The article “Adventures in Abyssinia: The Relation of Charles Poncet, 1698 to 1700” by Ronald S. Love, published in Itinerario 28/3 (2004): 38–69, does not indicate the extent to which it was based on a publication by Theodore Natsoulas that covers the same topic. The article by Natsoulas, “Charles Poncet's Travels to Ethiopia, 1698 to 1703”, appeared in Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700, edited by Glenn J. Ames and Ronald S. Love, 71–96. Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies 45. Westport: Praeger, 2003.

In the article by Stefan Halikowski Smith, “Perceptions of Nature in Early Modern Portuguese India”, Itinerario 31/2 (2007): 17–49, the following illustrations should have appeared on page 39. The editors regret the error.

In the fall semester of 2007 Professor Allison Blakely visited the Netherlands, a country that he studied extensively for his acclaimed book on racial imagery, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Indiana University Press, 1994). His other work on the black experience in Europe, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Howard University Press, 1986), won the American Book Award in 1988. Professor Blakely published numerous articles in a myriad of national and international journals. Blakely is currently Professor of European and Comparative History and George and Joyce Wein Professor of African-American Studies at Boston University. In 2006 he was elected president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and in the spring of 2008 he will be a visiting fellow at Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.

In 1623, the Dutch governor of Amboyna, an important clove-producing island in modern-day Indonesia, executed a group of English merchants and Japanese mercenaries accused of plotting to seize control of the VOC castle on the island. After news of these events reached Europe, the Amboyna Massacre, as it came to be called in England, rapidly became invested with great consequences as English and Dutch leaders fought over the issues of blame and compensation. This article examines the Japanese mercenaries accused by the VOC, the silent participants whose cause was not taken up by any national government.

Portuguese perceptions of nature in the new worlds they encountered in Southeast Asia from the turn of the sixteenth century were a complex amalgam of inherited frameworks and the forging of a new gaze or vision. Grand claims that the Portuguese discoveries amount to the “construction of space” and the “invention of humanity” have been trumpeted, but are too overblown. From another perspective, Portuguese scholars have recently engaged in a philosophical debate around experiencialismo—the distinction between “scientific experience” and the supposedly pre- or non-scientific “lived” experience of the senses (experiência vivencial), suggesting that the Portuguese Discoveries fall at a critical juncture between these two hermeneutic paradigms. But what did this amount to in concrete terms?

I would prefer to turn to other scholars like the Belgian historian Albert Deman, who has stipulated that the perception of Indian nature in the European imaginary, was locked in three unchanging tropes that even first-hand experience could not easily undo. These tropes were exuberance, superabundance and luxury, and go right back to the first encounters between East and West in antiquity, notably Alexander the Great's adventures of the fourth century B.C., which impressed upon Westerners the East's “superior forms of life” and what Pliny, for example, dutifully acknowledged as “the wonder of the victorious expedition of Alexander the Great, when that part of the world was first revealed.” Why wonder, and what does Deman allude to when he writes of “superior forms of life”? The common impression was that everything grew more forcefully, and in greater profusion in the East. There were, for example, two flowerings a year of some plants; the colours and tastes were stronger; the smells were beguiling. What the Portuguese noted as “the fumos da India” merely drew on biblical reference in the Book of Proverbs to the “spicy breezes of the East”. From these basic conceptions had sprung compilations of all the fabulous stories of the East, texts such as those produced by Ktesias the Knidian and Megasthenes whose ideas were passed down through Pliny into the genre of the marvellous, or mirabilia, fanciful speculations and fables developed along the lines of half-truths reported by returning merchants and travellers, and sometimes fictions spread by Arab middlemen keen to retain their long-standing monopoly of purveyance to Christian consumers.

Two of the former so-called rival empires of trade in the Orient, the Dutch and the British with their respective East India Companies, are today friendly neighbours, closely co-operating both politically and economically. Their erstwhile mercantile rivalry in the East, however, is still reflected in the fact that part of the records of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) is nowadays kept in—of all places—the department of India Office Records at the British Library in London, the very repository of the archives of the British East India Company (EIC).

This article presents an overview of the relatively unknown and unexplored materials derived, copied, or translated from the VOC and stored in that lion's den. Apart from a few miscellaneous papers, three groups of records will be described: the remaining archives of the VOC establishment at Melaka (in Malaysia), VOC documents in the Mackenzie collections, and relevant materials in the archives of the EIC. The bulk of the first group of records and parts of the second and third group are unique. In addition, the few Dutch records from Melaka that still remain in Malaysia will be dealt with in an Appendix.

This article uses a comparative perspective to consider the role that English governors played in facilitating inter-imperial trade with the Dutch in New York City and the ports of the English Leeward Islands, including Bridgetown, Barbados, during the seventeenth century. As governors struggled to establish viable colonies these men worked to supply needed trade goods, often allowing their colonists to turn to Dutch colonies and the Netherlands as trading partners, understanding the ways in which these executives negotiated between imperial policies, primarily the Navigation Acts, and the needs of their charges is crucial to understanding how colonies developed. Further, investigating the ways in which governors fostered, regulated, or prevented inter-imperial trade with the Dutch illustrates how governors and colonists implemented and adapted mercantile policy in different colonies, places that depended upon the transfer of culture, goods and entrepreneurial activities across imperial boundaries. Complementing recent scholarship describing the extent of inter-imperial and cross-national trade in the seventeenth-century Atlantic, this article examines the impact English governors had on local merchant communities and their efforts to trade with the Dutch.

