During the last thirty years, the nature of historical chronology has changed drastically. Fernand Braudel was among the first to show that historical time is neither uniform nor linear, but rather multiple, irregular and socially determined. However, Braudel and his followers have merely carried to an extreme a conceptual revolution already initiated by Marc Bloch in the 1920s. In his studies on the Middle Ages, Bloch identified several time scales: the linear time of Christian history, the circular time of nature and liturgy, the times of the peasant, the townsman and the merchant, and so on. In short, historical time has been transformed in such a way as to prompt a new search for direction and order in historical studies. The new concept of different and irregular time scales forces us to continually redefine the duration of certain phenomena in order to understand them. Chronologies no longer have the same enduring character that provides a definite and reassuring order for the past, as positivism and historicism had claimed to do. In order to be useful at all, chronologies have to be diverse and indicate dates demarcating durations, if only because it is now a generally accepted fact that the time scales of collective mentalities are not the same as those of the economy, politics, or demography.

As we pass the Quincentennial of the founding of the Spanish empire we stand within two years of marking the centennial of its demise in Asia and the New World in 1998. In recent years, much research has focused on the changes wrought on indigenous populations at the time of initial contact, but little consideration has been given to the material legacy of this empire. This study will examine the material aspects of two Spanish colonies, the Philippines and Puerto Rico at the end of nearly four centuries of Spanish colonization. Archaeological evidence from the two colonies is compared and contextualised within the economic order of the nineteenth century in order to better evaluate the nature of the physical manifestation of late Spanish colonialism.

During his first term in the White House, President Ulysses Grant attempted to annex the Dominican Republic to the United States. Support for the proposed treaty came from both countries. The United States pressed the annexation plans motivated by the prospects of acquiring hegemony in the Caribbean, by the likelihood of increasing its commercial avenues, by the possibility of establishing a black state, by opportunistic entrepreneurs, and by the idea of the Manifest Destiny Doctrine intermingled with the Monroe Doctrine. On the other hand, the Dominican government supported annexation with the intention of annihilating a rebellion backed by the Haitian government, and by the desire to satisfy personal financial interest among the government elite. Moreover, the typical colonial structure of the country assisted the government's efforts toward annexation.

Once recommended by A.G. Hopkins as a ‘profitable subject of future research’, the European liquor trade in West Africa has since then received considerable attention from scholars. While Lynn Pan examined the region in a broad survey of the African liquor trade, other scholars have focused on more specific aspects of the topic. To be sure, much of the literature has concentrated on the ideological controversy between the defenders and opponents of the European liquor traffic. Other aspects of the subject, however, such as the significance of the liquor traffic in the Anglo-German commercial rivalry in West Africa liquor prohibition as colonial policy in largely-Muslim territories, and the fiscal importance of liquor – both spirits and beer – in the colonial and post-independence states, have been examined in various studies.

The founding of a coastal trading factory at Kayalpatnam in south-eastern India in 1645 initiated a period of nearly a century of cross-cultural contacts between representatives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Nayaka state of Madurai. Traditionally this area has received little attention in both Dutch and Indian colonial historiography. While Company historians have tended to focus on either Coromandel or Ceylon, the main centres of VOC activity in the region, their Indian counterparts have concentrated on the epic struggle of the Mughals with the Deccan sultanates, and subsequently the Marathas, during this time period. In the true spirit of the great chartered companies, one historian has held a virtual monopoly in the field for more than two decades, from the late fifties to the early eighties. Only recently have other (ethno)historians, anthropologists, indologists, and sociologists turned their attention to the area south of the Kollidam (Coleroon) River and east of the Western Ghats.

In the two final decades of the nineteenth century, Spain introduced a number of measures promoting Spanish economic interests in the Philippines which culminated in a protectionist tariff established in 1891. As a consequence, Spain's trade with the archipelago rose unprecedentedly, particularly evident in the import of textiles and other manufactured goods. Through their neo-mercantilist policies, ‘the Spanish were able to recover something of their former economic position in their own colony’, that they in the course of the nineteenth century had lost to foreign, particularly British, competitors.