ABSTRACT

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This article examines the violence surrounding a war that the Danish East India Company declared against the Mughal Empire during the mid-seventeenth century. To explain why such a small chartered company would declare war against such a formidable foe, the relationship between trade, violence and statecraft in both societies is discussed at length. The article further describes how the war was waged, including the complex legal situation surrounding it and the various ways in which the opponents tried to hold each other responsible for losses. Using the Danish-Mughal war as a vehicle for exploring relations between European and Asian merchants, the article argues that violence was the contingency plan of even the weakest European companies.

This paper looks at the ways in which the Bugis of South Sulawesi, Indonesia remember their distant past. The example of Allangkanangngé ri Latanété, a palace site of the legendary polity of Cina, exemplifies how memories are mediated by cultural practices and socio-historical factors, as well as how they are included and excluded from histories, over a long period of time and through massive social changes. These social changes include the transition from a non-literate to a literate society, the demise of Cina and rise of agricultural kingdoms, colonialism, independence, and the advent of the digital age. The case of Allangkanangngé and Cina exemplifies how forgetting can serve new political situations; the way in which popular folk culture can maintain a memory despite historiographical oblivion; and the extent to which the Indonesian government is willing to appropriate history for nationalist purposes. It also exemplifies how history and memory can be synergistic or separate at different points in time.

This article looks at the possibility of using family as an analytical tool for understanding large-scale historical processes. The case in point is Austronesian expansion which is conceived of here within the largest possible geographical and chronological contexts to include the prehistoric spread of Austronesian speakers from Madagascar to Hawaii and twenty-first-century migration patterns and transnational lifestyles. It explores the possibility of using family relations as an analytical tool for making sense of this exceptionally vast subject. It also argues that an understanding of Austronesian expansion is essential to an understanding of world history.