In the historiography of the period of Dutch rule in the Cape of Good Hope, from 1652 until 1795, Cape burghers are represented as the perpetual underdogs bristling against the rule of a restrictive Dutch East India Company (VOC). But was this relationship really so antagonistic?

The author places Cape colonial society in the wider context of the Dutch Republic and, in doing so, compares the political structures, institutions and dynamics of the Republic and its overseas settlement. He shows ...

"Being a slave" brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. This volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective that embraces the origin and afterlife of enslavement as well ...

Situated at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Spanish Philippines offer historians an intriguing middle ground of connected histories that raises fundamental new questions about conventional ethnic, regional and religious identities. This volume adds a new global perspective to the history of the Philippines by juxtaposing Iberian, Chinese and Islamic perspectives. By navigating various underexplored archival resources, senior and junior scholars from Asia, Europe and the A...

Large-scale comparative economic history of westernmost and easternmost Eurasia is of importance for the understanding of global history. The book provides a description of material life in North-western Europe and East Asia, for the period from the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, with a focus on developments in Great Britain and the Dutch Republic on the one hand and China and Japan on the other hand. Like an atlas it provides information, in an accessible format, on the mai...

"Bureaucrats of Liberation" narrates the history of the Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a civil rights organization founded in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy. Between 1963 and 1994, the Southern Africa Project connected lawyers from Namibia, South Africa, and the United States. Within the Project’s network, activist lawyers exchanged funding resources, provided logistical support for political trials, and mediated new voting ...

Wie ‘zeventiende eeuw’ zegt, denkt al snel aan Rembrandt, Amalia van Solms, Huygens, Van Schurman, en Spinoza, aan de VOC en aan pompeuze grachtenpanden vol weelde en schatten. De Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden was in de zeventiende eeuw dan ook een politieke grootmacht, met wereldwijde handelsbelangen en een toonaangevend cultureel leven. Deze Nederlandse 'gouden eeuw' is vaak geroemd vanwege zijn religieuze tolerantie, artistieke creativiteit en economische innovatie. Tegelijkertij...

It is the paradox at the heart of the Dutch Republic: how could a state emerge from resistance to political slavery and subjugation by a foreign power, only to become a colonial empire that promoted slavery all over the world? Slavery and the Dutch State shows how the modern Dutch state and its predecessors were complicit in colonial slavery. It describes the roles of various actors, such as enslaved people, administrators and merchants in the Netherlands and the colonized societies. More tha...

In archieven, bibliotheken en musea over de hele wereld liggen Nederlandse koloniale bronnen: kilometers aan brieven, verslagen en dagboeken, en depots vol afbeeldingen, kaarten en objecten. Maar de informatie in dit enorme koloniale archief spreekt niet voor zich. Hoe is dit bronnenmateriaal gevormd en welke gevolgen heeft dat voor historisch onderzoek? Hoe ga je als historicus om met racisme, oriëntalisme en eenzijdigheid in koloniale bronnen? En hoe deden historici dat de afgelopen eeuwen?

Dit boek biedt handreikingen aan onderzoekers in drie stappen. Deel I bespreekt de diepe verstrengeling van geschiedschrijving met overzeese handel en koloniaal bestuur, en toont hoe die ook na de formele dekolonisatie nog sporen achterlaat in de historiografie. Deel II richt zich op methodologie. Het behandelt hoe en waarom koloniale bronnen gevormd zijn en biedt aanknopingspunten om die opnieuw, vanuit verschillende perspectieven, te analyseren. Deel III geeft een praktisch overzicht van belangrijke archieven, collecties en typen bronnen: uiteenlopend van overheids- en bedrijfsdocumenten tot mondelinge overleveringen, van kerkelijke rapporten tot scheepsjournalen, en van foto’s tot digitaal materiaal...

In modern Japan, anti-establishment ideas have related in many ways to Japan’s capitalist development and industrialisation. Activist and intellectual Ishikawa Sanshirō exemplifies this imagination, connecting European and Japanese thought during the first decades of the twentieth century. This book investigates the emergence of a strand of non-violent anarchism, reassessing in particular the role of geographical thought in modern Japan as both a vehicle of political dissent and a basis fo...

In the twenty-first century, terms such as globalization, global, and world function as key words at the cusp of new frontiers in both historical writing and literary criticism. Practitioners of these disciplines may appear to be long time intimate lovers when seen from pre and early modern time periods, only to divorce with the coming of Anglophone world history in the twenty-first century. In recent years, works such as Martin Puchner’s The Written World, Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch,...