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Map of Atlantic Coast of North America from the Chesapeake Bay to Florida
Joan Vinckeboons (1617–70) was a Dutch cartographer and engraver born into a family of artists of Flemish origin. He was employed by the Dutch West India Company and for more than 30 years produced maps for use by Dutch mercantile and military shipping. He was a business partner of Joan Blaeu, one of the most important map and atlas publishers of the day. Vinckeboons drew a series of 200 manuscript maps that were used in the production of atlases, including Blaeu’s Atlas Maior. This pen-and-ink and watercolor map ...
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Library of Congress
Map of New Netherland, Virginia, and New England
Joan Vinckeboons (1617–70) was a Dutch cartographer and engraver born into a family of artists of Flemish origin. He was employed by the Dutch West India Company and for more than 30 years produced maps for use by Dutch mercantile and military shipping. He was a business partner of Joan Blaeu, one of the most important map and atlas publishers of the day. Vinckeboons drew a series of 200 manuscript maps that were used in the production of atlases, including Blaeu’s Atlas Maior. This pen-and-ink and watercolor map ...
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Library of Congress
A Summary View of the Rights of British America: Set Forth in Some Resolutions Intended for the Inspection of the Present Delegates of the People of Virginia, Now in Convention / by a Native, and Member of the House of Burgesses
This pamphlet is Thomas Jefferson’s personal copy of A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which he originally drafted in July 1774 as a set of instructions for the Virginia delegates to the first Continental Congress. Jefferson argued that the British Parliament had no rights to govern the colonies, which he claimed had been independent since their founding. He also described the usurpations of power and deviations from law committed by King George III and Parliament. Jefferson was not present in the Virginia House when his draft ...
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Library of Congress
Memoirs of the Revolution in Bengal, Anno Domini 1757
This work by William Watts (active 1737-58) is an account of the Battle of Plassey, which took place on June 23, 1757, near the village of Pâlāshir, some 150 kilometers north of Calcutta (present-day Kolkata). In this decisive encounter, the forces of the British East India Company, under Robert Clive, defeated Siraj Ud Daulah, the last independent Nawab of Bengal. The British victory and the treaty with the Moghul Empire that ensued brought the province of Bengal and its great wealth under the control of the company, thereby establishing the ...
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Library of Congress
The Romance of an Eastern Capital
Francis Bradley Bradley-Birt (1874–1963), a member of the Indian Civil Service and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London, wrote several books on British India and Persia. The Romance of an Eastern Capital is a history of the city of Dacca, present-day Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Located on the Buriganga River, Dacca was, successively, under Buddhist, Hindu, Mughal, and British rule. This book traces the rise and fall of Mughal power, rivalry between the British and French for political and commercial influence in the city, the ...
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Library of Congress
A Voyage to the East Indies: Containing Authentic Accounts of the Mogul Government in General, the Viceroyalties of the Decan and Bengal, with Their Several Subordinate Dependencies
This two-volume work is the third edition of a book first published as a single volume in 1757, expanded to two volumes in 1766, and republished in 1772. The author, John Henry Grose (active 1750-83), was born in England and went to Bombay (present-day Mumbai) in March 1750, to work as a servant and writer for the British East India Company. The book contains Grose’s descriptions of 18th-century India, including his account of the war of 1756-63, in which the British East India Company largely eliminated France as a ...
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Library of Congress
Bhotan and the Story of the Dooar War
The Dooar (or Duār) War of 1864-65 began as an attempt by the authorities in British India to annex from Bhutan the territory known as Duārs in order to stop what they claimed were incursions into India from Bhutan. David Field Rennie, who participated in the conflict as a military surgeon, wrote this book on his four-month voyage back to England. Bhutan, which is located at the eastern end of the Himalaya mountain range, was at that time one of the world’s most isolated countries. Rennie’s intention was ...
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Library of Congress
Burma Under British Rule
Joseph Dautremer was a French scholar specializing in Asian languages who served for a time as the French consul in Rangoon, the capital of British Burma. Burma Under British Rule is a detailed study of Burma, with chapters devoted to the history, people, physical geography, economy, and international trade of the country. A brief concluding chapter deals with the Andaman Islands, where the British maintained a penal colony. Originally published in Paris in 1912, Dautremer’s book was translated from the French into English by Sir (James) George Scott (1851 ...
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Library of Congress
The Colonization of Indochina
La colonisation de l’Indo-Chine: L’Expérience anglaise (The colonization of Indochina: the English experience) is an 1892 case study of the British colonial experience in Asia and its lessons for France in the administration of French Indochina (present-day Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam). The author, influential French essayist and colonial theorist Joseph Chailley-Bert (1854–1928), was a passionate advocate of reforming France’s colonization practices and governing strategies, which he argued were deficient in both design and execution, and of the need to draw upon the successful experiences of the ...
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Library of Congress
The Province of Burma; A Report Prepared on Behalf of the University of Chicago
Alleyne Ireland (1871–1951) was a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in London who, in 1901, was appointed by the University of Chicago to head a commission to study colonial administration in the Far East. Ireland’s first major project, published in 1907, was this exhaustive, two-volume study of Burma, at the time under British rule as a province of the Indian Empire. Volume one contains a general description of Burma, a history of Britain’s acquisition of the colony, and chapters on the people, government, general administration, civil ...
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Library of Congress
Unpublished Documents on the History of the Seychelles Islands Anterior to 1810
This compilation of documents is an important source for the study of the early history of the Seychelles, an archipelago located in the western Indian Ocean north of Madagascar. Previously uninhabited, the islands were explored by the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama in the early 1500s. In the 1740s, the French sent expeditions from the Isle de France (present-day Mauritius) to the Seychelles, and on November 1, 1756, Captain Corneille Nicolas Morphey, commander of the French East India Company frigate Le Cerf, took possession of the islands in the name ...
