Wednesday, April 14, 2004, a rainy afternoon in Providence, the city with quaint old houses, as H.P. Lovecraft put it. Inside the century-old building of The John Carter Brown Library, located on the thoroughly soaked Brown Green, a ceremony is conducted in the MacMillan Reading Room. The Ambassador of Spain to the United States, HE. Javier Ruperéz, has just been presented with the first volume of the Hakluyt Society edition of the Malaspina Expedition. After remarking on the importance of this publication, the ambassador turns his attention to the Director of the John Carter Brown Library, Dr Norman Fiering. In recognition of the services of the Library to the promotion of the culture and history of both Spain and the former Spanish colonies, Norman is appointed Commander in the Orden de Isabel la Católica.

In early 1787, as American vessels flooded the Gold Coast with rum and as the French worked to extend their coastal position, the Cape Coast Castle governor Thomas Price, reported that the Fante, England's coastal allies, ‘are too politic a people, and too well acquainted with their own interests, ever to wish to confine their trade to one nation’. Price's summation of the issues affecting Anglo-Fante relations on the late eighteenth-century Gold Coast (modern Ghana) provides the foundation for this article. This article contributes to West African coastal historiography in that it examines the relationship between the Gold Coast and the Atlantic World through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The article expands upon this foundation by narrowing the focus to one Gold Coast trade/administrative enclave. It examines the enclave during a period of change, the 1770s to the early 1800s that culminated in radical reconstruction of coastal relations. The article utilises the Fetu city of Cape Coast, also the administrative centre for England's Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (hereafter CMTA), to examine the relationship between Atlantic (external) and coastal (internal) factors within an African trade enclave. To accomplish this, it eliminates the dichotomy that exists between exploring general coastal trends within a diverse coastal region. This raises a question concerning the consequence of these general trends upon diverse states, cultures and peoples. Do the general trends affect each group similarly or differently and, if so, why? The focus upon one Gold Coast enclave expands our understanding of the consequences caused by the interaction of Atlantic and coastal factors.

The study of the early European colonial presence in Asia has been stimulated in recent years by a series of excellent works. These have been both of general and specialist nature, written not only by historians, but also by political scientists as well as specialists of international relations. The truly excellent study published in 2002 by Edward Keene, can be taken as a point in case. Central to his revisitation of seventeenth-century treaties of the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) with the Emperor of Kandy, is the notion of divided sovereignty expounded by Hugo Grotius around 1600-1610. It was against the backdrop of such concepts of divided sovereignty that the VOC could ultimately conclude its complex web of treaty relationships that broadly characterise the Dutch colonial empire in the East Indies up the advent of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. There is some legitimacy in contending that Keene's postulations effectively rework and reinterpret, at the level of international relations, what was once conveniently dubbed the ‘Age of Partnership’, i.e. an age characterised by trade-driven colonial empires that grew upon a complex, sometimes self-contradictory network of treaty relationships as well as formal and informal cooperation garnered from native elites. Admittedly such relations were often but not always based on unequal power and treaty relationships. Despite the uneven playing fields created by many such Euro-Asian treaties, especially those forged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the conclusion of treaties was assumed on the basis of the nominal co-equality of sovereigns and plenipotentiary agents acting on their behalf. European and Asian treaty partners were accepted as contracting equals, and this is particularly stunning given that the feudal world of European power politics at the time was, by comparison, probably more complex and legally structured than Asia. Certainly, the underlying power relations behind these early modern agreements were completely different from those imposed by the mature colonial powers on Asia at the zenith of nineteenth-century imperialism!

Historians have very little information about the operation of Asian commercial networks and the social interaction between merchants. Hampered by this lack of data scholars have focused on trade routes and commodities. Our knowledge of the Armenian trading network is more or less limited to its geographical dispersal. The network stretched from New Julfa, a suburb of the Iranian capital of Isfahan, to Amsterdam and London in Europe, and to important centres in the Levant and Central Asia, covering the Indian Subcontinent, and extending eastwards to Manila in the Philippines. Armenian merchants were prosperous and communities were located in commercial towns all over the world. The brothers Khojah Joseph and Khojah Johannes Marger, for instance, established a partnership at Hyderabad in 1666 with a starting capital of 27,550 rupees. Some forty years later on the death of Joseph Marger, the trading activity of the two Armenians was worth more than two million rupees.

‘One of the greatest advantages a traveller brings back from his journeys’, wrote the chevalier d'Arvieux in 1673, ‘is that he rejects the prejudices imbibed in his own country against strangers, something which those who never leave will never accomplish.’ For with direct exposure to foreign cultures, explained Simon de la Loubère two decades later, one learns ‘that there is not in any place anything marvellous or extravagant’. The seventeenth century in European history witnessed a great exodus of articulate globetrotters from every walk of life who sought adventure, wealth, and reputation. This was an age, indeed, when Europeans could be found in nearly every corner of the world. Moreover, many of these individuals wrote extensively of their experiences, reporting details of geography, climate, flora, fauna and the natural wealth of the lands they visited. Their accounts are also enriched by the close attention paid to the fullness and richness of the social, religious, and cultural aspects of the people who occupied these non-Christian, non-European societies. In short, the anthropological, even ethnographic elements of these travelogues constitute an extraordinarily rich source for modern historians that, until recently, has rarely been mined by scholars who have tended to limit themselves instead to the political and commercial contacts between Europe and the wider world during the Age of Discovery and Exploration.

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.

