The concepts of war and peace are not as simple as they appear at first glance. Closer scrutiny reveals that reality cannot be reduced to the simple dichotomy expressed by this pair of words. There have after all been wars which were never declared and periods of peace which did not follow peace treaties. Yet this made them no less real. Moreover some acts of war were described euphemistically as ‘punitive expeditions’, ‘punishment raids’, or ‘police operations’ while others were described pejoratively as ‘terrorism’, ‘banditry’, and ‘piracy’. There have been wars which officially lasted seven, nine, thirty, eighty andeven onehundred years although theactual fighting took place within a much shorter period. Conversely there have also been eras of peace which were in fact no more than a truce extending over a number of years. In fact the concepts are so elastic that not only in George Orwell's frightening Newspeak but also in ordinary English one can say that “Waris Peace” if only one adds two adjectives: cold waris armed peace.

Après la lecture du passionnant ouvrage d'Albert Pitot “T'Eyland Mauritius” (Port-Louis, Ile Maurice, 1905), j'avais relevé la mention d'un naufrage peu banal survenu sur la côte est de l'Ile Maurice en Janvier 1702: celui du fameux pirate anglais John Bowen. D'après Pitot, le naufrage était survenu sur l'îlot des Roches, un écueil situé à environ deux kilomètres du rivage derrière la barriére de corail.

From 20 December, 1979 to 1 March, 1980 in the Royal Picture Gallery the Nauritshuis there was an exhibition devoted to Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604 – 1679). This learned officer was from 1636 to 1644 Governor of that part of Brazil conquered by the Dutch West India Company. Among his entourage were two painters, Frans Post and Albert Eckhout, as well as the Doctor Willera Piso and the German naturalist Georg Markgraf. During their stay in the colony the artists depicted the flora, fauna and people of the colony, while the scientists researched and classified the natural world. Johan Maurits made a collection of naturalia and artificiaiia in his palace Vrijburg in Recife, had an Observatory built there and laid out a zoological garden. This artistic and scientific reconnaissance of Brazil was the main theme of the exhibition.

In India under the English East India Company, it was said: “Necessity is the mother of invention and the father of the Eurasian”. This saying is based on the widespread belief that, during the first centuries of their presence in Asia, European men were to a large extent dependent on “non-white” women for their sexual contacts. The character of these early colonial settlements is therefore often described as non-European. Their population is characterised as a melting-pot of ethnic groups, dependent on the uneuropean institution of slavery. The cultural values this entailed were far from those of the mother countries, certainly not those of the (Calvinist) Netherlands.

In the past five or six years crisis has settled upon Southeast Asian studies in the United States, and among those close to the field professionally it is common to blame the Vietnam conflict and related post-war mentality, the so-called ‘Vietnam syndrome’, for this unhappy circumstance. Thegeneral atmosphere in the United States at the present time makes it difficult to conclude otherwise. We live, on theonehand, ina time of forgetting, when small-town mayors remark, ‘Vietnam? I can't think of anything that concerns me less,’ and profes-sors speak bookishly butnota great deal more eloquently of ‘premeditated amnesia.’ On the other hand, we also come into daily contact with what in large part arethelong-term results of ourVietnam involvement: a highly inflationary economy, confusion in foreign affairs, lingering social and political malaise, and a controversial refugee policy. Little wonder that the vast majority of Americans, for whom the words ‘Southeast Asia’ have come to mean simply Vietnam and possibly Cambodia, prefer to ignore the entire region as much as possible and fortherest seek solace ina feweasy myths and characterizations.

Protocolos or notarial acts are one of those historical sources that everyone talks about but few use. A few social historians such as James Lockhardt and Ruth Pike have assayed the rich ores of these documents (for Lima and Seville, respectively). Art historians have used them with profit, but only a few of an older generation of French historians and Louis-André Vigneras have done much with them for voyages of exploration. Yet they are the last truly rich source of historical information still awaiting study by students of the Expansion (1).

A long time ago – longer than I care to remember – I proposed what an economist would call an equilibrium model of imperialism (1). Briefly stated, the argument went as follows:

-Imperialism is a response to disparities of power. The very existence of such disparity is an invitation and temptation to exploit it. Not everyone will respond to such invitation, but there will always be some who try to translate potential dominion into actual.

-Motivation is secondary: where a disparity of power exists, imperialism will never lack for reasons or justifications. These will vary from the crudest greed or will to dominance to the loftiest altruism.

-To understand the timing and extent of imperialist dominions, therefore, it is more important to study the character and distribution of power than the incentives to its exercise.

Admiral Perry's arrival in Uraga-bay in 1853 brough about enormous changes in Japan's society which had, roughly speaking, been a stable and rigid organization ever since the isolation policy was fully implemented around 1640.

Not only was Japan's society turned upside down by the American action, but Perry's ‘black ships’ made the Japanese realize that the foreign threat could only be countered with a western-style navy.

European presence overseas almost immediately led to the creation of colonial armies, dichotomous organisms composed of European units and European-led corps of native peoples. Impromptu and ad hoc at first, these organizations quickly evolved into standing professional military formations and became the major underpinning of European colonialism. Local reaction to this intrusion, swift and hostile, simultaneously resulted in armed struggle, colonial wars. Like all standing armies, permanent colonial military forces had a high societal profile as a consequence of their vast and complex economic and social infrastructures. Sprawling British cantonments in colonial India, sustained by a motley mix of money lenders-creditors, swarms of attendants, merchants and (of course) prostitutes, nestled by towns and villages. And military communities, composed of disbanded native troops and their families dotted the landscape in parts of, for example, Trinidad, Sierra Leone and British Honduras, now Belize. Nor were these settlements static and isolated from the surrounding population. On the contrary, they were designed to continue as an imperial control mechanism, and produced as expected ‘local elites’, to use current parlance. As Samson Ukpabi has shown, military service was directly linked to social mobility in British West Africa during the nineteenth century (1).

A noteworthy report was recently published by two staff members of agricultural research institutes in Bogor (Indonesia), Collier and Soentoro, concerning the substantial changes that have occurred during the last ten to twenty years in traditional social relationships in the village community of rural Java (1). The phenomenon had been recorded before, including by Dr. Collier, who published a report on the subject when he and other research workers examined it in the course of their field work (2). Collier and Soentoro's report consists of a summary of surveys subsequently carried out by the Bogor institutes. These surveys confirmed the earlier observations. The report indicates clearly that this development, with its ominous consequences, is proceeding apace and is steadily permeating rural Java as a whole. Collier and Soentoro's report stands out for its lucid analysis of economic and social developments in rice production methods. Their detailed account of this development takes due account of the many variants stemming from varying regional traditions, economic circumstances and legal relationships.