In 1643, a Moluccan mestizo soldier named Alexo de Castro was arrested by the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the multicultural Manila barrio of Binondo. Suspected of secretly observing the Muslim faith in Manila, Castro faced inquisitorial investigations that culminated in his trial and punishment in Mexico. Based on evidence from Philippine, Mexican, and Spanish archives, this article examines Castro’s inquisition trial in the broader context of the seventeenth-century Hispano-Asian Pacific world that stretched from Mexico to Manila and the Moluccas. Within its permeable and shifting maritime boundaries, this transpacific cosmopolis was shaped by notions of Catholic universalism and orthodoxy present both in Spanish imperial ideology and in local adaptations. This article draws upon the Castro trial to reveal the tensions of this expanding world. On the one hand, Alexo’s mestizo genealogy and conversion to Catholicism, his work as a go-between in the Moluccas, and long career as a soldier for Spain and Portugal all reveal, on an intimate scale, the innumerable transits that interconnected this seventeenth-century world. On the other, Castro’s trial exposes the political-religious anxieties of Manila’s inquisitors, who saw in Castro a global threat posed by cosmopolitan New Christians – the moriscos, conversos, and indigenous converts whose adaptability and mobility helped to build this transpacific cosmopolis but also seemed to undermine it. By juxtaposing Alexo’s court arguments with those of his inquisitors, this study explores the limits of pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and exclusivism on this volatile seventeenth-century Pacific frontier.

The close, reciprocal relationship between overseas expansion and domestic state formation in early modern Western Europe has long been understood. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Portugal, the Netherlands, and England used the resources arising from their Atlantic colonies and Asia trades to defend themselves against their respective Spanish and French enemies. Creating and sustaining a territorial or trading empire, therefore, enabled polities not only to survive but also to enhance their standing with-i n the hierarchy of European states. The proposition that success overseas facilitated state development at home points however to the opposite logic, that where kingdoms failed as colonial powers they might well suffer from inhibited state formation. Indeed, if the example of England demonstrated how empire augmented a kingdom's power, then the experience of its neigh-bour, Scotland, seemed to reveal one possible outcome for a country unable to access colonial expansion. In 1707 Scotland negotiated away its political sovereignty and entered into an incorporating union with England. The new British framework enabled the Scots to access English markets (both domestic and colonial) previously closed to them. This does not mean that the 1707 union was simply an exchange of Scottish sovereignty for involvement in England's economy. Pressing political concerns, not least the Hanoverian succession played an equal if not more important role in the making of the British union. The question of political causation notwithstanding, the prevailing historiography of 1707 still places Scotland in a dichotomous framework of declining continental markets on the one hand and the lure of more expansive trade with England' domestic and overseas outlets on the other.

The publication of Africa and the Victorians in 1961 challenged the prevaling orthodoxy regarding the European scramble for territory during the last decades of the nineteenth century. In it, Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher argued that what had been traditionally viewed as qualitatively new was merely a difference ol degree and not kind. Subsequent studies, especially the work of David Fieldhouse, effectively laid to rest the assumption that new developments in Europe were the cause of the rush for colonies after 1880. And yet historians generally have been reluctant to abandon the ‘age of imperialism’ as an appropriate epithet for late-Victorian Europe. The sheer amount of territory conquered by Europeans in so short a span ol time seemingly compels teachers ol modern history survey courses to view the period 1880–1914 from a traditional perspective and with resort to established nomenclature. Does the historical rubric, ‘age of imperialism’, still have pedagogic value? The answer is a qualified affirmative, provided that its chronological moorings are anchored elsewhere.

The crossroads of nationalist historiographies in sub-Saharan Africa and of the history of developmentalist attempts that characterise the European late colonial states, have left us with very incomplete images of important trajectories. In the seemingly more “liberal” large colonial empires—notably the French and British—sails were set by 1945 towards a policy of investment and economic change. Some of the scholarly debates question whether this investment was genuine or just a last resort to avoid (rapid) decolonisation; others put the emphasis on inadequate routines of development implemented in these territories, many of which have apparently been continued since decolonisation.

In this context, we encounter a clear lack of understanding about how decisions made by individual actors on the administrative level interacted with the larger panorama of social conditions in colonial territories, and of the consequences that these interactions had for the paths towards decolonisation. For a smaller empire such as the Belgian colony of Congo-Léopoldville, these processes are still more obscure; and for the colonies ruled by authoritarian metropoles, as in the cases of territories under Spanish and Portuguese rule, stagnation and absence of change are often taken for granted. In other words, these territories, which were under the rule of metropoles regarded as rather weak in economic terms, are treated as unrepresentative of the broader, European movement towards change in colonial policies. However, the conditions of change towards economic and social modernisation in this latter group of empires, even when inhibited by lack of funding and weak professionalisation of the administration, are frequently very telling for the broader range of challenges that the late colonial states faced.

