Between 1995 and 2000 a number of synthetic studies on the economic history of Asia in the Early Modern Period were published which have changed – or should change – our ideas and perceptions of the ‘rise of the west’ and the parallel ‘decline of the east’ in a fundamental way. The potential impact of these studies is comparable to that of a previous brief spell of brilliance in our profession, the early 1970s, with the pioneering publications by, amongst others, Wallerstein, Brenner, and North and Thomas. Whereas these studies proposed fundamentally new views on the long term dynamics of the ‘rise of the west’, and concentrated heavily on the economic and socio-political history of Europe (albeit sometimes within a ‘world system perspective’), the new generation of innovative works focuses on a new analysis of the economic history of parts of Asia - on China and India in particular. Much of the detailed empirical research on which this revisionism is based, was done before the books of Goody, Frank, Wong, Pomeranz, and Lee and Wang were published, and forerunners of the revisionism can be identified. But only now the movement has created a clear set of hypotheses that challenges the accepted wisdom about die economic and institutional contrasts between both sides of the Eurasian Continent.

In this paper, I want to explore a very simple contrast which has many potential implications. China at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century was, by most measures, a very poor society. China in the latter part of the eighteenth century seemed – both to its own members and to most, though not all, visitors from abroad – a very rich society. So what happened in between?

In the formation of ethnicity the interaction between the views of outside observers and insiders themselves is an important process. The Minangkabau, whose homeland is located in the uplands of central Sumatra, have been a popular source of study because of their matrilineal social organisation and the practice of the merantau, where young Minangkabau men leave the homeland to seek knowledge and fortune abroad. Since the 1970s as a result of the women's movement, there has been a growing number of works focusing on the matrilineal principles which underlie Minangkabau society. The merantau, too, has often been cited for the dynamism in Minangkabau society which has led to its considerable contributions to the Indonesian state in a number of fields. It is not surprising, therefore, that today the Minangkabau themselves see matriliny and the merantau as primary components in their identity. While these components were present in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they did not play the central role in ethnic identity as they do today. As I hope to show in this paper, there were different historical circumstances in those years which required another approach to ethnic identity.

The search to understand the motives behind Portuguese overseas expansion has long preoccupied historians of the early modern period. Numerous articles, surveys and studies have addressed its economic incentives, achievements and legacies to the point where the historiography has obscured a holistic understanding of the forces at play in the early sixteenth century. Moreover, in this field of study overseas policy has been set apart from the domestic political and social climate, giving the impression that events taking place in Southeast Asia were foremost the concern of the policy makers in Lisbon. D. Manuel (1495–1521) who was king of Portugal and driving force behind the expansion during its arguably most crucial period, was neither warrior king nor astute entrepreneur, but rather the proponent of ambitious political reforms. The tenuous nature of his succession and his relationship with the highest stratum of nobility demands that scholarly attention focus on domestic politics during the so-called ‘Vasco da Gama era’. This paper contends that placation of the grandes (titled elites and their families) was D. Manuel's primary motivation behind continued expansion and conquest, superseding aspirations to economic and imperial power. It asserts that in an attempt to defuse his legacy of political instability left to him by his predecessor, D. Manuel manufactured a culture of chivalry that was linked to the overseas expansion and provided venues for noble combat away from the political centre.

Much of the recent work on the economic and social history of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1867) has been driven by a desire to identify what T.C. Smith has called ‘native sources ofJapanese industrialisation’. From the Marxist-influenced historians in the 1920s who sought to explain the pre-industrial roots of the structure of production in interwar Japan, through to contem-poraryJapanese historians' studies of the pattern of Japanese development, a major part of the agenda has been to identify how Japan had got to where it was, in other words, what was the secret of its twentieth century successes and weaknesses. It is not possible to explore the situation of Japan's economy in the century 1750–1850 without benefit of this hindsight, without being aware that while Japan's situation may have been in many ways analogous to that of China and Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, its economic fortunes were by the latter part of the nineteenth century experiencing their own ‘great divergence’ from those of China, India and the other countries of Asia and the near East. To search for the antecedents of this divergence is for economic historians of Japan a parallel exercise o t any search for the sources of the European ‘miracle’. While a focus on the period 1750–1850 as an era of European/Asian divergence means, therefore, that we must highlight the situation inJapan during that century, it must also be accepted that in the case of Japan any comparison with other countries or regions may also suggest the causes of Japan's own divergence some fifty to a hundred years later.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the development of a Mongol identity. The Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century had laid the foundations but had not truly forged such an identity. These earlier events provided, in modern parlance, the cultural memory that eventually served to unify them. However, the Mongol Empire actually revealed the fractiousness of the Mongols and their inability to promote the unity that might gradually have fostered a Mongol identity. As Joseph Fletcher argued, the creation of a supra-tribal identity for nomadic herders has proven to be extremely difficult. The so-called Mongol Empire attested to this predicament, as within two generations it evolved into four separate Khanates, which occasionally waged war against each other. For example, individual Khanates frequently sided with non-Mongols against fellow Mongols. In addition, the military, the quintessential Mongol institution, was not, as the Empire expanded, composed simply of Mongols. Turks, Persians, and even Chinese served in and sometimes led the Mongol armies, contributing to the blurring of Mongol identity.