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Library of Congress
Austral Africa: Losing It or Ruling It; Being Incidents and Experiences in Bechuanaland, Cape Colony, and England
John Mackenzie (1835–99) was a Scottish missionary who was sent by the London Missionary Society to South Africa in 1858. He lived at Shoshong in present-day Botswana in 1862–76. Mackenzie believed that the Ngwato and other African peoples with whom he worked were threatened by Boer freebooters encroaching on their territory from the south, as well as by politicians such as Cecil Rhodes who wanted to see extensive territories to the north annexed to the British Cape Colony. He thus began a campaign for the establishment of what ...
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Library of Congress
Respect for Human Dignity: an Inaugural Address
This pamphlet contains the text of the speech given by Nigerian independence leader Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904-96) on the day he became the first indigenous governor-general of Nigeria and the first Nigerian to be named to the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth II. Nigeria became an independent state within the British Commonwealth on October 1, 1960. In the speech, Azikiwe discusses the changed role of the governor-general as a result of independence and, as in many of his speeches and writings from the period, the importance of the rule of law ...
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Library of Congress
German East Africa as a Settlement Region for Europeans, Taking into Consideration British East Africa and Nyassaland
As imperial Germany began creating an overseas empire in the late 19th century, many influential Germans sought to emulate the example of Great Britain, which had built its large and powerful empire in part by promoting the settlement of immigrants from the British Isles to British-controlled territories in other parts of the world, including East Africa and South Africa. Germany declared a protectorate in East Africa in 1885 and established the colony of German East Africa (present-day Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi) in 1891. In 1908, Friedrich von Lindequist, undersecretary in ...
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Library of Congress
The Tanganyika Territory (Formerly German East Africa), Characteristics and Potentialities
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the fighting quickly extended to the colonial possessions of the European powers. In 1916 British forces operating from South Africa set out to conquer German East Africa (present-day Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda). They were assisted by Belgian and Congolese troops operating from the Belgian Congo. The allies never subdued the German army led by Colonel (later General) Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, but they captured the German rail line and occupied much of the territory of German East Africa. At the conclusion of ...
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Library of Congress
Natal, Rhodesia, and British East Africa
In May 1910, the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), an influential organization of German economists based in Berlin, decided to commission a series of studies on the colonization and settlement of tropical regions by Europeans, with the goal of determining whether and under what conditions such colonization was economically and socially sustainable. The studies were to assist in the development of the German overseas empire, and German East Africa in particular. Each study was to include an overview of a particular region of settlement; analyses of its economy ...
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Library of Congress
Complaint by Some Members of the Dutch Reformed Church, Living at Raritan, etc in [...] New Jersey [...] about the Behavior [...] of Dominie Theodorus Jacobus Frilinghuisen and his Church Council
In 1664, the Dutch colony of New Netherland ceased to exist when Governor Peter Stuyvesant was forced to surrender New Amsterdam--soon to be renamed New York--to an English fleet. Many residents of what became the British colonies of New York and New Jersey continued to speak Dutch and to worship in churches where services were conducted in Dutch. This pamphlet, published in New York in 1725, concerns a dispute within a Dutch Reformed congregation in Raritan, "in the Province of New Jersey, in North America, under the Crown of Great ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Articles about the Transfer of New Netherland on the 27th of August, Old Style, Anno 1664
On August 27, 1664, a fleet of four British warships under the command of Colonel Richard Nicolls sailed into the harbor of New Amsterdam (present-day New York City) and demanded that Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, surrender the colony to the British. The out-gunned Stuyvesant had no choice but to comply, and under English rule Nicolls became the first governor of the renamed Province of New York. This document lists the articles of capitulation by which the colony was surrendered and that established the ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
Remonstration of the Administrators of the Dutch West India Company to their Lords the State General about Several Examples of Tyranny and Violence by the English in New Netherland
In the 1660s, colonists from the English colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts to the east and northeast and Maryland and Virginia to the south and southwest increasingly infringed on the Dutch colony of New Netherland, which was located in parts of present-day New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut. This remonstrance, or complaint, published in Schiedam in 1663, was an appeal by the directors of the West India Company to the States-General, the ruling body of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, for increased protection against the incursions of the ...
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National Library of the Netherlands
A Relation of the Late Intended Settlement of the Islands of St. Lucia and St. Vincent, in America: in Right of the Duke of Montagu, and Under His Grace's Direction and Orders, in the Year 1722
Britain and France vied for control of the island of Saint Lucia throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1722, the British government of King George I granted the island, along with the island of Saint Vincent, to the Duke of Montagu. The duke appointed Nathaniel Uring, a merchant sea captain and adventurer, as deputy-governor of his new lands and sent Uring with a large flotilla to colonize the island. After a stop in Barbados, Uring arrived on Saint Lucia in December 1722, where he established a settlement at Petit ...
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Library of Congress
The History and the State of Jamaica under Lord Vaughan
The History and the State of Jamaica under Lord Vaughan is a 71-page, handwritten report that chronicles events in Jamaica under John Vaughan, Earl of Carbery (circa 1639–1713; known as Lord Vaughan), governor of Jamaica 1674–78, and under his successor, Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle (1629–85). The report covers the geography, geology, and climate of Jamaica; its demographics, including native peoples, free men, indentured servants, and slaves; trade; the British army stationed on the island; government institutions and the salaries of officials; and the history of the ...
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National Library of Jamaica