Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world's prime resource. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were transformed by a fusion of new and old forces of production, as the international sugar economy incorporated production areas in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Sugar's global economic importance and its intimate relationship with colonialism offer an important context for probing the...

In this book Ulbe Bosma explores the experience of immigrants in the Netherlands over sixty years and three generations. Looking at migrants from all countries, Bosma teases out how their ethnic identities are informed by Dutch culture, and how these immigrant identities evolve over time."Fascinating, comprehensive, and historically grounded, this essential volume reveals how the colonial past continues to shape multicultural Dutch society. . . . It is an important counterpart to work on France, Britain, and Portugal."--Andrea Smith, Lafayette College

Commodities, Ports and Asian Maritime Trade Since 1750 explores how British, European and Asian commercial networks interacted in the period from 1750 to today. Its central theme is the way in which these processes affectively created an 'Asian Commercial World' based on trading and financial linkages across the region, and movements of commodities. It also looks at the way in which merchants from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds negotiated barriers of language and business culture to establish effective working relations and to create a unique and dynamic regional environment,...

Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it over time.