together, to multiply their relations, to prepare, in a word, that universal brotherhood, destined and reserved by Providence for future generations.

Universal brotherhood may seem like a tall order for a lighthouse, but Guillain was a man who liked to dream big. He had arrived in 1862 as governor of New Caledonia and director of the prison France hoped to establish there, but he really envisioned himself as an enlightened technocrat engineering a perfect society on his unspoiled island paradise.

This article explores the private trade networks of English East India Company merchants on the west coast of India during the first half of the eighteenth century. Existing studies of English private trade in the Indian Ocean have almost exclusively focused on India's eastern seaboard, the Coromandel Coast and the Bay of Bengal regions. This article argues that looking at private trade from the perspective of the western Indian Ocean provides a different picture of this important branch of European trade. It uses EIC records and merchants' private papers to argue against recent metropolitan-centred approaches to English private trade, instead emphasising the importance of more localised political and economic contexts, within the Indian Ocean world, for shaping the conduct and success of this commerce.

The crossroads of nationalist historiographies in sub-Saharan Africa and of the history of developmentalist attempts that characterise the European late colonial states, have left us with very incomplete images of important trajectories. In the seemingly more “liberal” large colonial empires—notably the French and British—sails were set by 1945 towards a policy of investment and economic change. Some of the scholarly debates question whether this investment was genuine or just a last resort to avoid (rapid) decolonisation; others put the emphasis on inadequate routines of development implemented in these territories, many of which have apparently been continued since decolonisation.

In this context, we encounter a clear lack of understanding about how decisions made by individual actors on the administrative level interacted with the larger panorama of social conditions in colonial territories, and of the consequences that these interactions had for the paths towards decolonisation. For a smaller empire such as the Belgian colony of Congo-Léopoldville, these processes are still more obscure; and for the colonies ruled by authoritarian metropoles, as in the cases of territories under Spanish and Portuguese rule, stagnation and absence of change are often taken for granted. In other words, these territories, which were under the rule of metropoles regarded as rather weak in economic terms, are treated as unrepresentative of the broader, European movement towards change in colonial policies. However, the conditions of change towards economic and social modernisation in this latter group of empires, even when inhibited by lack of funding and weak professionalisation of the administration, are frequently very telling for the broader range of challenges that the late colonial states faced.

During the eighteenth century, the global environment of imperial competition and cooperation encouraged the circulation of highly qualified mapmaking personnel from the service of one ruler to the other, thus contributing to the dissemination of cartographic knowledge. This article examines the career of military engineer and mapmaker Michel Angelo de Blasco (1697-1772), whose life in the service of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Portuguese Empire illustrates the importance of trans-imperial approaches to the history of cartography. As Vienna and Lisbon sponsored large mapmaking enterprises, including border demarcations and military surveys, skilled cartographers became precious resources for these empires. However, in the case of de Blasco, the invaluable service done in Brazil for the Portuguese monarch, made him both sought-after as a potential information source for the Habsburg monarchs and unemployable due to the risk of a diplomatic conflict. The efforts of de Blasco to transition back into the service of Vienna included the unauthorised submission of cartographic material. Additionally, the details of the negotiations regarding this mapmaker's possible transfer reveal the processes of institutionalisation and centralisation Habsburg cartography underwent during the time of Maria Theresa (1740-80).