As a historian I have worked on and have been shaped by two great struggles: the one between whites and blacks for control over South Africa and the Afrikaner-English struggle over which white community was dominant. The former struggle was clear-cut, but the latter was ambiguous and took many forms. It was waged over South Africa's relationship with Britain, the national symbols and languages, and the higher moral ground. The first section of the article provides a brief sketch of the latter struggle which influenced my career strongly.

South Africa and Indonesia are countries whose postcolonial trajectory has been characterised by racial, ethnic and religious tensions: tensions whose roots lie in their shared colonial past. Whether simmering and subdued, or overt and necessitating international intervention, these tensions demand a renewed critical perspective by academics who, until now, have made little attempt to transcend the two, previously discrete, arenas of scholarship. This volume aims to initiate a comparative study of the ‘Greater Netherlands’, which has been widely recognised as long overdue. Our aim in this volume is to delineate the distinctive governmental and cultural processes which currently shape the emergent democratisation of these two states, and to establish how far these owe something to Dutch (and related European) influence.

The Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya are occupied by events like ceremonies for the Supreme-Holy-Lord-Omnipotent, and by the King's holy compassions and angers concerning his beloved Siam, especially at times of conspiracy. Westerners, in the times of kings like the famous Narai (1656-1688), appear only in the extreme margins of the Thai records. The Dutch are only mentioned twice, in particular when their ships were destroyed in the Burmese invasion of 1766.1 How did the Thai court perceive Westerners?

The events of September 1652 on the island of Formosa were one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of Dutch management of the island, and could arguably be viewed as one of the most severe suppressions of a rebellious group in the seventeenth century. The unexpected, ill-prepared uprising of thousands of frustrated, angry and impoverished Chinese farmers and field hands against Dutch colonial management were successfully, yet in the most severe and savage way, suppressed through a military collaboration between the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the local Aborigines of the island. In total some 3,000 Chinese residents of the island were killed, the ‘hacked-off’ head of the leader ‘displayed on a stake […] to frighten the Chinese as a sign of victory over those dastardly traitors’, while three of his lieutenants were tortured to death by Company officials in an effort to extract confessions and information from them. Indeed severe action towards a section of the Formosan colonial society that was primarily responsible for the economic success of the Dutch settlement enterprise.

The Dutch civil servants, missionaries, business people, and others living and working in the Dutch East Indies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries looked homeward to a society in process of being ‘pillarized’ into socio-religious blocks. Some scholars have observed how the new nation that arose from that colony, Indonesia, developed a similar kind of structure called aliran (literally, currents or streams) best known to scholars, perhaps, through Geertz's classic ethnography, Religion of Java. There is surely some ontogenetic relationship between Dutch ‘pillarization’ and Indonesian aliranisation. Drawing on ideals about a public church embedded organically in a particular society and culture, a volkskerk, Protestant missionaries brought a different theological version of Christianity compared to their Catholic competitor, but also like that competitor, church-affiliated schools, hospitals and social services. Modernist Muslim organisations such as Muhammadiya copied these religiously based services and institutions, thus ‘pillarizing’ Islam in response to the Christian presence. It is not surprising, then, that when Indonesians were first able to form political parties, some of these were also defined along sectarian lines – Catholic, Protestant, traditionalist and modernist Muslim.

On 21 March 1956, the French Overseas Minister, Gaston Defferre, addressed the Assemblée Rationale, presenting a project with especially far-reaching implications. A loi-cadre was planned in order to enable a greater degree of participation by the indigenous populations in the sub-Saharan African overseas territories. The responsibility of the local Assemblées Territoriales was to be increased in various fields. Conseils de Gouuemement were proposed, with the objective to allow Black African politicians to have a role in the territorial executive. Defferre exhorted the deputies to prevent by their vote a development of the tropical African territories in the style of the Maghreb or Indochina. His speech seemed to impress the members of the chamber. At the occasion of two ballots, on 23 March and on 23 June 1956, his bill passed with a comfortable majority.

Adam Smith, the well-known eighteenth-century economist, investigated a number of important themes regarding the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindbche Compagnie, VOC) as well as its counterpart, the English East India Company. These continue to provide principal topics in the historical study of the VOC. Through a systematic analysis, he came to the conclusion that free trade is more beneficial to the wealth of nations than monopolised trade. In his view, an economy based on the division of production along with competition among market participants was the best precondition for accelerating economic development.

From 1763 to 1790 the Dutch East India Company attempted to promote pepper production in rural regions of Banten, the western tip of Java. This was the first Western intervention into Banten's local agrarian economy, and at the same time it was also a political attempt to introduce ‘modern’ administrative concepts into a ‘traditional’ society. In this paper I shall discuss the discrepancy and conflict between the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ administrative concepts, and concomitant changes in the political configuration in the local society. Special focus will be directed to the following questions: how the ‘traditional’ administrative system functioned; how the Dutch tried to modify it; how the Dutch promotion policy of pepper production was carried out and what result it attained; and what sort of changes, as a result, occurred in the political configurations in the local society.

The debate over modern South Africa has been dominated by the question whether continuities between apartheid and segregation existed. Much of apartheid was a tightening or an elaboration of segregation, but there were also features that made it unique. The one was the systematic classification in statutory groups of the entire population, including people of racially mixed origins, which resembles the rule of the Cape by the VOC or Dutch East Company that distinguished among legal status groups. The other distinctive feature of apartheid was its concern with the rehabilitation of subordinate communities up to the point where they could become nations. Using the terminology of German romantic nationalism and mission doctrine rather than that of British indirect rule, apartheid substituted culture and ultimately nation for race.