All historical research, however micro and focussed can be represented as part of a process of ‘reconfiguration’ Research is simply the crafts dominant and traditional activity of transforming archival evidence into printed narratives which validate, qualify and occasionally demolish dominant meta-narratives. Most historians continue to be engaged in Von Ranke's grand project for construction of history by making different, more durable and better quality bricks that are piled up awaiting to be used as more modern architecture for national histories. They agree as a point of discipline (if not belief) that this remains the best way to proceed. Some (as Randolph Churchill remarked of Gladstone) are ‘old men in a hurry’ and opting.to proceed from the top down by relocating national histories within the wider spaces, larger chronologies and cosmopolitan concerns of global history.

On 2 January 1625, the English ambassador Robert Anstruther met with King Christian IV of Norway and Denmark and requested his participation in a union of Protestant states against Emperor Ferdinand II and the Catholic League in Germany. Within three days, King Christian proposed to contribute five thousand soldiers for one year, as part of an army of almost thirty thousand men. In early June, despite opposition from the Danish Council of State, reluctant to put a huge amount of money into foreign affairs, Christian decided to join what he called “the war for the defence of Lower Saxony”. He then headed an army of mercenaries southwards through Lower Saxony, secured all crossings over the river Weser and prepared to confront the Catholic forces. On 29 November, it was decided that Denmark would be in charge of military operations in Northern Germany, whereas England and the United Provinces would provide a monthly subsidy. The political and military prospects for Denmark were excellent, to say the least. It had the fourth strongest navy in Europe (after Spain and the two new allies), and only a few years before the Danish warships had been described by a French observer as “merveilles de l'océan”. A small standing army of two regiments had recently been established and Denmark was the fourth European state to do so after France, Spain and the neighbouring Sweden.

The survival of the Spanish empire after the loss of the mainland American colonies is a neglected subject, and no part of it is more neglected than its economic features. General histories of Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rarely touch on overseas matters, although the colonies do occasionally appear centre stage, as in 1868, when the Cuban Creoles rose in rebellion; in 1898, when Spain lost most of her colonies as a result of war with America; in 1921, when the Berber tribes of Northern Morocco defeated the Spanish army; and in 1936, when General Franco and his coconspirators raised the standard of rebellion against the Republic in North Western Africa. But these references are episodic and essentially political, indeed military in nature. There is little structural analysis of what the colonies meant to Spain, least of all in the economic field.

While a thick vein of scepticism marked Enlightenment thinkers’ studies, such investigations cannot be divorced from their concurrent quest to merge the wondrous and the rational. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in philosophers’ investigations of merpeople. Examining European gentlemen’s debates over mermaids and tritons illuminate their willingness to embrace wonder in their larger quest to understand the origins of humankind. Naturalists utilized a wide range of methodologies to critically study these seemingly wondrous creatures and, in turn, assert the reality of merpeople as evidence of humanity’s aquatic roots. As with other creatures they encountered in their global travels, European philosophers utilized various theories—including those of racial, biological, taxonomical, and geographic difference—to understand merpeople’s place in the natural world. By the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers integrated merpeople into their explanation of humanity’s origins, thus bringing this phenomenon full circle.

This introductory article explores the recent turn in Asian history towards work that foregrounds mobility, circulation, and cosmopolitan connections, decentring colonial territoriality and postcolonial geo-bodies as the primary units of historical analysis. In it, and to frame our own special issue on Muslim movements in Southeast Asia, we point out that some of this mobility was coerced via projects of state territorialisation that actively displaced select, targeted Muslim actors whose presence in the polity was deemed problematic by states seeking to consolidate their power. Echoes of this displacement can be traced in the politics of the Muslim movements that these actors created, as we argue in this article and throughout the special issue.

Much more globally entangled than many global historians used to think, the so-called Spice Wars were not only a story of European expansion and Southeast Asian interaction, but had an inextricable northern link leading all the way to China. From the capture of a Chinese junk serving the Spaniards in Ternate by Cornelis Matelief in 1607, to the completion of the first manuscript of the incense compendium (Xiangsheng) by Zhou Jiazhou in Jiangnan in 1618, and eventually to the proposal of the strange monopoly policy by Jan Pieterszoon Coen to the Heeren XVII (Gentlemen Seventeen) in the Dutch Republic in 1622, these seemingly irrelevant events are in fact the fragments of an untold global history of cloves which was not westward bound to the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and Europe, but northward linked with the East Asian world via the Manila route.

