In 1917 the three main protestant mission societies in the Netherlands, the Nederlandsch Zendelings-genootschap, the Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging and (in 1919) the Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging started a training school for future missionaries in a new building in Oegstgeest and amalgamated their archives and libraries. Later the Sangi- en Talaud Zending and the Java Comité joined too, adding their archives and libraries to the existing ones.

The archives have approximately the same origin as the library of the Hendrik Kraemer Instituut, i.e. the various missionary societies in the Netherlands whose activities have been taken over by the Board of Mission of the Netherlands Reformed Church in 1951. These are: the Dutch Missionary Society (Nederlands Zendelinggenootschap, founded in 1797), the Dutch Mission Union (Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging, 1858), the Utrecht Mission Union (Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging, 1859), the Java-Comité (1855), the Sangien Talaud-Comité (1887), the Centraal Comité Depok (1870), and, later, the Cooperating Mission Societies (Samenwerken.de Zendingscorporaties).

The Catholic Documentation Centre (KDC) was set up in 1969 by the Catholic University of Nijmegen. Its task is to collect, order and describe documentation on the Catholic life of the Netherlands in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and so to make it available for research. The Centre has three departments: an archive, a library and a so-called categorical documentation department.

The Interuniversity Institute for Missiological and Ecumenical Research (IIMO) is a Dutch cooperative venture for missiological and ecumenical studies. It was founded in 1969 and is officially recognized by the Minister of Education and Sciences as one of the thirteen interuniversity institutes in the Netherlands.

Dependency theory, which places responsibility for the underdevelopment of the peripheral zones of the world economy upon the North Atlantic core, might well be called a Latin American invention. It goes back, after all, to an article published in 1949 by the Argentine economist Raul Prebisch. Since that time, acceptance of the basic argument — which emphasizes intercontinental trade — has grown, also among historians. Economic dependence with respect to the North Atlantic world began during the colonial era, and forms the principal legacy of that period of Latin American history, according to Stanley and Barbara Stein's The Colonial Heritage of Latin America, first published in 1970 and now in its tenth printing.1 This view has it that economic dependence grew out of Spanish exploitation of American gold and silver, + maritime commerce in tropical plantation products. The entire Spanish colonial world in America would appear to have rested on these two pillars.

It is often claimed that the absence, or bias, of sources makes the writing of a balanced history of women impossible. This kind of reasoning is not new. The same has been propounded about the writing of the history of the proletariat, colonized peoples and other downtrodden groups. When invited to contribute a paper on the women of ancient regime Batavia I was initially strongly reminded of this complaint1. Travel accounts that have come down to us in printed sources yield quite a substantial amount of information, as generations of visitors to early Batavia witnessed and described with astonishment the behaviour of the dark-skinned Portuguesespeaking consorts that made up the female side of Dutch colonial society in Batavia. Without exception their verdict was harsh. Chewing betel nuts, associating with their slavegirls and devoid of any intelligent conversation, not to speak of acceptable table manners, the Batavian daughters formed a laughing stock to European writers. Nothing would be easier than to present an anthology of these, often quite entertaining anecdotes. The dilemma of course that such an account would be one-sided and coloured if it were merely based on descriptions and explanations by males, outsiders who obviously did not belong to the world of women that we intend to study.

In this article a survey will be presented of the protestant mission activity of Dutch men and women, and of foreigners in the service of Dutch societies. It will concentrate on the missionaries themselves, not on the life of the Christian communities that have come into being through their work.

At the beginning of the current academic year (1982–1983) the department of Chinese Studies at Leiden University initiated a research project on the early (17th century) Jesuit mission in China and the Chinese reactions to it.

About one-seventh of the world population lives in South Asia and about one-seventh of this concentrated human mass belongs to the so-called harijans or untouchables. Economically exploited and socially despised, this minority — which actually contains well over 85 million people — has been relegated to the lower fringes of Hindu society. With occupations like sweeping, tanning, midwifery etc. permanently assigned to them, their degradation is further reinforced by the stigma of ritual pollution, which renders them unfit for social contact: untouchable.

If historians nowadays still talk of “colonial history” they do so because they are at a loss for an adequate term which would express the new quality this discipline has assumed in the course of decolonization. Rudolf von Albertini has edited a volume which presents a number of articles relevant to this problem. In his introduction he emphasizes the departure from the traditional view of overseas empire-building in which only the creative genius of European colonial powers was considered of historical interest — amidst a comparatively static scenery of exotic opacity. He draws attention to the ever growing shift towards a history of the peoples of the Third World which — whether of national or more regional orientation — shows an increasing concern for questions of social and economic history and draws on the latest findings of social and cultural anthropology, thus limiting Europe's role overseas in a decisive way. European worlddominance, once an epoch—making phenomenon, is reduced to a short—term period of alien rule over the majority of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Albertini takes account of this change, not only in the selection of the contributions to his volume, but its title reflects this change as well: it is a “new colonial history” that he presents, and Albertini gives us to understand that by this he is not concerned with the periodization of colonial history, but rather with the new approaches in this field since the end of the Second World War.