The empire of absolutist Spain haunted the debates over the empire of liberal Spain. To take one example, José Arias y Miranda, an unemployed civil servant who would later work as the librarian for the Ministerio de Ultramar (Overseas Ministry), responded to the Real Academia de la Historia's query on the effects of the American empire on Spain's economy and society in words that would have been familiar to a seventeenth-century arbitrista. After reviewing America's drain on the sparse Spanish population and the corrupting effects of gold, silver, and land on Spanish work habits, Arias y Miranda concluded ‘that America was […] the determining cause of Spain's decadence’.

Virginia was founded with a certainty of common humanity that had disastrous consequences for its native peoples. The English established Jamestown in 1607—in what was to become their first permanent settlement in America—with all the mixed motivations of benevolence and grasping desire of any colonial enterprise. Yet they firmly believed the peoples that they found there, whom they called Indians, were as human as themselves. Convinced that they possessed an absolute truth valid for all peoples in all times and places, they desired to embrace and mould these Indians into their own ideal vision of humanity. It was this inclusive embrace of the Indians, and not any cynical attempts to exploit them or to denigrate them as “other,” which led to the destruction of their way of life. The tragedy of the colony was due to the most benevolent of intentions.

In Steinkopf, a former coloured Reserve in the Northern Cape Province, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingkerk (NGS; Dutch Reformed Mission Church), a former sub-branch of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK; Dutch Reformed Church) forged a legitimate public space for the expression of Nama identity in the 1960s. The legitimisation of aboriginal identity was not accidental, but very much an expression of apartheid policies of the day. I hope to demonstrate both the content and the consequences of this particular episode in Steinkopf, and thereby contribute to an understanding of the links between a crumbling capitalist infrastructure and the ideological efforts to reinforce that infrastructure through processes of ethnic strengthening. My claim is that the NGK played an ideological role supporting the capitalist interests as it strengthened the super-structural pillars of the segregation and apartheid eras.

In 1983, a year which some might view as the high watermark of apartheid, a strange thing happened in Roodepoort, a town in the West Rand mining area, near Johannesburg. A Mrs van Rensburg, visiting a local, all-white school, realised that some of the children were starving. She gave them food. When she returned the next day, the childrens’ parents were sitting on the pavement in front of the school, waiting for a meal. Van Rensburg's husband, Leon, took on the task of feeding the parents and children on a regular basis. He was a man of extreme right wing sympathies and was to become active on the West Rand as a follower of Eugene Terreblanche's neo-Fascist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). By 1985, the AWB had initiated a nation-wide Volkshulpskema (People's Help Scheme). By 1988 the scheme was providing 14,000 meals a day for white children. On the West Rand, where Leon van Rensburg became organiser for the scheme, 2,000 children a day were being fed. The scheme was explicitly aimed at fostering racial solidarity. Leon van Rensburg told a journalist: These people need not be members of the AWB. They are Afrikaners. We help any white person, in spite of their political beliefs.’

Perhaps one of the saddest consequences of the demise of traditional Khoikhoi societies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the loss of their languages. Contemporary reports by visitors abound with references to how difficult the Khoi language was to learn, while at the same time commending the Khoikhoi for their ability to learn European languages. By about 1700, only half a century after Dutch colonisation, most Khoikhoi living in the colonised areas of the Western Cape could speak some form of Dutch in addition to their own language. However, the rapid spread of European settlers deeper into the interior, on the one hand, and the acculturation of the Khoikhoi and their inclusion in the colonial polity and economy, on the other hand, meant that by the end of the eighteenth century Khoi was spoken only on the fringes of the Cape colony. Cape Khoi was increasingly replaced by (a form of) Dutch as the first language of the native inhabitants of the Cape. Thus, on his tour of Southern Africa in 1803-1806, Heinrich Lichtenstein could observe that ‘on the borders alone are some Hottentots to be found who speak their own lariguage; but among them several foreign words are introduced, spoken with the Hottentot accent and snort’. Cape Khoi was by this stage rapidly dying out.

Trade has been one of the determining features of Indonesian history. Attention has often focused on the monopolising efforts of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), which came to be replaced in the nineteenth century by an equally monopolising government and its Cultuurstelsel or Cultivation System (1830-70). However, the economic sector was never devoid of private initiative as exemplified by the development of Batavia. The city offered access to major trade routes and soon after its foundation became a military, economic, and administrative centre. Feeding and housing its growing population required the import of food supplies, building materials, and other items. Private trade was of vital importance in this respect.

With the eighteenth century drawing to a close, Anglo-French hostilities were rapidly escalating in Europe. Besides competing for power on the continent, both the British and the French were concerned with expanding their influence in the East, where the once mighty trading empire of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had been in steady decline for some decades. By the end of 1794, conflicts on the continent were turning firmly in France's favour and in January 1795 French troops invaded the Netherlands, forcing the ruling Prince of Orange to seek refuge in England. Members of the Dutch Patriot movement—the democratically-minded opponents of the Dutch monarchy and the old order in general—were sympathetic towards French revolutionary ideals and welcomed the French presence in their country. Meanwhile, the occupation of the Netherlands was of great concern to the British government, who suspected that the French would waste no time in also taking control of strategically-located Dutch colonies.

There is an interesting and long-standing controversy over the applicability of the vent-for-surplus model to the growth of the Gold Coast cocoa industry around the turn of the century. This debate has important implications both for African economic history and for current issues of resource allocation in developing countries. Our paper attempts to clarify the elements of the debate by applying to each ele-ment a production-possibilities model, using historical evidence to verify where possible the validity of the analysis.

Where do episodes of colonising failure fit into the historiography of European expansion? Almost by definition, this field, especially those aspects of it concerned with colonial social formation, privileges the study of those colonies which became established. Nor does an enquiry into failure have much to offer to those who have adopted the increasingly popular “Atlantic” perspective on European overseas activity. The students in this school of thought stress the importance of the commercial and social links between European-American settlements, as well as with Africa and Europe. These were forged through the unprecedented movement of people and commodities generated by early modern overseas activity, especially across the Atlantic Ocean. These connections and the corresponding mingling of peoples from four continents constitute the key elements in the development of “modernity” and the creation of a manifestly new world.