When speaking of decolonisation and post-colonialism, it is essential to avoid the generalising approach which sometimes leads to a distortion of the real. Decolonisation is generally seen as accession to sovereignty. For the elites and the populations of the French Overseas Dependencies it represents a reforming of the bond with France. It is a conversion of what was political subordination into dependence on social and economic resources. This conversion is a rational process based on the following idea: Independence would be costly compared to the advantages of dependence. In other words, Guadeloupe, Guyane and Martinique would be decolonized without becoming independent. Therefore, the transition from the status of colony to that of ‘departement’ is not a legal contrivance. Even if local populations did not choose their political status through the electoral process, they did vote for the parties which were in favour of French citizenship.

The colonial military history of British and French West Africa has received copious attention from historians and soldiers. The role of the region in the two world wars has also been discussed in one way or the other. However, in the discussion of West Africa's colonial military history and the role of the colonies in the two world wars, hardly any reference is made to the air factor. While discussions of colonial military history concentrate on infantry and naval exploits, those on the role of the colonies in the world wars concentrate on their importance as sources of raw materials and manpower for British and French war efforts in other theatres of the wars. The wrong impressions thus given are that the air factor was alien to West Africa's colonial defence and that the region was largely outside the strategic manoeuvres of the two world wars. This is understandable in that the Maxim gun and the gunboat had largely been responsible for the conquest and policing of West Africa. Moreover, while infantry and naval warfare had been the mode of combat in all societies from time immemorial the air as a factor of warfare is largely a phenomenon of the twentieth century. Lastly, strategists in British West Africa ignored the air factor for a very long time because of its capital intensity.

Although this paper builds on earlier research, let me frankly confess that this is still a preliminary report as it is not based on comprehensive research in the original sources upon which my work on the seventeenth centuryis based. Given the huge amount of sources available for the eighteenth century, to write a truly thorough paper on the Arabian seas in the eighteenth century would take many years – nay, a life-time so voluminous is it. Holden Furber, perhaps the greatest historian of the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean, started to work on this topic in 1936, published a volume on the 1780–1790 period in 1948 and then announced he would write further volumes tracing the story back into the seventeenth century. But Holden Furber spent the rest of his life hunting down further archival material, with new material constantly forcing him to delay further publications for another forty years. Even then he was only able to write a preliminary survey of the eighteenth century, ending with the causing note that, of course, he had not studied the Dutch material as well as he would have liked to.

According to Frantz Fanon, decolonisation starts out as ‘a programme of complete disorder’. This idea is interestingly echoed in the Creole expression ‘ce on dezod ka me lod’, which translated means that through chaos comes order. In 1998–1999 Martinique lost 23,000 working days; strikers blockaded the ports of Pointe à Pitre in Guadeloupe and Fort de France in Martinique for several weeks at a time in 1998. Trade unions have built up membership levels of eighty to ninety per cent in hotels and in public administration. In this article we will be examining some of the consequences and causes of new forms of socio-economic action and political protest that have emerged in the French Caribbean since the end of the Cold War. For a long time, the French Caribbean was a haven of relative calm and prosperity in the Caribbean. The Dutch Antilles and Aruba and the British dependent territories (now renamed UK Overseas Territories) have also generally shared this good fortune. Today the relative prosperity of the non-sovereign territories is becoming more marked as independent Caribbean states slip into economic recession and growing poverty, so that their political systems and leaders face an endemic crisis of political legitimacy.

There are two views of British policy toward the Commonwealth Caribbean. One, held most firmly by those with responsibility for British policy, is that Britain is fully engaged with the region and that it remains committed to its welfare. It is exemplified by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's website which contains a section entitled ‘Britain's Special Relationship with the Caribbean’. The other, encountered in the Caribbean and by its diplomatic representatives in Britain, as well as by some of those in Britain who have close contact with the region, is that Britain has diluted its commitments and is in a long process of withdrawal from the region. It is exemplified in observations made from time to time by Caribbean High Commissioners in the UK, and none more so than Sir Ron Sanders, the former and current High Commissioner for Antigua and Barbuda who has written on Britain's lack of commitment to the Caribbean.

Academic historians – or at least one sub-species of them - display growing interest in underwater archaeology, but nearly all of these profess little but disdain for treasure salvors who dive for precious metals and jewels hidden in submerged shipwrecks. Even so, the academics sometimes rub elbows with the undersea hunters and I myself became involved with them in 1982 and again in 1995–1996. I might add that they contacted me - not the other way around. This article is designed to document my experience, and while it is not intended in any way to be an exposé, I think it might be useful to my profession and to my Brazilian friends to learn something of how the salvors operate.

What had begun as a respectable stream of information about Asia during the sixteenth century became a virtual flood during the seventeenth. Literally hundreds of books about Asia and its various parts were published during that century, authored by missionaries, merchants, mariners, physicians, soldiers, and independent travellers. At least twenty-five major descriptions of South Asia, appeared during the century; another fifteen on mainland Southeast Asia, about twenty devoted to the Southeast Asian archipelagoes, and sixty or more to East Asia. Alongside these major independent contributions stood scores of Jesuit letterbooks, derivative accounts, travel accounts with brief descriptions of many Asian places, pamphlets, newssheets, and the like. Many of these were collected into the several large multivolume compilations of travel literature published during the period. In addition, several important scholarly studies pertaining to Asia were published during the seventeenth century - studies of Asian medicine, botany, religion, and history- as well as translations of important Chinese and Sanskrit literature.

