Historians have traditionally paid relatively little attention to the French migrations to America. Although in the early modern period France was a demographic giant, had a deep – yet not enough recognized – maritime tradition, had many colonies in the Americas from the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence to the Amazon, and suffered from a tumultuous political history comparatively few of its people migrated to British North America and the United States. France has therefore and to some extent understandably enjoyed minimal visibility in the American ethnic landscape. There is, however, a long tradition of French migrations to America, beginning with the Huguenots at the end of the seventeenth century. At times these influxes were important in terms of number and influence, indeed in 1690 and in 1790 French was spoken in the streets of Charleston and of Philadelphia.

The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and the collapse of French resistance to the German onslaught a year later were momentous events which had far-reaching implications for France, Britain, and their colonies. In West Africa, the war affected existing patterns of inter-state relations within and across the French/British imperial divides, which were further complicated for the British by the emergence of two blocs in the French colonial empire – Vichy and Free French. It was in this context that the West African Governors' Conference was created in 1940 to coordinate the war effort and to manage relations with the French colonies.

On 20 February 1637/38, the Virginia House of Burgesses, ‘called by his Majesty's appointment’, convened to consider five ‘Propositions’ offered by Charles 1 for the reformation of their colony's tobacco trade. An investigation into the career and context of this ‘Assembly’ better informs us of the character of that monarch's government and, correspondingly, on English ‘state formation’ and empire in the first half of the seventeenth century. We learn that, as in its three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the Crown and its officers experienced little joy in their efforts to clear the lines of authority connecting Whitehall with the rest of the king's domains.

There is something logical and perhaps even comforting about linking the history of European expansion to a narrative about the slow but steady rationalization of space. Periodic advances in techniques of navigation and mapping, an increasing focus on boundaries in treaty-making between imperial rivals, and the accumulation of geographic knowledge of conquered and colonized territories by the colonizers – these trends appear as defining elements of the construction of global European power both in older imperial histories and in post-Foucauldian studies emphasizing social control and governmentality in colonial societies. ‘Mapping’ features in this telling as both a technology in the service of empire and as a metaphor for the colonial project of mastery through knowledge accumulation and control.

The project about the maritime history of the Java Sea, in which various scholars from Indonesia and the Netherlands have been participating since about 1996, bears the title ‘The Java Sea Region in an Age of Transition, 1870–1970’. From the beginning of the project there has been discussion about the time-span to be covered by the project, especially about the terminal year. Some people feared that the availability of sources would limit the prospects of fruitful research. On the basis of this, it was even proposed to stop at 1945, the date of Indonesia's independence. However, in the end most of the scholars involved agreed that it would be worthwhile to continue to roughly 1970, because then it would be possible to include the first years of the Orde Baru regime and pinpoint its effects on the rehabilitation of ports. Moreover, 1970 was also convenient for the simple reason that it was one hundred years after the year, taken as the starting point, namely 1870. The year 1870 as a point of departure was never the subject of any discussion. Because of the liberalization of the economy, namely the general shift from exploitation by the colonial state to exploitation by private enterprise and the alleged beginning of the so-called Age of Modern Imperialism, which tied the corners of the Archipelago closer together, it was simply accepted. Within the confines of the maritime sector, 1870 was assumed to symbolize the change from wind energy to steam power and a beginning of the improvement of ports. Confidently, the opening up of the Suez Canal in 1869 heralded an intensification of contacts between the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies.

Nothing less than a revolution! The Dutch prince Hendrik had no doubts about the impact of the Suez Canal, cutting through the isthmus between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. At the end of 1869, having witnessed the opening of this new waterway, the prince remained in Egypt for six weeks to study the possible benefits for Dutch trade and shipping. As one of the driving spirits behind the modernization of the Dutch maritime industry he earned himself the epithet ‘the seafarer’. In the following year he played an active role in the founding of the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland (SMN), the first Dutch steam shipping line to the Netherlands Indies.

