It is widely known, though scarcely recognized, that large sections of the Indian Muslim intelligentsia have been greatly conscious of their fraternal links with their co-religionists in other countries, following their history with interest, deriving comfort in their accomplishments, and lamenting their slow but steady decline. In the nineteenth century, in particular, when Islam seemed to fall on evil days because of the convergence of European Powers on the heartlands of the Muslim world, the heritage of the past stood forth as a symbol of community pride and distinction and the emotional need of most Muslims to vindicate their humiliation was intensified. This was expressed in the adventurist movements of the ‘Wahabis’ in India and Arabia, and the Sanusis in Sudan, the Fulanis and the Mahdists in Nigeria, and the Pan-Islamists in Egypt. At another level, Islam was defended from the polemical and hostile attacks of nineteenth century Western orientalists, and against the intellectual and moral imperialism of the West.

A commentator on Muhammad Iqbal, the great poet-philosopher of.Muslim India, once wrote that ‘Pan-Islamism is not actually defined anywhere’. If true, it has not been through want of trying. Since the term ‘Pan-Islamism’ became common currency in the late nineteenth century, a variety of European journalists, colonial officials and academic researchers (not to mention Muslims themselves) have striven to offer a precise interpretation of the phenomenon. But they have failed to develop any consensus, even on basic questions: what was Pan-Islamism? why was it? or even, has it ever existed? Some have considered it an essentially religious drive, others as a political mobilisation. Some observers have presented it as a movement, as a disciplined, and perhaps clandestine, organisation with active members and fixed purposes. Others have dismissed it as mere sentiment, as nothing more than the vaguest of emotional attachments between co-religionists. A number, believing that Pan-Islamism seeks to re-create a past perfection, have argued that it aims to regroup Muslims under one sovereign authority much as they had enjoyed during the Prophet's lifetime. Others, on the other hand, have sensed more modern connotations, claiming that it intends to forge an exclusive international federation of Islamic states with the very real potential for threatening non-Muslim countries. At least one Marxist writer has distinguished between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ strains.3 This suggests that Pan-Islamism might both nurture the longings for some distant past and be responsive to the demands of the present.

The Asian soldier in the service of the European trading companies of the Ancien Régime or of the more modern colonial governments has a long history and is a phenomenon which displays some fundamental contradictions. Ever since the Europeans came to the Americas, Asia or Africa, they employed large groups of the indigenes as soldiers, men of many different customs, languages and cultures. By the thousands, inhabitants of the country filled the ranks which European recruiting was unwilling or unable to furnish.

To write a comparative study on so broad a scale as colonial exploitation systems in two such very different countries as Java and India would be an enormous task. A more practical approach would be to select a single aspect of the Dutch system on Java for study, and compare this same feature in the context of the British colony. And, conversely, to isolate a particular facet of British practice in India and compare it to Dutch usage on Java, asking.how the systems worked or did not work as they did over a given span of time.

On the face of it, there ought to be many similarities between the heyday of imperialism in South and Southeast Asia. Both areas, it can be said, experienced a long period of colonial rule, and in both cases the European regimes grew out of the enterprise of small trading companies who had ventured to the Indian Ocean area in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in search of exotic items for trade. In both cases the subsequent history proves something of a surprise, for who could have foretold that a quest for the odd shipload of spices or of cotton cloth would lead, quite unexpectedly, to very small North European nations establishing dominion over very large and populous areas of Asia. In both cases, the English and the Dutch only gradually became involved in the acquisition of territory in Asia, and their involvement owed less to an aggressive assertion of superior European economic and technological might than to an insidious and creeping entanglement with the indigenous governments they found established. However, in retrospect, as the traditional historiography has it, the English in India and the Dutch in Indonesia became more and more involved in local politics and moved implacably from trade to rule. With the shift in emphasis came new imperial politics. The emphasis which had once been limited to securing tropical products and commodities for resale in Europe, switched t o broader concerns of economic development. Imperial governments were always expected to cover their own costs, and what underlay their activities were attempts to integrate colonial and home economies and to make them complementary to each other.