The importance of the Atlantic Ocean during the Early Modern period has been stressed in a growing number of studies since the 1960s. However, some aspects of the contacts between different cultures and continents have enjoyed little attention. One of these is the role of individuals behind the Atlantic economic system: merchants, businessmen and entrepreneurs.

Historians have approached the Indian Ocean from a variety of vantages in their attempts to explain the modern history of this huge maritime arena. Some scholars have concentrated on predation as a linking theme, charting how piracy connected a broad range of actors for centuries in these dangerous waters. Others have focused on environmental issues, asking how patterns of winds, currents, and weather allowed trade to flourish on such a vast, oceanic scale. These latter historians have appropriated a page out of Braudel, and have grafted his approaches to the Mediterranean to fit local, Indian Ocean realities, such as the role of cyclones and mangrove swamps in both helping and hindering long-distance commerce. Still other scholars have used different tacks, following trails of commodities such as spices or precious metals, or even focusing on far-flung archaeological remains, in an attempt to piece together trans-regional histories from the detritus civilisations left behind. All of these epistemological vectors have shed light on the region as a whole, though through different tools and lenses, and via a variety of techniques of inquiry.

In 1729, an enslaved woman named Juana Isabel Curazao fled the island of Curaçao, a small Dutch entrepôt in the southern Caribbean, and made her way across calm waters to the northern coast of the nearby Spanish American mainland (present-day Venezuela), just forty miles down-current and downwind. After ostensibly converting to Catholicism Juana Isabel obtained her freedom and acquired a small plot of land in Curiepe, a town of free blacks which the Spanish had founded in 1721 to protect the coast from the incursions of English, French, and Dutch privateers. Juana Isabel planted cacao trees, hoping to profit from Europe's growing taste for chocolate. Defying Spanish colonial law that prohibited trade with foreigners, thousands of people like Juana Isabel surreptitiously sold cacao pods to Curaçaoan traders, usually small-scale Sephardic Jewish merchants or seafarers of African descent. The traders smuggled sacks of the pods back to Curaçao, where enslaved dockworkers loaded them onto large ocean-going vessels and shipped them to Dutch processing firms across the Atlantic. A generation later, in 1765, Juana Isabel's niece and heir, a free black woman named Ana María Mohele, began a long legal battle to retain the grove, which by then had grown into a 1,000-tree plantation. Spanish colonial authorities challenged Ana Maria's ownership of the land, claiming that her aunt's manumission and property grant both were invalid. Nevertheless, they only confiscated half the property, and allowed Ana Maria to keep the rest.

Exotic natural objects brought to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mutable and malleable things. They were constructed and assimilated into European world-views in a reciprocal process of change as they moved around early modern Europe. In particular, the provenance of natural objects and the associated rich symbolic resonances were central to their natural histories. The distinctions between Orient and Occident had divided the world since antiquity and were given a range of new senses in this period. The location of these two ‘Indies’, and their relationship to one another, were neither static nor always geographically defined. This article focuses on two rich examples of this natural historical construction in relation to images of the Indies: the Old World pangolin, or scaly anteater, and its New World counterpart, the armadillo. Initially, pangolins were understood as East Indian ‘scaly lizards’, armadillos as West Indian. But from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, their geographical identities and symbolic associations were entangled as these creatures came to embody colonial anxieties and resonances. The ‘India’ of the scaly lizard became the ‘Indies’ of the scaled mammals, both East and West. Examining the reception and treatment of examples such as these in European cabinets and natural histories, offers new insights into European relationships with regions of the world seen as distant and wonderfully bountiful.

About seven years ago the journal Itinerario issued a special volume on the Ancien Régime in India and Indonesia that carried the papers presented at the third Cambridge-Leiden-Delhi-Yogyakarta conference. The aim of the conference was a comparative one in which state-formation, trading net-works and socio-political aspects of Islam were the major topics. Thumbing through the pages of this issue (while preparing this essay) I had the impression that the results of the conference went beyond its initial comparative goals. Directly or indirectly, several papers stressed that during the early-modern phase India and Indonesia were still part of a cultural continuum that was only gradually broken up by the ongoing process of European expansion during the nineteenth century. It appeared that even after the earlier course of so-called ‘Indianisation’ – a designation that unjustly conveys an Indian ‘otherness’ – India and the Archipelago shared many characteristics, especially in terms of their political and religious orientation. More importantly, these shared traits were shaped by highly mobile groups of traders, pilgrims and courtiers who criss-crossed the Bay of Bengal, traversing both the lands above and below the winds.

