Has Europe grown rich because it expanded overseas? According to recent scholarship the answer must be no. During the period between 1500 and 1750 Europe's economy did not provide its inhabitants with a per capita income that was significantly higher than that in other parts of the world. Europe – and only the Western part of it – started to become richer after the Industrial Revolution from 1750 onwards. This far most attempts at linking the expansion of Europe to the Industrial Revolution have failed.

When I was invited to participate in the conference marking the twentieth anniversary of Leiden's Centre for Overseas Expansion and to contribute to the conference's retrospection of recent scholarship on the history of overseas expansion, I happily agreed. And I agreed specifically to contribute a paper on what was rather casually, I think, called ‘The Atlantic in the Ancien Régime’. Since I had been working, one way and another, in that area for a long time, I expected no difficulty in writing up a reasonable paper. But the more I thought about the subject, and the more I reviewed what had been done in recent studies of ‘the Atlantic in the Ancien Régime’ the more mysterious and interesting the question became and the more strongly I was led back to earlier antecedents in the literature. I had a growing feeling that something strange had happened, something that, oddly enough, I had myself been involved in without knowing it, something that I was in fact attempting to formulate in connection with an international seminar on Atlantic history that I will be directing over the next few years.

In June 1760 Nicolaas Heinsius, Dutch factor in service of the West India Company (WIC) on the Gold Coast, and commander of fortress Batenstein at Butri, took the law into his own hands. He pawned three slaves owned by the black woman Paraba, because she had, in name of her abusua (matrilineal descent group) appropriated the inheritance of his deceased African concubine and, what is more, she had told Heinsius that she intended to take care of the raising of his Euro-African son. In a letter to his superiors, who resided at Elmina castle, he accounted for his action. Heinsius explained that he acted not for himself but in his little son's interests, the latter being, so he thought, according to indigenous law, the sole heir to his mother's legacy. The reaction he received from the president and the council at Elmina contained a sharp reprimand. The WIC-authorities designated his claim on the inheritance as unlawful and contrary to customary law, and ordered him to immediately return the slaves.

In 1861 the book Java: Or, How to Manage a Colony, by J.W.B. Money, which compared the deficits suffered by British India with the profitability of the cultivation of Java and Madura, caused considerable discussion among the Dutch politicians. At an international level, the last word has yet to be spoken in the debate among historians and economists on the profits and losses of former colonies.

The development of Colombia's import/export economy was accompanied by numerous violent conflicts from the second half of the nineteenth century onward. Craftsmen were among those who fiercely opposed the model of ‘outward-looking development’ (desarrollo hacia afuera). With independence this group initially increased in number during the first half of the nineteenth century. Around 1870, their proportion of the gainfully employed male population may have come to about ten per cent. More than sixty per cent of all working women were involved in handicraft activities. Artesanos, as craftsmen were listed in Colombian population statistics, were one of the most wide-spread occupational classes until the turn of the century. In nearly all towns and cities there were tanners, shoemakers, weavers, dyers, tailors, blacksmiths, bricklayers, carpenters, joiners, and potters, as well as the newly introduced trades of lithographers and letterpress printers, to provide for the local consumers’ demands. However, artisans differed from region to region in terms of quantity (absolutely and as a percentage of the total population), composition of professions, proportion of women and children, as well as in their ethnicity. Moreover, a largely rural textile industry (based on family concerns) developed near Pasto as well as in Santander and Boyacá and became famous beyond these regions. In contrast to urban manufacture in Bogotá and Bucaramanga dominated by mestizoes, and that of Cali and the Atlantic coast dominated by mulattos, these weavers were mainly of Indian descent. In Tolima and in parts of Antioquia and Santander palm straw hats (‘Panama hats’) were produced - mainly by Indian women. This headgear was priced so reasonably that the hats were exported in large quantities to the West Indies and the USA.

Brazil's active foreign policy tradition dates from the beginning of its existence as an independent state in the early nineteenth century. More than the former Spanish colonies in Latin America, Brazil considered the international recognition of its sovereignty an important goal. Therefore, Brazil demonstrated in the 1820s a great interest in the establishment of diplomatic relations and the negotiation of commercial treaties with the European nations and the United States.

Ever since its publication in 1966, Tussen Neutraliteit en Imperialisme (‘Between Neutrality and Imperialism’) has been the standard work on Dutch policy towards China between 1863 and 1901. In this study the author, F. van Dongen, stresses the adherence to neutrality towards the strong European neighbour states as the fundamental guideline for Dutch foreign policy, not only within Europe but also in the Far East. This policy stemmed from the fact that the European balance-of-power system had been extended to China in the late nineteenth century, through the participation of most European states in imperialist policies concerning that country. According to Van Dongen this adherence to neutrality slowed down imperialist tendencies, as the Netherlands were anxious to avoid entering in conflicts between the great powers, but at the same time the Dutch were forced to ‘play a modest part in the common Western policy towards China’. Whenever the great powers took a united stand the Netherlands must follow suit. So as a result of its European policy the Netherlands joined the imperialist powers in China, although usually careful not to take the initiative. The Netherlands were, therefore, classified by Van Dongen as a reluctant and generally passive element of imperialism in China: ‘the Dutch were at worst accessories after the fact’. Finally he concluded that whenever Dutch actions concerning China ‘savoured of imperialism, this was not the result of a deliberate policy to exercise control over the empire or to obtain Chinese territory, but an almost accidental by-product of the general aim of promoting the Netherlands’ economic interest'.

In a seminal paper published nearly forty years ago, Frank Thistlethwaite argued that the migration process ought to be liberated from the stereotypical historiographical tradition. This tradition offered a homogeneous image of undifferentiated waves of uprooted peasants and artisans suffering from epidemics of emigration fever during times of crisis. Instead, he argued, a close study of the individual or group experience of emigrants from particular regions, to specific destinations, would reveal a great deal about the motives, characteristics and pathways of people participating in highly distinctive movements. Thus, emigration might be seen not as a phenomenon in its own right, but as an aspect of a process that stimulated the seasonal circulatory movements of specific occupational groups not only within Europe, but extending outwards around the Mediterranean basin and often culminating in a circular navigation of the ‘Atlantic lake’. For millions of European workers, a natural extension of this ‘proletariat globetrotting’ was an individually-organized one-way voyage to the New World.