Neither southern Africa’s archaeology nor its history or contemporary social and political structure can be understood without reference to its experience of colonialism and conquest or of the resistance to this. This chapter therefore looks at the archaeology of Portuguese exploration and subsequent settlement in Mozambique, as well as at the much more expansive colonisation of southern Africa set in motion by the establishment of a Dutch East India Company (VOC) base at Cape Town in 1652. It traces the spread of European settlement into the region’s interior, the emergence of new creolised populations on and beyond the frontiers of that settlement, the institutionalisation of the social, economic, and political structures that led to apartheid, and – crucially – the resistance of Indigenous societies to this. Chapter 13 also discusses the Mfecane and the emergence of the Zulu, Basotho, Ndebele, and Swazi states, among others, to emphasise their contemporaneity and potential connections with European settler expansion and to encourage comparative study of processes of state formation, migration, and population incorporation common to both.

An Indocentric lens shaped the early interpretation of the cultural heritage of Chinese Turkestan at sites such as Khotan and Dunhuang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Buddhist studies, the discovery of Gandhara, and the German, French and Raj-sponsored archaeological explorations along the ancient Silk Roads opened a new perspective on the spread of Indic art, culture and religions beyond the Himalayas. The recovery of this Buddhist past, and the art historical interpretation of the finds, were closely linked to debates on Gandhara’s cultural heritage and the importance of the ‘Greek factor’ in Indic/Asiatic art, a question which preoccupied Indian and European experts such as the French art historian Alfred Foucher. This chapter explains how ‘Indic’ gradually replaced ‘Greek’ as the superior classicism and civilizing impulse traced in Central Asia and shows how Aurel Stein’s notion of ‘Serindia’ was incorporated in the interwar Greater India imagination. GIS-members reframed the Far Eastern odyssey of Buddhist doctrine and art as a glorious saga of Indian civilizational diffusion, and a crucial chapter in the formation of an ancient Indian cultural empire.

The Indic orientation that informed the nineteenth-century scholarly engagement with the ancient cultural heritage of the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina translated, under the impetus of colonial archaeology and Indology, in a more coordinated and systematic approach to the study of Southeast Asia’s past. This chapter explores the French-Dutch transimperial knowledge network of ‘Greater India’. It discusses the Indological study-trips undertaken by French and Dutch scholars to India, maps the institutional cooperation and exchanges that synchronized research agendas in Hanoi and Batavia, and critically probes the role of the Leiden school inaugurated by Hendrik Kern and the French strand of indianisme epitomized in Sylvain Lévi’s academic oeuvre, in energizing visions of Greater India. In the French and Dutch sphere, Indology came to imply a much broader research agenda, both in geographical scope and interdisciplinary content, than in Germany and Britain. European Indology was a highly differentiated field of studies, and colonial trajectories and a nation’s cultural politics vis-à-vis India translated in different research priorities.