This article examines the journey undertaken by the slave ship Brilhante, captured by a British anti-slave trade patrol off the coast of Brazil in 1838. The ship and its crew were engaged in slave trafficking in contravention of international treaty agreements. In accordance with prize law the Brilhante was condemned by the Anglo-Brazilian mixed commission court in Rio de Janeiro and the slaves on-board were freed and apprenticed for a prescribed number of years. This article argues that during their apprenticeships not only were these Africans treated in the same way as slaves, but they formed similar bonds for survival. Both ethnic solidarity and shipmate bonds, which transcended ethnic boundaries, allowed them to forge new identities. The article demonstrates how the liberated Africans from the ship, who belonged to a larger marginalised group of “recaptives” within the Atlantic World, were thus able to facilitate the achievement of their eventual freedom, and improve the conditions in which they lived.

This article analyses the influence of confessional divides in the construction of a Mediterranean frontier between the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb at the very beginning of the early modern period. Questioning the influence that religious difference had on the geopolitics of the early modern Mediterranean could seem superfluous since historians have traditionally depicted the Mediterranean world as a space of confrontation between two confessional empires, the Ottoman and the Habsburg. Nevertheless, by focusing on a selection of diplomatic negotiations from the Western Mediterranean it appears that several actors envisioned a scenario where religious and political frontiers were far from coincide. This article will analyse the diplomatic negotiations promoted by different Muslim communities from the Maghreb to voluntarily enter under the rule of the Catholic Monarchs in the framework of the Spanish imperial expansion at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In studying these negotiations from an actor-based approach my aim is not to deny the religious or the political divide existing between the Christian and the Islamic shores. I will argue, however, that this frontier was constructed through the interaction of a wide array of agents such as local elites, royal officers, military men, religious actors, and rulers, with changing agendas towards religious difference.

The German scholar Georg Marcgraf was the first trained astronomer in the New World and co-author of the earliest published natural history of Brazil, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden and Amsterdam 1648) (Fig. 1). Arriving in the Americas in 1638, Marcgraf took his place among a remarkable group of scholars and painters assembled at the Brazilian court of the German count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679), the governor-general of Dutch Brazil from 1637–1644.1 Dutch Brazil was established by the Dutch West India Company (WIC), which was created in 1621 to engage in trade, conquest, and colonisation in the Americas and Africa. Except for Marcgraf, the most important members of the Count's entourage were Dutch and included the painters Albert Eckhout (c. 1610 - c. 1666) and Frans Post (1612–1680) and the physician Willem Piso (1611–1678). The rich group of scientific and visual materials they created are comparable in both scope and importance with the works created by Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, and others during the Pacific voyages of Captain Cook in the eighteenth century.2 The Count's support of natural history, astronomy, and scientific and ethnographic illustration during his governorship was highly unusual, setting him apart from other colonial administrators and military leaders in the seventeenth century. Indeed, he is responsible for establishing both the first observatory and the first botanical garden in the New World, sparing no expense in creating a princely empire for himself in the Brazilian wilderness.

Recent approaches in global history and postcolonial studies have pointed to global aspects of colonialism and suggested that the history of colonialism should not be described just as a unidirectional history of power, because the reverberations of colonialism within the metropolis were also important. If we reflect further, we might ask not only if the metropolis and the colonies were entangled, but also if different colonial contexts had connections to one another. Pursuing this in the case of missionary activities, Rebekka Habermas recently demanded that scholars connect missionary history and global history so as to examine the global entanglements of the mission. She drew attention to missionary societies’ active on a global scale. It stands to reason that missionary societies, as global actors, pursued similar politics in different regions and, therefore, different regions and contexts were thereby connected. But is it possible to show direct entanglements between individual mission contexts? Can we explain certain practices and discourses in colonial situations better if we look at other regional contexts?

In testing these questions, the case of the so-called “emigrant mission” (Auswanderermission), directed at Germans emigrants to Brazil by a sister organisation of the Protestant Rhenish Missionary Society, is instructive. Strangely, Habermas mentioned neither the Americas nor the emigrant mission when she proposed the analysis of global entanglements of the mission, as if there had been no missionary activities in the Americas. But it is exactly this kind of entanglement that seems most interesting, the entanglement between regions with apparently different histories. This paper tries to address this lacuna by asking if the history of the emigrant mission in Brazil can be linked with “normal” missionary contexts of, for example, missions directed at non-Europeans, in order to understand why certain discourses were circulating in Brazil. In this instance, the former German colony of Southwest Africa and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Nias serve as classical missionary examples, as the Rhenish Missionary Society was very active in these regions. In considering relations between German emigrants in Brazil, the German colony in Africa, and the German mission in a Dutch colony, one must remember that Brazil, although it figured very prominently in German colonial debates of the nineteenth century, was not a formal German colony.