The establishment of a Dutch trading factory at Kayalpatnam in 1645 initiated half a century of Luso-Dutch rivalry for the control of the Madurai coast (modern Tamilnad) until its ‘final solution’ in the 1690s. The stakes were high and involved both material and non-material considerations. Contemporary Dutch sources estimated the capital value of the local chank or conch shell and pearl fishery at 350,000 and 5 to 6 million guilders, respectively. Almost half of the circa 500 vessels involved in the pearl fisheries of 1668 and 1669 came from the seven major ports (yelu ur) of the socalled Fishery Coast (Costa de Pescaria). Control over southeast India littoral, moreover, meant mastery of the strategic Palk Straits and the Indo-Ceylon trade in areca, textiles, salt, grains, ray skins, chaya or dye roots, lime, and the like. Dutch projections of potential revenues derived from this source in the 1670s ranged from 1.28 to 1.65 million guilders per year. Apart from the intra-Asiatic or country trade, exports from the Madurai coast became increasingly important in the long-distance trade with Europe in the wake of the ‘calicoe craze’. Between 1680-81 and 1734-35, the total invoice and sales value of Dutch textile exports from Madurai destined for patria amounted to 8.85 and 15.31 million guilders, respectively. The annual invoice and sales value of Company textile exports from southeast India littoral to the Dutch Republic peaked in the first decade of the eighteenth century at an average of 282,824 and 644,541 guilders, respectively. In 1704-05, the invoice and sales value of Dutch textile exports from Madurai to Europe alone amounted to no less than 659,215 and 1,362,050 guilders, respectively.

In this study, I examine how ‘ethnic’ trading networks are created and recreated, but may also fracture and fall apart. This occurred among some Indian groups in East Africa, who initially strengthened their economic and cultural ties with India by maintaining intensive trade relations and taking brides from the homeland. However, after just one generation, their economic focus was on East Africa, Japan and the UK. Many of today's well-off Indian businessmen in East Africa show little economic interest in India. In fact, Gujarati businessmen in East Africa created new, rather negative images of their counterparts in Gujarat. During the last century, their overall image of Indians in India was transformed from one of a ‘reliable family or community members’ to one of ‘unreliable, corrupt and, untrustworthy ‘others’.

Remarkably little is known about Jan Huygen van Linschoten's private life in the Portuguese Indies. The only available source material consists of a letter to his parents he wrote in 1584, shortly after his arrival in Goa, and the text of his Itinerario. Working as a secretary to the Archbishop of Goa he must at least have given the impression of being a respectable man in everyday life. Although he was still a young man in the period of his residence in Goa from September 1583 to November 1588; born at the end of 1562 or at the beginning of 1563 he must have been nearly twenty-one when he arrived and nearly twenty-five when he left and although he dwells quite extensively on various cases of adultery and especially on the moral character of Indian and Portuguese women in Goa, he never even hints at personal amorous experiences. We may take this as a sign of the times in which he lived. Indeed there was a strong moral code in sixteenth-century Europe, at least in theory and especially from what may be termed the lower middle class upwards, and apart from this mostly religiously based and socially sanctioned moral code there were literary conventions. Debauchery and erotic adventures were dealt with mainly in pornographic or diary-like texts that certainly were not the genre of Linschoten's Itinerario. But as the morally judging observer he presents himself to be, he could of course describe more or less spicy details and comment on them. Linschoten played this part several times and as it would seem quite eagerly. As a matter of fact his moral views are accorded considerable importance in the book. A first and most interesting attempt to analyse these views in relation to the stamps published with the Itinerario was made by Ernst van den Boogaart. To accompany an exhibition of the stamps, the same author published a more extensive analysis of the stamps and of the Latin texts of a separate edition in Het verheven en uerdoruen Azië. Both titles are good reading on the subject.

This could be considered as the ‘swan song’ of a French colonial administrator in Tropical Africa. Between 1958 and 1961, most of these colonial administrators had to leave what was soon to be considered one of the major sins committed by France in the twentieth century: the Empire. For some of them it was a real shock, from which they never recovered. Of course, it was the normal outcome of the very process they had prepared: to teach the African peoples how to rule themselves. But: ‘Did it not come too early leaving the new African elite insufficiently prepared?’ If this were so, was ‘the great sin of France not to colonise but to decolonise too quickly?’

That which the Dutch called Ligor is the present-day southern province of Nakhon Si Thammarat in Thailand. It was one of the oldest city-states and flourishing entrepôts in Southeast Asia. Dutch East India Company (VOC) documents reveal that the Company traded tin in Ligor and had a small office there for more than a century from around 1640 until 1756. In fact, the relationship between the VOC and Ligor had already been established a few decades earlier when Ligor was still enjoying much autonomy with respect to self-governance, trade, and foreign contacts.

The Scramble for Africa between the European powers at the end of the nineteenth century has always struck people as quite an extraordinary process. It has played an important role in the debate about European overseas expansion, and still does. This article is about the discussion surrounding the partition of Africa which took place within a geographical society in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS). In those days, as the expansion reached its zenith, the question of how the British Empire should be organised was one of the most important political issues. The debate about imperialism continued after Africa had been partitioned, and the nature of the debate changed in the light of two World Wars and the era of decolonisation. As time went by, scholars who mainly focused on the economic and political motivations for European overseas expansion dominated the imperialism debate. The role that groups such as geographical societies played became obscured as their ideas were seen as outdated. In recent years there has been a growing interest in the ways societies like the RSGS contributed to the metropolitan culture of imperialism.