In July 1752, two days after their arrival at a roadstead in Saint Augustine's Bay on the south-western coast of Madagascar, ‘theGreat Island’, two junior merchants of the Dutch East India Company ship Schuylenburch headed for the residence of king Ratsimandresy (Ramanrasse in the Dutch sources). They were Philip Boomgaard and Dirk Westerhoff, responsible for commercial affairs and on a trade mission for the Company. On the way to the king's residence, about two miles inland from ‘Toulier’ (Toliara), they were welcomed by Ramanrasse's son, ‘crovmprince Revenoe’, and they offered him a few gifts they had brought along. However, upon taking a closer look at the presents Revenoe disdainfully threw astring of beads on the ground replying ‘that the Dutch were nothing more than traffickers, and that he expected them upon their arrival to present him with proper gifts just like the British and French traders that frequented his father's court were accustomed to do’.

Indian nationalism was born out of the notion that India's poverty and backwardness was not a natural result of technical inferiority or inefficient use of resources, but that it was a consequence of colonial rule. Even before the development of scientific nationalist economics in the 1890s, the moralists of Young Bengal had called for a protectionist ‘national political economy’ on the lines advocated by Friedrich List in Germany, whom they had read as early as 1850. Bholanath Chandra asserted in 1873 that India had once been the greatest textile producer in the world and had initiated the industrial revolution. By 1970,.he predicted, Britain would be eclipsed by the United States and by India as the greatest industrial producers. This would be brought about by rigorous protectionism and by the growth of what he called ‘moral hostility’ to the consumption of foreign goods which had even polluted the materials used in the making of the sacred threads of orthodox Hindus. This emphasis on the culture of consumption and the structure of external economic relations was central to different varieties of Indian nationalist thought as they developed from Dadhabhai Naoroji through to Mahatma Gandhi.

In the pre-modern period, Japanese identity was articulated in contrast with China. It was, however, articulated in reference to criteria that were commonly accepted in the whole East-Asian cultural sphere; criteria, therefore, that were Chinese in origin.

One of the fields in which Japan's conception of a Japanese identity was enacted was that of foreign relations, i.e. of Japan's relations with China, the various kingdoms in Korea, and from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, with the Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutchmen, and the Kingdom of the Ryūkū.

The Gulf of Guinea, home to numerous ethnic nationalities, stretches from the Republic of Senegal in the west to Nigeria in the east. There have been population movements and socio-economic interactions within and across the coastal belt over the past millennium. In response to their environment, the people have been engaged in fishing, salt-making, commerce and boat making. Fishing, the pivot of their economy, has taken the leading fishing groups – the Fante and Ewe (Keta) of the Republic of Ghana, and the Izon (Ijaw), Itsekiri and Ilaje of Nigeria – all over the entire West African coastline, where they have established many settlements.

Something exceptional happened first in England and later in Northwestern Europe beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century. Institutions, state and the ability to achieve technological breakthroughs all need to be taken into account in any satisfactory explanation as to why and where the Industrial Revolution took place. This essay attempts to situate the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Until the 1780s, this century was a period of economic expansion for the Ottoman Empire but the empire was surely not in a position to achieve an Industrial Revolution of its own or even an extended period of technological change and productivity increases. The essay also argues that the explanation for this state of affairs should be searched not in any external intervention or impact but n i internal structures and dynamics. In short, social and economic forces for change remained weak while the Ottoman state was strong enough to defend a traditional order.

The Nias sense of space is a curious one. Lest anyone suspect me of harbouring a complaint about the size of the rooms on the famous campus in Wassenaar, let me insist at once that I am thinking not of NIAS, the delightful research institute, but Nias, the island off Sumatra. There, space to build the splendid houses for which the islanders are justly celebrated is allocated, not according to notions of the proper relationship between authority or status and centrality or ‘social distance’, but on a system of priorities established by symbolic directions. ‘Upriver’ — a direction which only sometimes corresponds to the flow of a nearby waterway — is ennobling, whereas ‘downstream’ is demeaning. Beyond the confines of the village, ‘downstream’ designates the world of increasing remoteness. Its outer reach is the horizon, the abode of the monstrous and evil. In conjunction with the inveterate hostility the islanders have always exhibited towards intruders, this seems suggestive. The horizon, though contemplated with reverence in some cultures, is not always divine. Distance does not always lend enchantment – or if it does, the ensorcelment may be malign. Different cultures have contrasting attitudes to intrusions from far away and, therefore, different strategies for receiving the sojourner, entertaining the traveller, accommodating the migrant, and absorbing the invader.

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.

The first reference to a ‘Sea of Melayu’ is from an Arabic document dated c. 1000, which noted that travellers ‘reaching the Sea of Melayu, were approaching the area of China’. While the location of the Sea of Melayu is not specified, the practice of naming a sea after a dominant people surrounding its shores suggests that this particular body of water must have been the Straits of Melaka. This is clear in the only other known reference to the use of this name, which is found in Description of Malacca, Meridional India and Cathay written in 1613 by Emanuel Godinho de Eredia, a Eurasian Jesuit born in Portuguese Melaka. Eredia refers to the Sea of Melayu as that ‘land-enclosed sea between the mainland of Ujontana [Malay Peninsula] and the Golden Chersonese [Sumatra]’. He was clearly referring to the Straits of Melaka, though it was obviously not yet called that by his contemporaries. Eredia's description of that ‘land-enclosed sea’ clearly reveals a commonly held assumption of the greater significance of a land mass over a body of water. But for Malays and many other sea and riverine peoples, the focus was on water, not land, and entities were formed by seas and rivers joined by short land passages.