This study of Dutch and British colonial intervention on Sri Lanka in the period 1780 - 1815 provides a new over-all characterisation of the functioning and growth of the colonial state in a period of transition.

Exile was a potent form of punishment and a catalyst for change in colonial Asia between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Vast networks of forced migration supplied laborers to emerging colonial settlements, while European powers banished rivals to faraway locations. Exile in Colonial Asia explores the phenomenon of exile in ten case studies by way of three categories: “kings,” royals banished as political exiles; “convicts,” the vast majority of those whose lives are explored in this volume, sent halfway across the world with often unexpected consequences; and “commemoration,” referring to the myriad ways in which the experience and its aftermath were remembered by those exiled, relatives left behind, colonial officials, and subsequent generations of descendants, devotees, historians, and politicians. Intended for a broad readership interested in the colonial period in Asia (South and Southeast Asia in particular), the volume encompasses a range of disciplinary perspectives: anthropology, gender studies, literature, history, and Asian, Australian, and Pacific studies. In addition to presenting fascinating, little-known, and varied case studies of exile in colonial Asia and Australia, the chapters collectively offer a sweeping, contextualized, comparative approach that links the narratives of diverse peoples and locales. Rather than confining research to the European colonial archives, whenever possible the authors put special emphasis on the use of indigenous primary sources hitherto little explored. Exile in Colonial Asia invites imaginative methodological innovation in exploring multiple archives and expands our theoretical frontiers in thinking about the interconnected histories of penal deportation, labor migration, political exile, colonial expansion, and individual destinies.

During the period of the Dutch East India Company's rule of the Spice Islands, Prince Nuku of Tidore stands out as the local hero who opposed the VOC's oppressive trade monopoly. This study analyzes how he succeeded in regaining independence for the Sultanate of Tidore by creating an alliance with the English and his Malukan and Papuan adherents.

The archive of the Kong Koan constitutes the only relatively complete archive of a “diaspora” Chinese urban community in Southeast Asia. The essays in the present volume offer important and new insights into many different aspects of Overseas Chinese life between 1780-1965. The Kong Koan of colonial Batavia was a semi-autonomous organization, in which the local elite of Jakarta’s Chinese community supervised and coordinated its social and religious matters. During its long existence as a semi-official colonial institution, the Kong Koan collected sizeable Chinese archival holdings with demographic data on marriages and funerals, account books of the religious organisations and temples, documents connected with educational institutions, and the meetings of the board itself.

In this definitive study of the intra-Asian trade in Japanese copper trade by the Dutch East India Company, the author argues that the trade in this commodity reaped high profits. Despite the huge imports of British copper by the English East India Company during the eighteenth century, the Dutch Company successfully continued to sell Japanese copper in South Asia at higher prices. Compared to the capital-intensive development of British mines in the age of the Industrial Revolution, the copper production in Tokugawa Japan was characterized by a labour-intensive 'revolution' which also made a big impact on the local economy.

This book explores imperial entanglements to reassess the Napoleonic Empire as a missing link—or at least an important chain—in the global and longue durée history of Empires. In recent years Napoleonic studies have, belatedly but resolutely, embraced the transnational historiographical turn, vastly expanding the field’s geographical scope. Its canonical chronological boundaries, on the other hand, appear increasingly narrow against this wider backdrop, giving the impression of a parenthetical, almost anachronistic aside from 1799 to 1815. What connects, and what doesn’t connect, the Napoleonic Empire to the Age of Empire, remains by and large an open question. Put another way, this book attempts to locate the Napoleonic empire in World History.

Dynastic Colonialism analyses how women and men employed objects in particular places across the world during the early modern period in order to achieve the remarkable expansion of the House of Orange-Nassau. Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent explore how the House emerged as a leading force during a period in which the Dutch accrued one of the greatest seaborne empires. Using the concept of dynastic colonialism, they explore strategic behaviours undertaken on behalf of the House of Orange-Nassau, through material culture in a variety of sites of interpretation from palaces and gardens to prints and teapots, in Europe and beyond. Using over 140 carefully selected images, the authors consider a wide range of visual, material and textual sources including portraits, glassware, tiles, letters, architecture and global spaces in order to rethink dynastic power and identity in gendered terms. Through the House of Orange-Nassau, Broomhall and Van Gent demonstrate how dynasties could assert status and power by enacting a range of colonising strategies. Dynastic Colonialism offers an exciting new interpretation of the complex story of the House of Orange-Nassau‘s rise to power in the early modern period through material means that will make fascinating reading for students and scholars of early modern European history, material culture, and gender. This book is highly illustrated throughout. The print edition features the images in black and white, whereas the eBook edition contains the illustrations in colour.

How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain’s contemporaneous subjugation of the island of Sri Lanka. In Islanded, Sujit Sivasundaram reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island’s traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided. Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, Sivasundaram tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. He explores how the British organized the process of “islanding”: they aimed to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography. But rather than serving as a radical rupture, he reveals, islanding recycled traditions the British learned from Kandy, a kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands whose customs—from strategies of war to views of nature—fascinated the British. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, Islanded is an engaging retelling of the advent of British rule.

The study of slavery and coerced labour is increasingly conducted from a global perspective, and yet a dual Eurocentric bias remains: slavery primarily brings to mind the images of Atlantic chattel slavery, and most studies continue to be based – either outright or implicitly – on a model of northern European wage labour. This book constitutes an attempt to re-centre that story to Asia. With studies spanning the western Indian Ocean and the steppes of Central Asia to the islands of South East Asia and Japan, and ranging from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, this book tracks coercion in diverse forms, tracing both similarities and differences – as well as connections – between systems of coercion, from early sales regulations to post-abolition labour contracts. Deep empirical case studies, as well as comparisons between the chapters, all show that while coercion was entrenched in a number of societies, it was so in different and shifting ways. This book thus not only shows the history of slavery and coercion in Asia as a connected story, but also lays the groundwork for global studies of a phenomenon as varying, manifold and contested as coercion.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a small, but heavily populated country with almost 17 million inhabitants. It is one of the last kingdoms in Europe and in 2015 it celebrated its 200 years anniversary. The Netherlands became a kingdom after the Napoleonic era. During this period it was transformed into a centralized state. Before those years it had been one of few republics in Europe for about two centuries. That state was a confederacy, which emerged in the 1580s during its independence struggle against the Spanish Habsburgs. Although the present state is still monarchial, the Netherlands functions as a modern constitutional democracy, in which the king’s position is almost comparable with a ceremonial presidency. The majority of the Dutch population, however, appreciates the hereditary political presence of the House of Orange-Nassau, regarding this dynasty as a symbol of national unity and connection with the country’s past. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of the Netherlands contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Netherlands.