It seems no exaggeration to say that the Caribbean used to ‘eat’ people. The autochthonous inhabitants of the region, the Amerindians, estimated to have numbered about one million before Columbus, quickly embarked on a course of rapid demographic decline after the intrusion of the Europeans. Around 1700 all Amerindians had virtually disappeared from the islands and only a fraction of them remained in the hinterland of the Guianas.

It is now more than 25 years ago that the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz published his well-known book Agricultural Involution. The processes of ecological change in Indonesia. In this excellently written essay, Geertz to argue that involution rather than evolution had occurred in Java during the past century and a half. This process was said to be responsible for the stagnating development, the depression, on the Javanese countryside which was so easily discernable when Geertz was conducting his field research in East-Central Java during the 1950s within the framework of the so-called Mojokuto project, in which Mojokuto was the equivalent of the American Middletown. In brief, the involution thesis boils down to the theory that as a result of Dutch colonial intervention at the start of the nineteenth centuryJavanese rural society developed a very high degree of social homogeneity, while balancing on the edge of the minimum of subsistence or below it. This society was characterized by the absence of sharp class-differences or a clear social stratification, the presence of ‘shared poverty’ and the necessity, as the island became more and more densely populated, to cut the (rice) cake in smaller and smaller parts.

A new found interest in social history, recent developments in historical thought and methodology and a fresh awareness of the importance of gender-specific experience have led historians to question an ‘ordinary woman's place’ in Singa- pore's past. In the historiography of Singapore, there is a need to foreground the critical importance of the ah ku and karayuki-san in the sex,politics and society of the city, stressing not only alterations in their life and circumstance, but also variations in the role of the colonial government, and changes in the ideology of sex and social policy.

Time is catching up with today's student of the history of European overseas expansion in the sense that he has to add yet another facet to his already diverse array of skills. In order to fully explore and exploit the potentials of his field, he needs at least a working command of how to apply computer technology in research, thereby reaching beyond the art of word processing. Without turning into a full-fledged programmer, he will have to master some basic tools of processing and also to gain an insight into the options available. Perhaps even more importantly, he will have to know when and when not to apply the computer. This article aims at providing some guidelines for facilitating the computerization of European expansion history.

This checklist is a by-product of a study of Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimes (1625), a work which makes much use of contemporary accounts of the earliest Dutch trans-oceanic voyages, particularly those to the East. It is well known that the Dutch regularly published accounts of separate voyages, and that the appearance in English translation of many of these separate voyage accounts encouraged English sailors and merchants to follow the Dutch eastwards. Purchas sometimes used existing English translations, whether in print or inmanuscript, but more often used new versions — normally only abridged versions or extracts — made by himself or by an unnamed hack; and Pilgrimes thus contained a number of translations of Dutch voyage accounts previously not available to English readers. Hence the following checklist covers (a) published separate English translations of Dutch voyage accounts, up to 1625; and (b) the versions and summaries of Dutch accounts, and the briefer references to Dutch voyages taken from such accounts (whether derived directly or from intermediate sources) to be found in Pilgrimes.

Until quite recently the majority of Mexican archives were not easily accessible and working conditions were sometimes appalling. Many collections were only poorly catalogued, or not at all. Documents were brought together n i annual legajos or following the particularist norms of a local archivist, often without proper training or schooling. Nineteenth-century revolutions, and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) provoked considerable havoc. In several state capitals or municipal seats archives were destroyed or documents were used as wrapping paper in drugstores. In other cases documents were sold to foreign collectors.