The twelve essays explore three connected aspects of European expansion in the period between 1500 and 1900 - migration, trade, and slavery - with some attention given to present-day echoes from that era.

This case study of Chinese settlement in Mauritius investigates the complexities of colonial diasporas and sets the construction of a mythology of migration against the realities of the processes of negotiation and communication with the larger society.

Based on historiographical changes over the last century, this new edited edition of the Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama to India (1497-1499) provides the first English translation of this important expedition in more than a century.

James Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan was crucial in forming the modern image of the Rājpūt, a princely "martial" caste resident in India's northwest desert. This book explores the relationships between the political power of the British imperial state, the construction of historical memories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the uses of these constructions by European writers and Indian nationalist elites. The case of the Rajputs demonstrates how imperial histories reflected Indian social processes and pre-colonial forms of knowledge, interpreted...

This volume contributes rich, new material to provide insights into indigenous responses to the colonial empires of Great Britain (South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia)) and Germany (Namibia) and explore the complex intellectual, cultural, literary, and political borders and identities that emerged across these spaces. Contributors include distinguished global scholars in the field as well as exciting young scholars. The essays link global-national-local forces in history by analysing how indigenous elites not only interacted with colonial empires to absorb, adapt and re-cast...

Henry Edward O'Neill was British Consul in Mozambique from 1879 to 1889. He completed thirteen exploratory journeys in northern Mozambique, including the first exploration of the Makua and Lomwe countries between Mozambique Island and Lake Malawi. This recreation of the book, which he never published, makes available for the first time a large body of information on the peoples of northern Mozambique (a region still little researched), on the history of the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean and on the expansion of Portuguese rule and the resistance to it by powerful local communities....

In The Boxer Codex, the editors have transcribed, translated and annotated an illustrated late-16th century Spanish manuscript. It is a special source that provides evidence for understanding early-modern geography, ethnography and history of parts of the western Pacific, as well as major segments of maritime and continental South-east Asia and East Asia. Although portions of this gem of a manuscript have been known to specialists for nearly seven decades, this is the first complete transcription and English translation, with critical annotations and apparatus, and reproductions...

This book provides an original study of the sizeable Portuguese community in Ayutthaya, the chief river-state in Siam, during a period of apparent decline (1640-1720). Portuguese populations were displaced from their chief settlements like Melaka and Makassar, and attracted to the river-states of mainland South-East Asia by a protective model of kingship, hopes of international trade and the opportunity to harvest souls. A variety of sources will be used to shed light on the fortunes and make-up of this displaced, mixed-race 'tribe', which was largely independent of the matrices of Portuguese...

Captain John Anderson served in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) as 'Pilot-Major' in a fleet of ships that set sail from Europe in December 1640, and returned with his ships in July 1643. This was Anderson's fourth voyage to the East Indies. His journey took three years during which time he safely brought a VOC fleet to Java and home again through tempests and full-scale battles with the Portuguese at sea. In this, the first-ever edition of Anderson's Journal, the editors have complemented his own words with chapters discussing the author's contributions to the History of Warfare in Asia,...

Since 2000, there have been fewer studies released about the 'formal aspects' of the operation of colonial powers, such as Portugal, in the East during the Early Modern period. Prior, the fall of Communism, in the last decade of the twentieth century, gave a boost to liberal ideology, while research into topics related to autocracy or state apparatus have become unfashionable. The Portuguese role in the East is usually overlooked, being less high-profile than that of the Dutch or British. Drawing on unpublished materials from the Overseas Historical Archive, and other libraries in...