The 1944–1945 Yearbook of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam includes a commemorative article written byjohan Huizinga in honour of the French historian Gabriel Hanotaux, who was a foreign member of the Academy from 1913 to 1944. Hanotaux was born on November 19, 1853, and died on April 11, 1944, a few months after his ninetieth birthday. In his commemoration of Hanotaux, Huizinga briefly sketched the life, work and achievements of Hanotaux who was, at that time, a wellknown French historian and politician. Huizinga was very impressed, as becomes apparent from his words: ‘Truly, it is almost unbelievable what this representative of all that is noble and pure in the French has created.’ He concluded his commemoration with a brief consideration of what he called his ‘temporary personal relationship with Hanotaux’.

Dutch colonialism has traditionally focused on the East Indies, rather than the West Indies. Thus when Queen Wilhelmina, while in exile in London, declared in 1942 that the colonies should become autonomous with the words ‘relying on one's own strength, with the will to support each other,’ she was thinking of the East and not so much about Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. Yet as it turned out, all constitutional plans, culminating into the Statuut or Charter of the Kingdom of 1954, even though conceived and drafted with the East in mind, was ultimately only applied to the West. The Netherlands East Indies, occupied by Japan during World War II, opted for independence after the War. The Hague did not accept this step and waged both hot and cold wars to fight against Indonesia's independence. This, for the Netherlands traumatic, experience left its traces in Dutch policy regarding its Caribbean territories.

Ethnic hegemony has been the pattern of governance in the Caribbean since the first century of colonialism, with a small but powerful elite of European ancestry directly controlling the destiny of these territories until the 1960s, when a new African-based political hegemony developed. The conquest and subsequent disappearance of the native inhabitants, followed by the steady development of plantation economies on the basis of slave and contract labour, which in turn influenced heavily the emergence of a race-based system of social stratification in these colonies, are too well known to warrant repetition here. The main concern of this paper is to examine, in the context of ethnic and class formations, the political and social dynamics of the post-colonial period with a view to prognosticating probable developments in the ensuing decades of the twenty-first century.

Perhaps, the story of Europe's views of Asia should begin with the question of when the term ‘Asia’, ‘Açu’, was introduced into what one must call the European perspective of the world. Meaning the 'sunrising’ in its original, Assyrian usage, it always seems to have denoted that part of the world which lay to the East. Once the Greek had adopted it to identify those lands which, precisely because they were threatening and near, they wanted to denote as ‘not theirs’, it became part of the dichotomy in which Europe was created as the geographical context for Greek civilisation, Hellas, while Asia -jealously viewed and, consequently, negatively judged - was the territory of the other, the enemy. From that time onwards, ‘Europe’ was part of the vocabulary the peoples of the Mediterranean used to structure the shores of their sea geographically.

The German scholar Georg Marcgraf was the first trained astronomer in the New World and co-author of the earliest published natural history of Brazil, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden and Amsterdam 1648) (Fig. 1). Arriving in the Americas in 1638, Marcgraf took his place among a remarkable group of scholars and painters assembled at the Brazilian court of the German count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679), the governor-general of Dutch Brazil from 1637–1644.1 Dutch Brazil was established by the Dutch West India Company (WIC), which was created in 1621 to engage in trade, conquest, and colonisation in the Americas and Africa. Except for Marcgraf, the most important members of the Count's entourage were Dutch and included the painters Albert Eckhout (c. 1610 - c. 1666) and Frans Post (1612–1680) and the physician Willem Piso (1611–1678). The rich group of scientific and visual materials they created are comparable in both scope and importance with the works created by Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, and others during the Pacific voyages of Captain Cook in the eighteenth century.2 The Count's support of natural history, astronomy, and scientific and ethnographic illustration during his governorship was highly unusual, setting him apart from other colonial administrators and military leaders in the seventeenth century. Indeed, he is responsible for establishing both the first observatory and the first botanical garden in the New World, sparing no expense in creating a princely empire for himself in the Brazilian wilderness.

It has been over a hundred years since the U.S. took control of Puerto Rico. In that time, the way in which the U.S. perceived Puerto Rico has changed from a colony requiring Americanisation to, in the 1950s, its showcase of democracy in the Caribbean, to today, an island that still retains geopolitical importance for the U.S., but represents an increasing economic burden. The failure of Operation Bootstrap, as the Puerto Rican industrialization program was known, resulted in permanent large-scale unemployment, with a population dependent on federal transfers for a living, and a constant source of migration to the mainland, where over half of Puerto Ricans now live. I shall trace the outline of these three stages in U.S. hegemony over Puerto Rico, and argue that throughout the U.S. Congress was reluctant to fully incorporate Puerto Rico, because its population was deemed racially and socially inferior to that of the mainland. Though the removal of Spain from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines was considered part of the its ‘manifest destiny’, the United States never intended to incorporate these people so different from the U.S. as part of the American nation, as was done with its earlier acquisitions in Texas, Alaska or even Hawaii.