In 1729, an enslaved woman named Juana Isabel Curazao fled the island of Curaçao, a small Dutch entrepôt in the southern Caribbean, and made her way across calm waters to the northern coast of the nearby Spanish American mainland (present-day Venezuela), just forty miles down-current and downwind. After ostensibly converting to Catholicism Juana Isabel obtained her freedom and acquired a small plot of land in Curiepe, a town of free blacks which the Spanish had founded in 1721 to protect the coast from the incursions of English, French, and Dutch privateers. Juana Isabel planted cacao trees, hoping to profit from Europe's growing taste for chocolate. Defying Spanish colonial law that prohibited trade with foreigners, thousands of people like Juana Isabel surreptitiously sold cacao pods to Curaçaoan traders, usually small-scale Sephardic Jewish merchants or seafarers of African descent. The traders smuggled sacks of the pods back to Curaçao, where enslaved dockworkers loaded them onto large ocean-going vessels and shipped them to Dutch processing firms across the Atlantic. A generation later, in 1765, Juana Isabel's niece and heir, a free black woman named Ana María Mohele, began a long legal battle to retain the grove, which by then had grown into a 1,000-tree plantation. Spanish colonial authorities challenged Ana Maria's ownership of the land, claiming that her aunt's manumission and property grant both were invalid. Nevertheless, they only confiscated half the property, and allowed Ana Maria to keep the rest.

In 1964 F.R.J. Verhoeven, then Director General of the National Archives of Malaysia, wrote an article entitled ‘The lost archives of Dutch Malacca’ in which he lamented the apparent disappearance of the c. 2,000 volumes of records which he estimated must have been produced during the Dutch administration of Melaka from 1641 to 1824. Apart from 150 volumes in the National Archives of Indonesia in Jakarta, some fifteen volumes of Church registers now in the National Archives of Malaysia, and a small number of records in The Hague and elsewhere, nothing was known to have survived. It was only with the publication in 1983 of Ian Baxter' listing of series R/9 in the India Office Records that it became widely known that a portion of the archives had been shipped to London early in the twentieth century:

The records of the Malacca Orphan Chamber and Court of Justice, R/9, occupy 44 feet of shelving (ninety-eight boxes) at the India Office Records in London. They were donated by the Government of the Straits Settlements to the India Office in June 1927, after lying, neglected, for many years in the basement of the Court House at Malacca. It is only recently (1981) that they have been completely sorted and listed. They comprise thirty-six boxes of Orphan Chamber records, fifty-four boxes of records of the College of Justice, one box of records of the Political Council and seven boxes of miscellanea. For the most part the records are written in Dutch and although they extend in date from 1685 to 1835 the bulk of them relate to the period 1785–1825, i.e. the last years of the Dutch East India Company's administration, the British occupation of 1795–1818 and the second Dutch administration of 1818–25.

In 1786, Britain and Spain concluded the Convention of London, a treaty renewing permission for Anglo woodcutters to cut timber within a designated area in the Bay of Honduras. In exchange, Britain affirmed once again Spain's sovereignty over this valuable section of the Central American coast. As a revision of several earlier treaties, this new agreement differed in that, while allowing mahogany cutting for the first time, it attempted to strictly define and limit the boundaries within which the woodcutters (or Baymen as they called themselves) could operate, and took decisive steps to restrict their settlement's expansion. While the two nations hailed the Convention as a welcome bilateral solution to a long-standing inter-imperial conflict, many of the Baymen, especially members of the local white oligarchy, reviled the outcome. In a memorial to George III, the treaty's critics in the Bay dismissed it as the misguided product of presumptuous diplomats:

[T]he court of Madrid may amuse the court of London, with the number of miles and leagues which have been ceded to […] the British Settlement as long as the court of London is pleased to be amused with it. But […] your Memorialists with infinite respect to the superior Abilities and Knowledge and Wisdom of both Courts, most humbly pretend to be better Wood-cutters and better judges of the Soil, the Situation, and the Trees […] than all the courts of Europe […] They speak, and have always spoken, from their Knowledge and Experience.

There is no generally accepted explanation as to why Mare Liberum, or The Free Sea, was written. The most common view is that the Text was a propaganda instrument designed to improve the position of the United Provinces during the truce negotiations with Spain from 1606–08. Central to Grotius' strategy was his reliance upon Iberian Scholastics as a means of providing a series of irrefutable propositions to the Spaniards.

Some historians think that the expulsion of the KPM (Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij/Royal Packet Company) from Indonesian waters in 1957 had a disastrous impact on the inter-island shipping and trade in this largest insular region in the world. It is assumed that the Indonesian people did not have the capacity to overcome such serious problems generated by the absence of KPM from their waters, as financial inadequacy in buying new ships to replace the KPM fleet, the non-existence of experience and managerial skill in operating a modern, big shipping company and the like. Considering how big the role of KPM in the Indonesian inter-island shipping was, it is also imagined that the expulsion of this company would be a precondition of economic stagnation in Indonesia, because there was no shipping which had adequate experience to take over the role of KPM. As Dick states ‘Suspension of KPM sailing in December 1957 was the end of an efficient inter-island shipping (in Indonesia)’.