Did the expansion of Europe create large numbers of unfree labourers in Africa, Asia and the New World or was the use of unfree labour in a colonial setting nothing else but an adaptation to the labour traditions of the non-European world? It is fascinating to see how unique free labour actually was in the early modern world. Historically speaking, free labour was usually the exception and unfree labour the rule, especially when we consider non-European controlled labour systems.

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.

In 1978 a hefty monograph, entitled Orientalism, appeared that would, in its own way, come to constitute a landmark in the history of Asian studies - to the satisfaction of some and the resentment of others. The author of this work, American-Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said, appealed to a wide intellectual circle, which was also shown by the sheer number of reviews in Anglo-Saxon papers and periodicals: there were at least sixty of them in the period following publication.

Why are some forms of bound labour more coercive than others? Specifically, why was European indentured servitude in America more coercive than craft apprenticeship or life-cycle servitude-in-husbandry, despite the close similarity and derivative nature of these institutions? Concepts recently advanced in labour economics offer some preliminary answers to these questions. This investigation is exploratory in nature and focuses on three types of voluntary long-term labour contracts. However, the arguments and conclusions presented here may have wider applications and be useful for future research on other forms of bound labour which involve consent and contract.

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.

The migrants who left India to work on colonial sugar plantations in the nineteenth century have been variously categorised as neo-slaves or as voluntary black settlers. This paper assesses some of the recent historical claims and revisionist interpretations of Indian indentured labour and takes up a number of themes based on the Mauritian case to highlight important aspects of this colonial labour diaspora.

Many of the principles we know today about the world economy were first discovered in Early Modern Asia. The Portuguese and the Spanish were the first to extend their sphere of trade to encompass the world. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes and others, all made their way past the Cape of Good Hope seeking their share of the Asian trade. By the middle of the century, one of them became so successful that, aside from being the envy of the others, they set a new standard of efficiency in global operations. It was of course the Dutch.