This article concerns itself with the kind of legal conflicts that broke out in the Atlantic New World between merchant interests from different parts of Europe. Case studies are made of two disputes: one between Samuel Argall of the Virginia Company and a factor on behalf of Antoinette de Pons at the Île des Monts-Déserts, and the other between the Compagnie de Caën and the Kirke brothers at the Saint Lawrence River. Together, these case studies reveal how important it was for merchant interests to have resident ambassadors and state officials advancing their interests in England and France. Procedural difficulties and jurisdictional uncertainty often impeded the road to redress. Additionally, this article suggests that the peacetime reckoning of events associated with warfare provided an optimal opportunity for disaffected private actors to have their claims for redress recognised. The extent to which private overtures for restitution relied upon public acts of diplomacy reveals some of the reasons why it is not possible to date the origins of private international law before the long nineteenth century. Rather we might profitably identify, in events such as these, the prehistory of private international law.

This article analyses two databases with information on traveling Jesuit missionaries to calculate the human cost of connecting Europe and China between 1500 and 1800. After combining analysis of these statistics with travel accounts, the article argues that when missionaries did not arrive at their intended destination, it was more often the case that they had been redirected than that they had died en route. Particular groups and individual Jesuits were redirected as a result of political fissures within the global Jesuit network. Since Jesuit missionaries held allegiances to competing state patrons based on their national background, their travel patterns were altered significantly either by choice or by force.

Decolonization influenced the rise of environmental activism and thought in Australia and South Africa in ways that have been overlooked by national histories of environmentalism and imperial histories of decolonization. Australia and South Africa’s political and cultural movement away from Britain and the Commonwealth during the 1960s is one important factor explaining why people in both countries created more, and more important, public indigenous botanic gardens than anywhere else in the world during that decade. Effective decolonization from Britain also influenced the rise of indigenous gardening and the growing popularity of native gardens at a critical period in gardening and environmental history. Most facets of contemporary gardening—using plants indigenous to the site or region, planting drought-tolerant species, and seeing gardens as sites to help conserve regional and national flora—can be dated to the 1960s and 1970s. The interpretation advanced here adds to historical research tracing how the former Commonwealth settler colonies experienced effective decolonization in the same era. This article expands the focus of research on decolonization to include environmentalism. The interpretation of the article also augments national environmental histories that have hitherto downplayed the influence of decolonization on the rise of environmentalism. Putting decolonization into the history of the rise of environmental thought and action sheds light on why people in contemporary Australia and South Africa are so passionate about protecting indigenous flora and fauna, and so worried about threats posed by non-native invasive species.

This article explores the effects of music education carried out by Protestant missionaries on local forms of sociability in sub-Saharan Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on a methodological framework of ideal types of musical communities, the examination focuses on examples of musical encounters between missionaries and the Yoruba in West Africa, the Lobedu in South Africa, and the Nyakyusa in East Africa. A closer look at the kinds of sociability facilitated by missionary music will reveal a colonial dialectic emerging from the contrasting forces of cultural hierarchy and belonging.

While a thick vein of scepticism marked Enlightenment thinkers’ studies, such investigations cannot be divorced from their concurrent quest to merge the wondrous and the rational. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in philosophers’ investigations of merpeople. Examining European gentlemen’s debates over mermaids and tritons illuminate their willingness to embrace wonder in their larger quest to understand the origins of humankind. Naturalists utilized a wide range of methodologies to critically study these seemingly wondrous creatures and, in turn, assert the reality of merpeople as evidence of humanity’s aquatic roots. As with other creatures they encountered in their global travels, European philosophers utilized various theories—including those of racial, biological, taxonomical, and geographic difference—to understand merpeople’s place in the natural world. By the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers integrated merpeople into their explanation of humanity’s origins, thus bringing this phenomenon full circle.

The statistical table is one expression of the settler colonial capacity and willingness to enumerate colonized “peoples” as “populations.” By examining four tables—from 1763, 1828, 1848, and 1850—in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia this paper illustrates the emergence of this powerful technique of representation during the same a period in which European states were developing their capacity to represent the social in statistical terms. In the colonial context, the rise of the notion of a “population” whose characteristics could be averaged contributed to the specifically administrative eclipse of native sovereignty, paralleling the jural/political demise of native sovereignty.