This paper deals with transformations in local political thinking in Northern Mali. It describes how concepts from what can be called ‘formal’ politics, or administration, have gradually seeped into local settings, where they have been taken up by local political actors. The transformation central to this paper is the movement from a political organisation essentially based on lineage, (fictive) kinship ties and a clan system, into a system in which territory, hitherto only important in the economic realm, takes a more central place. The society described is that of the Tuareg in Northern Mali, especially those inhabiting or bordering the so-called Tamesna plain. Influences in territorial thinking date back to the colonial conquest of the area, and were developed further during the late colonial period, when a system of indirect rule gradually became more direct. The developments then set in motion were taken over by the post-colonial nation-state of Mali which, after three decades of central administration (or absence of it), underwent a process of decentralisation in the 1990s. In describing these developments, the paper aims to provide a detailed case study of how both colonial and post-colonial administration have influenced local political views on territory, borders and land tenure, and the ways of dealing with conflicts over these issues. Finally, I intend to discuss the impact of decentralisation in Mali on territorial thinking and conflicts. Two Tuareg concepts regarding territory will be central in this paper: ihenzuzagh — economic geographical space, and akal — political geographical space.

In 1565, an English sailor named John Sparke visited the colonial Floridas for the first, and probably, only time. Sparke, along with thousands of other Europeans, was in the midst of exploring, settling, and exploiting the Western Hemisphere's eastern coastline, an endeavour that escalated in intensity following the spectacular voyages of Christopher Columbus almost eighty years before. Encountering a variety of locales, objects, and peoples for the first time, the mariner made observations that reveal a great deal about the meeting of Old and New World cultures. Referring to the indigenous inhabitants of the region, Sparke wrote, ‘those people of the cape of Florida are of more savage and fierce nature, and more valiant than any of the rest [he had met in the Americas]’. Significantly, the sailor based his opinions, at least in part, on tales of native barbarity communicated to him by Spanish settlers who had begun colonising the peninsula at the dawn of the sixteenth century. According to these stories, Indians were uncivilised and ‘eaters of the flesh of men […] canibals’. Yet, Sparke remained unsure about how to evaluate the indigenous inhabitants. His confusion stemmed from conflicting assessments supplied by French colonisers who had also recently established a foothold in the Floridas.

In our Age of the Discovery of Space, many people still enjoy commemorating the Age of Global Exploration and Discovery. In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' epic voyage to the Caribbean islands off the American continent was celebrated in Spain and America, and in 1998 and 2000 Portugal also commemorated its Age of Descobrimentos in Africa, South America and Asia. Various campaigns are underway in China to celebrate in 2004 the 600th (!) anniversary of the great expeditions by Admiral Zheng Ho to South Asia and Africa. Most of these festivities, meant to foster international awareness in the current Age of Globalisation, have met with mixed reactions among the peoples who were ‘discovered’.

Described in travel books as a ‘sleepy church town’, Tentena is unusual in Indonesia, a nation where ninety per cent of the population is Muslim. In Tentena, on the island of Sulawesi, the proportions are reversed. There, as in much of rural Indonesia, religion clearly demarcates distinct ethnic and class boundaries: the majority of ethnic To Pamona, the indigenous peoples of the area, converted to Protestantism under the Netherlands Missionary Society at the turn of the century. Their church synod offices dominate the town. Largely peasant farmers, the To Pamona are culturally, religiously and economically distinguishable from both the Muslim Bugis traders who live around the market quarter, and from the ethnic Chinese Pentecostal merchants whose large shops dominate the local economy. This confluence of religion and ethnic identity among the To Pamona was fostered by Dutch missionaries who sought to create a ‘people's church’ or volkskerk, of the sort they were familiar with in the Netherlands. Driven by a new respect for indigenous cultures, the missions relativised the church's tenets; they argued that different ‘nations’ like the To Pamona could have their cultures preserved within their ‘national’ churches as long as those traditions were evaluated from a Biblical perspective. This discourse on ‘culture’, and missions in the vernacular, created a ‘nationalist’ religious discourse among the To Pamona infused with the ‘emancipatory’ politics of the churches in the Netherlands. The product of these strategies of incorporation was the religious ‘pillarization’ of the peoples of the highlands of Central Sulawesi, and their division into socially autonomous ethno-religious blocks.

Human social organisation intrinsically includes borders, divisions that mark inside and outside, civilised and barbaric, acceptable and unacceptable. Human groups establish physical and ideational boundaries that help order, explain, and direct their lives. Those groups and activities that blur or cross over these lines receive special attention, as their violations of or challenges to what are presented as logical, natural, and moral standards force their reconciliation with generalised norms. Such people and actions are categorised as immoral, uncouth, detrimental, seditious, or non-human. They are also often considered endowed with special powers.

This paper examines Dutch colonial discourse as it was developing at the beginning of the twentieth century. I argue that colonial circumstances were changing at the beginning of the twentieth century in many aspects - economic, political, social - and that these changes required new policy and administrative responses. I take as examples of these changing colonial conditions and responses, two episodes in the history of ‘the late colonial state’, which I argue are both representative of and formative in shaping, colonial policy in the last decades of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia.