Pilgrims to the Past: Private Conversations with Historians of European Expansion (review)

Pilgrims to the Past is a fascinating idea, and one that makes a worthwhile book that will be of use both for those who teach European expansion and for scholars offering courses on historical method and historiography. The volume arises from the journal Itinerario, the European Journal of Overseas History, a quarterly published by the Leiden Center for the History of European Expansion. Since 1995Itinerario has also been the official journal of the American Forum for the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction. A distinctive feature of the journal is its interviews with leading historians in the field of European expansion. On the occasion of the journal's twen-tieth anniversary, the editors have selected twenty-seven of these inter-views, which form the subject matter of this book. Two interviews are absent from this collection, because they were never published—interviews with Fernand Braudel and Charles Boxer. Boxer refused to have his interview published. The preface by Leonard Blussé, however, records an exchange from the interview. When Boxer was asked, "How would you describe yourself as a historian?" he replied, "A historian? I am a collector! Whatever I have written and spoken about comes from the manuscripts and books I have collected over the years!" Braudel gave an important interview, but mechanical failure of the tape recorder meant that there was no adequate record.

The published interviews are extremely valuable. The first, with Ronald Robinson, was followed by others with Meilink-Roelofsz, Curtin, Brunschwig, McNeill, Coolhaas, Kartodirdjo, Thesauri, Diffie, Schoffeleers, Silva Rego, Kumar, Vansina, Slicher van Bath, Low, Mörner, Akira, Miège, Parker, Winius, Jaarsveld, Adas, Kennedy, Steensgaard, Hoetink, Elliot, and Wesseling, and they are published in that order. Robinson explains:

The whole of colonial rule is really a question of the kind of bargains which you can make explicitly or implicitly with the indigenous leaders. I knew a good many colonial governors. I used to ask, "How do you do it? You've got two hundred Europeans, a battalion of police about five hundred miles away in a territory about the size of France?" They explain it thus: "I'll tell you what, One word: prestige." "What do you mean by 'prestige?'" I asked MacPherson, the governor of Nigeria. "Well, before you issue any order, you have to make absolutely sure it's acceptable to the chiefs."

Philip Curtin poses the question of why slaves were so cheap in Africa:

It's quite clear that the planters in the New World were probably quite right, who thought it was cheaper to buy slaves than to raise a child to the age of fourteen or so....[T]he people were sold from Africa for less than their cost of reproduction....[I]t also suggests that there must be some mechanism within African societies...that makes possible this sort of uneconomic behaviour concerning their own demographic patterns....[T]he kind of question that wouldn't have been posed if some people had not begun applying some quantitative calculations to the whole economy of the slave trade.

William McNeill discusses the relationship between his ideas and the international posture of the United States, and suggests that "the sense of wrongness with the discrepancy between what China should be and what China was" led to an anger that became part of the global psychological reality.

Like Robinson, W. Philippus Coolhaas shows an interest in what led the population to obey the orders of colonial officials. Sartono Kartodirdjo discusses the transition from being a pupil in the Dutch East Indies to becoming a leading Indonesian historian. Manuel Teixeira offers a fascinating autobiographical account of being a Portuguese diocesan scholar-priest in Macao. Bailey Diffie considers mestizo culture and establishes the modernity of the philosophy of history of José da Cunha Brochado (1651-1733). Matthew...