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Less than a generation ago, historians interested in colonial Peruvian social and economic history entered a vast terra incognita. Apart from pioneering work on ethnohistory, mining, and comparative economic studies, little historical literature on Peru had been published. In the past few years, however, Andeanists have produced several important works that have substantially contributed to research in this field

Charles Kingsley, a popular novelist, — he had written Westward Ho among other books and was yet to write The Water Babies, — was appointed to the Regius Chair of Modern History in Cambridge in May 1860. His lectures, it was said, were those of 'a poet and a moralist, a politician and a theologian, and, above all, a friend and counsellor of young men'. They were, his critics agreed, certainly not those of an historian and a scholar. Such attacks upon him as an historical novelist rather than an historian, combined with the strain of coming up to Cambridge from his rectory twice a year to deliver his lectures, caused him to resign his chair in 1869, to be succeeded by John Robert Seeley. Seeley was a classicist, who had also published a religious work, Ecce Homo, the centre of one of those ferocious Victorian doctrinal controversies. He had published nothing historical but historical speculation had always interested him, and thus qualified, he became Regius professor, holding the Chair until 1895. After his Inaugural Lecture, W. H. Thompson, the witty and acid Master of Trinity, observed, 'Well, well. I did not think we should so soon have occasion to regret poor Kingsley.' Such were the beginnings of the serious study of imperial and colonial History in English universities.

If anything is clear to the student of the history of the early modern French colonial enterprise, it is the need for a general overview to equal Boxer's and Parry's fine volumes on the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish seaborne empires, or George Winius' volume in the Minnesota series. Not that such volumes on the French colonies do not exist, in French. Indeed, there has not been a decade since the 1920s without some such publication. None of them, however, appears to me to be wholly satisfactory. The glorification of the French 'mission' characterizing the earlier works nowjars; the more recent works are more balanced, but still, on the whole, too descriptive. This is particularly the case for the Histoire de la France coloniale, des origines à 1914. While the authors responsible for the period which interests us, Jean Meyer and Jean Tarrade, have produced distinguished works on the French overseas empire, their survey remains somewhat uncritical and, at least for the seventeenth century, very thin. As to the treatment of New France, it draws on a rather unreliable series of monographies.

The discovery of an official report, so far unpublished, about coolie scandals on the plantations on Sumatra's East Coast around the year 1900, motivated me to produce a full-length book on this theme. My original intention had been merely to write a short introduction to the publication of a shocking historical document. However, I changed my mind when it became obvious that proper understanding of the source required more background information on the social and policy framework within which the plantation system operated. This applied both to conditions on the estates themselves and to the evaluation of those affairs by official and non-official outsiders. The main aim of my study is to contribute to the historiography of industrial labour in Southeast Asia. However, it also analyses die linkage that came about between capitalist industry and colonial policy in a region that formed part of the so-called Outer Provinces of die Netherlands Indies.

In the last issue of Itinerario (vol. XVI, 1992/2), Jan Breman of the University of Amsterdam, has published an English translation of his introduction to the third edition of his book Koelies, Planters en Koloniale Politiek. In this article, titled 'Controversial Views on Writing Colonial History', Breman tries to deal with some of the 'more sceptical and sometimes even hostile' reactions to his book on plantation labour in East Coast Sumatra during the last decades of the nineteenth century. However, his contribution has a more important purport, as he suggests a specific way in which the history of the colonial past should be written, dismissing at the same time the approach to the colonial past undertaken by what he calls the 'Leiden Revisionist School'.

THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE MATTERS. IT STRETCHED SOME THREE CENTURIES IN LATIN AMERICA, MORE THAN HALF THE PERIOD SINCE THE INITIAL CONFRONTATION OF AMERINDIAN PEOPLES AND EUROPEAN COLONIZERS IN 1492. IN SOMEWHAT TRANSMUTED FORM, THE LEGACIES OF COLONIAL RULE CONDITIONED THE CONTOURS OF SOCIAL RELATIONS, ECONOMIC LIFE, CULTURE, AND POLITICAL STRUGGLE IN THE NINETEENTH AND, IN SOME REGIONS, THE TWENTIETH CENTURIES. IT IS THIS RESILIENT GRIP ON THE PAST THAT HAS MADE TERMS SUCH AS "NEOCOLONIAL" SO APPEALING IN DISCUSSION OF POST COLONIAL HISTORY (SEE HALPERIN DONGHI, 1969; STEIN AND STEIN, 1970). THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE HAS ALSO PROVED CRITICAL IN POLITICAL AND THEORETICAL DEBATE ABOUT LATIN AMERICA'S CONTEMPORARY AND FUTURE CONDITION. CONTROVERSIAL THEORISTS OF DEPENDENCY AND WORLD SYSTEMS SUCH AS ANDRE GUNDER FRANK (1969) AND IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN (1976) HAVE USED THE COLONIAL PERIOD AS FUNDAMENTAL POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR THE ARGUMENT THAT LATIN AMERICA HAS LONG BEEN "CAPITALIST" RATHER THAN "FEUDAL." CRITICS OF THESE THEORISTS HAVE, IN TURN, USED THE COLONIAL PERIOD AS A "FEUDAL" BENCHMARK (LACLAU, 1971). EVERY VISION OF THE PRESENT AND FUTURE INCLUDES A VISION OF THE PAST; IN THE LATIN AMERICAN CASE, THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE AND ITS "NEOCOLONIAL" REPERCUSSIONS ARE AT THE CORE OF THIS CHARGED AND STILL UNRESOLVED PAST. ON ANY OF THE GROUNDS JUST MENTIONED-SHEER PROPORTIONAL WEIGHT IN POSTCONQUEST HISTORY, IMPORTANCE AS A SOURCE OF LEGACIES CONDITIONING POSTCOLONIAL TRAJECTORIEPY: 1985