The intention of this paper is to fill a gap in a rich yet underrepresented aspect of Indian Ocean slave history. I have elected to found this study on a close reading of a journal from a slave-trading vessel that sought slaves for the Cape in Madagascar in the mid-1770s. This vessel, De Zon, conducted a slave-trading operation on behalf of the VOC along the west coast of Madagascar from May 1775 to January 1776. I have undertaken a close reading of the journal maintained by the merchant of De Zon, so as to write a history sensitive to the daily experiences of the slave traders in Madagascar, as well as to the codes and discourse through which this experience was filtered.

This paper is primarily concerned with the experience of negotiation and trading as it was recorded by the VOC merchants on the vessels, and is drawn predominantly from the first trading encounter of the crew of De Zon when they arrived in Madagascar in 1775. In contrast to the surveys that comprise the majority of the English-language scholarship on slave trading in Madagascar, this paper is founded on a close reading of particular episodes; it thus represents an attempt at a micronarrative that illustrates and details the historical experience of VOC slave trading on the island at a particular juncture.

This study presents an in-depth analysis of Alexander von Humboldt's description and criticism of the various colonial societies of Spanish America which he visited during his well-known expedition through the Americas (1799–1804). His criticism of colonialism in general, deeply rooted in his personal convictions, has already been the focal point of several scholarly studies; however, during his American expedition Humboldt offered a more differentiated assessment of specific colonial societies, namely by comparing various regional and local traditions and developments. This differentiated assessment of Spanish American colonial societies has yet to be analysed. This essay focuses on Humboldt's little known personal diaries, which offer a wealth of interesting comments on colonial societies, but which have been scarcely used in international Humboldt research, since they have not yet been translated entirely.

Domination is not hegemony, and no stable colonial system can survive on the basis of permanent physical violence over the local populations; a fiction of generosity has to be installed in order to create a bond between the rulers and the ruled. In order to establish a rhetoric based on disinterested giving, colonial powers had to make available to the colonised populations some “benefits” that could be claimed as being advantageous for the recipients and testify to the generosity of the givers. The “gift” on the part of the Portuguese in the Asian colonial context was their effort to convert the local populations to Christianity, a major enterprise that was undertaken with the help of the religious orders, and most especially the Jesuits. As a result of efforts to convert the masses, newly baptised populations could be granted some degree of integration in colonial society. One of such instances of integration was charity, although, as we shall see, converts were taken care of in a luminal social space that was well below that awarded to the colonists. The example of the Misericórdia of Goa can illustrate the point I am trying to make. The charity provided to the converted populations by this confraternity was directed mainly to the Portuguese-born elites, or their descendants, but did nevertheless include those willing to be integrated in the Catholic Church through conversion.

This article reconstructs the voyage of the Swimming Lion to the Caribbean in 1595 and the court battle to which it gave rise. The Master mariner Gillis Dorenhoven was accused of piracy by Pedro d'Arana, contador of Havana, who sued his employers before the Middelburg Admiralty Court in 1609–1610. Johan Boreel, the eldest son of one of the defendants, sought expert advice from his friend Hugo Grotius. The author of Mare Liberum, published in April 1609, became involved in the case at various levels. Pressure was put on the States General to revise their instructions for the Admiralty Court. Grotius also tried to convince the Admiralty judges that freedom of trade and navigation was a fundamental right of Dutch merchants in the West Indies and that Dorenhoven's actions should be seen in this light. For political reasons, he could not refer to the Americas in Mare Liberum. Yet the case of the Swimming Lion reveals just how expansive his notion of freedom of trade and navigation really was.

In 1885, the Dutch East Indian state began a huge ‘civilisation offensive’ in the field of irrigation focussed on Java. It comprised creating modern irrigation works, regulating irrigation management and planning construction activities. This paper shows the successes and failures of this irrigation programme, which was part of the Dutch ‘colonial project’ as a whole. Particular attention is given to the question of why the colonial state made irrigation affairs one of its special missions. What emerges is that Dutch exploitation interests (sugar) were dominant, though the welfare interests of the native population (rice) clearly became more prominent. Another question to be dealt with is the issue of how the Dutch East Indian state realized its plans. As this paper argues, the engineers of the Public Works Department played a key part, but only in competition and cooperation with other relevant groups.

Architecture is testimony to the passage of time, to social relations and ways of doing things. Architecture is responsible for the morphology of cities; it constitutes a fundamental element in the city's image and of the urban landscape. In the context of Indo-Portuguese culture, architecture—emerging as the sedimentation of different ways of doing things—appears from a research perspective as a particularly delicate issue because of the shortage of specific documentary information. Given the difficulty of access to documentary support, the study of architecture often falls back on the descriptions and accounts of travellers which are almost inevitably constrained by an interpretive vision that speaks more of the observer's own mindset than of the object itself.