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.

This scholarly and wide-ranging history of the East India Company's trade covers a scope not frequently found in studies in the area. In contrast to those who focus on the activities of a few Europeans amongst the teeming population of Asia, Dr. Chaudhuri has brought into meaningful relationship relevant movements and events of both continents. Such an approach enables him to illuminate the views and actions of contemporaries. Those of us accustomed to the description of the arbitrary extortions of despotic oriental governments may well take he.ed of the observation that ‘a trading organization that voluntarily offered 10,000 P.Sterling to its sovereign equated a payment of 500 P.Sterling to .an Asian prince with political extortion’ (p. 461).