In the late nineteenth century, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) physically modified guitars and created a new technique for playing them. In the years that followed, hundreds of Hawaiian troupes, engaging new entertainment circuits that crisscrossed the globe, introduced the world to their “Hawaiian steel guitar,” from Shanghai to London, Kolkata to New Orleans. While performing Hawaiian mele, or songs, with their instrument, they demonstrated new virtues for the guitar’s potential in vernacular and commercial music making in these international markets. Based upon archival research, this essay considers the careers of several Hawaiian guitarists who travelled the world in the early twentieth century, connecting local soundscapes through the proliferation of an indigenous technology.

During the first global economy, roughly from Western industrialization to World War I, the gramophone, much like other consumer goods, circulated relatively freely around the world. This paper compares the market in India and China asking how gramophone companies established themselves there and focuses on the interaction between Western businesspeople and local partners. The article first shows how agents started exploring strategies for “localizing” music and, second, how in both countries their interaction with local partners was first shaped by curiosity and commercial interest, and later by traditionalism and nationalism, the latter of which paradoxically both inhibited and enabled Western business. Based on diaries, corporate files, trade journals, and consular reports, the paper shows that the highly localized and politicized demand for music made access to local knowledge a crucial competitive advantage.

This paper examines the attempt of British missionaries on Madagascar to use medicine and the mission hospital as a way to convert the Malagasy people during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In their attempt to educate the Malagasy about the benefits of Western civilization, which was often defined through science as well as Christianity, missionaries were challenged by Malagasy culture and the local environment. To counter the ability of the Malagasy to challenge Western methods through their cultural beliefs and healing practices and so convert the Malagasy to Western ways, British missionaries had to carve out a space isolated from the Malagasy environment. Medicine, particularly the mission hospital, offered a space to champion Western science and Christianity. In their attempt to bring civilization to Madagascar, missionaries directly tied together science and Christianity while domesticating the space of the hospital.

Organic farming activists have promoted the idea that ancient peasant wisdom informed the basic principles or Albert Howard’s Indore method, and of organic farming generally. The myth of the peasant origins of organic farming has influenced environmental activists and historians alike and concealed the remarkable contributions of Albert Howard and his first and second wives, Gabrielle and Louise Howard. A few statements made by Howard himself, and by his second wife, Louise, inspired the myth of peasant origins of organic wisdom. But a closer look at the published and unpublished writings of the Howards show that the formulation of the Indore method, which lies at the heart of organic farming, is a strict scientific protocol with its roots in the scientific work of Albert Howard and his cohorts.

Among the roughly 150,000 soldiers sent to the Dutch East Indies between 1815 and 1914, the Luxembourg contingent made up a tiny minority of just 1,075 men. Based upon extensive research into their careers, data on these soldiers provide further clues to understanding what drove Europe’s young men to become colonial soldiers. The results of this national case study will be compared with earlier investigations by Bossenbroek and Bosma on recruits for the Dutch colonial army. Similar to the Dutch soldiers, their Luxembourg counterparts had a predominantly urban provenance. However, in contrast to the Dutch, they did not have a strong military background, and it appears that fewer Luxembourgers stayed behind in the Dutch East Indies after their tour of duty. They were more attracted by the payments that the recruiters doled out in advance, particularly at a time of economic crisis, than in a career in the tropics.

Western visitors to Japan are often surprised at how widely European art music can be heard. The roots of what is arguably one of Japan’s greatest success stories lie in the systematic introduction and dissemination of Western music by the government after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Much research has focused on the government’s role; but how was Western music disseminated and received in different parts of Japan? This article discusses the roles of two brothers, Shikama Totsuji (1853–1928) and Shikama Jinji (1863–1941), who in different ways contributed significantly to the dissemination of Western music beyond Tokyo and in particular to the northern provincial town of Sendai.