The year 1998 saw the publication of a new and impressive handbook on the history of Dutch economic expansion and political domination in Asia and the Indonesian Archipelago in particular: J.J.P. de Jong's De waaier van het fortuin (The fan of fortune). Its almost seven hundred pages are packed with information about the Dutch in the Indonesian archipelago in the period between 1595, when the first Dutch ships departed for Asia, and 1950, when the Dutch colonial presence in Indonesia (with the exception of Dutch New Guinea) came to an end. De Jong, an official at the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs, who obtained his doctorate with a thesis on the Indonesian decolonisation in 1988, has undoubtedly delivered his magnum opus with this new study. The book does not only tell the story of the Dutch expansion in Indonesia, it also gives a number of new or partly new interpretations of Dutch colonial history in the archipelago. It is divided into five parts: I: The Era of the Dutch East India Company; II: ‘Plantation Java’; III: The Era of Changes, 1870–1918; IV: The Modern Colony, 1918–1942; and V: ‘Denouement’, 1942–1950.