Wednesday, April 14, 2004, a rainy afternoon in Providence, the city with quaint old houses, as H.P. Lovecraft put it. Inside the century-old building of The John Carter Brown Library, located on the thoroughly soaked Brown Green, a ceremony is conducted in the MacMillan Reading Room. The Ambassador of Spain to the United States, HE. Javier Ruperéz, has just been presented with the first volume of the Hakluyt Society edition of the Malaspina Expedition. After remarking on the importance of this publication, the ambassador turns his attention to the Director of the John Carter Brown Library, Dr Norman Fiering. In recognition of the services of the Library to the promotion of the culture and history of both Spain and the former Spanish colonies, Norman is appointed Commander in the Orden de Isabel la Católica.

The study of the early European colonial presence in Asia has been stimulated in recent years by a series of excellent works. These have been both of general and specialist nature, written not only by historians, but also by political scientists as well as specialists of international relations. The truly excellent study published in 2002 by Edward Keene, can be taken as a point in case. Central to his revisitation of seventeenth-century treaties of the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) with the Emperor of Kandy, is the notion of divided sovereignty expounded by Hugo Grotius around 1600-1610. It was against the backdrop of such concepts of divided sovereignty that the VOC could ultimately conclude its complex web of treaty relationships that broadly characterise the Dutch colonial empire in the East Indies up the advent of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. There is some legitimacy in contending that Keene's postulations effectively rework and reinterpret, at the level of international relations, what was once conveniently dubbed the ‘Age of Partnership’, i.e. an age characterised by trade-driven colonial empires that grew upon a complex, sometimes self-contradictory network of treaty relationships as well as formal and informal cooperation garnered from native elites. Admittedly such relations were often but not always based on unequal power and treaty relationships. Despite the uneven playing fields created by many such Euro-Asian treaties, especially those forged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the conclusion of treaties was assumed on the basis of the nominal co-equality of sovereigns and plenipotentiary agents acting on their behalf. European and Asian treaty partners were accepted as contracting equals, and this is particularly stunning given that the feudal world of European power politics at the time was, by comparison, probably more complex and legally structured than Asia. Certainly, the underlying power relations behind these early modern agreements were completely different from those imposed by the mature colonial powers on Asia at the zenith of nineteenth-century imperialism!

The establishment of a Dutch trading factory at Kayalpatnam in 1645 initiated half a century of Luso-Dutch rivalry for the control of the Madurai coast (modern Tamilnad) until its ‘final solution’ in the 1690s. The stakes were high and involved both material and non-material considerations. Contemporary Dutch sources estimated the capital value of the local chank or conch shell and pearl fishery at 350,000 and 5 to 6 million guilders, respectively. Almost half of the circa 500 vessels involved in the pearl fisheries of 1668 and 1669 came from the seven major ports (yelu ur) of the socalled Fishery Coast (Costa de Pescaria). Control over southeast India littoral, moreover, meant mastery of the strategic Palk Straits and the Indo-Ceylon trade in areca, textiles, salt, grains, ray skins, chaya or dye roots, lime, and the like. Dutch projections of potential revenues derived from this source in the 1670s ranged from 1.28 to 1.65 million guilders per year. Apart from the intra-Asiatic or country trade, exports from the Madurai coast became increasingly important in the long-distance trade with Europe in the wake of the ‘calicoe craze’. Between 1680-81 and 1734-35, the total invoice and sales value of Dutch textile exports from Madurai destined for patria amounted to 8.85 and 15.31 million guilders, respectively. The annual invoice and sales value of Company textile exports from southeast India littoral to the Dutch Republic peaked in the first decade of the eighteenth century at an average of 282,824 and 644,541 guilders, respectively. In 1704-05, the invoice and sales value of Dutch textile exports from Madurai to Europe alone amounted to no less than 659,215 and 1,362,050 guilders, respectively.

Remarkably little is known about Jan Huygen van Linschoten's private life in the Portuguese Indies. The only available source material consists of a letter to his parents he wrote in 1584, shortly after his arrival in Goa, and the text of his Itinerario. Working as a secretary to the Archbishop of Goa he must at least have given the impression of being a respectable man in everyday life. Although he was still a young man in the period of his residence in Goa from September 1583 to November 1588; born at the end of 1562 or at the beginning of 1563 he must have been nearly twenty-one when he arrived and nearly twenty-five when he left and although he dwells quite extensively on various cases of adultery and especially on the moral character of Indian and Portuguese women in Goa, he never even hints at personal amorous experiences. We may take this as a sign of the times in which he lived. Indeed there was a strong moral code in sixteenth-century Europe, at least in theory and especially from what may be termed the lower middle class upwards, and apart from this mostly religiously based and socially sanctioned moral code there were literary conventions. Debauchery and erotic adventures were dealt with mainly in pornographic or diary-like texts that certainly were not the genre of Linschoten's Itinerario. But as the morally judging observer he presents himself to be, he could of course describe more or less spicy details and comment on them. Linschoten played this part several times and as it would seem quite eagerly. As a matter of fact his moral views are accorded considerable importance in the book. A first and most interesting attempt to analyse these views in relation to the stamps published with the Itinerario was made by Ernst van den Boogaart. To accompany an exhibition of the stamps, the same author published a more extensive analysis of the stamps and of the Latin texts of a separate edition in Het verheven en uerdoruen Azië. Both titles are good reading on the subject.

The Scramble for Africa between the European powers at the end of the nineteenth century has always struck people as quite an extraordinary process. It has played an important role in the debate about European overseas expansion, and still does. This article is about the discussion surrounding the partition of Africa which took place within a geographical society in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS). In those days, as the expansion reached its zenith, the question of how the British Empire should be organised was one of the most important political issues. The debate about imperialism continued after Africa had been partitioned, and the nature of the debate changed in the light of two World Wars and the era of decolonisation. As time went by, scholars who mainly focused on the economic and political motivations for European overseas expansion dominated the imperialism debate. The role that groups such as geographical societies played became obscured as their ideas were seen as outdated. In recent years there has been a growing interest in the ways societies like the RSGS contributed to the metropolitan culture of imperialism.