The thousands of international treaties that provided the main legal justification for colonial rule and dominance throughout the world since the sixteenth century were almost invariably written in two languages: that of the imperial power and that of the colonised or subordinated polity. However, with few exceptions, the latter versions were never published, in contrast to the versions written in the language of the imperial power, which for the most part were published and widely disseminated through official periodical publications and compilations of treaties. Recently, these versions of the treaties have been digitized and made available for researchers through internet archives and large databases (often by subscription only). However, many treaties remain entirely unpublished, even in the languages of the imperial powers. Moreover, the headings and contents of the published treaties have often been altered in the process of publication and digitization, leading to inaccuracies and biases in one of the most important types of sources to the global history of diplomacy and international law. Against this background, the open access database Historical Treaties of Southeast Asia, which was launched in early 2024 as part of the Linnaeus University-based research project with same name, sets out to provide information and metadata about all treaties concluded between an imperial power and an indigenous polity in Southeast Asia between c. 1500 and 1950. A select, but significant number of treaties will also be published and accurately transcribed in all available versions and languages, allowing users to study and compare the contents of the treaties.

This paper critically examines Dutch colonial narratives from Malabar and Ceylon, emphasizing their significance in global history as sites of trade, culture, and religious pluralism. Through an analysis of the memoirs of Julius Stein van Gollenesse, a governor of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the study highlights the necessity of reading against the grain to uncover cross-cultural entanglements often overlooked in traditional historiography. By integrating local and non-Dutch sources and employing the decolonizing frameworks of Ricardo Roque and Kim A. Wagner, this work challenges Eurocentric interpretations and fosters a nuanced understanding of South Asia’s role in global networks during the 17th and 18th centuries.

This paper examines how political actors in the late seventeenth-century Javanese succession wars viewed violence as a necessary tool for achieving political objectives, through a combined analysis of both Dutch and Javanese sources. Imperialism, with its militaristic gesture, heightened violent clashes between armies from diverse cultural backgrounds, indicating how various cultural contexts may interpret and understand wars in distinct ways. Despite growing research on non-Western perspectives of war, Southeast Asia—particularly Indonesia—remains underexplored. This study focuses on the two phases of the first Javanese succession wars (1680–1681 and 1704–1706), a series of conflicts in Central Java involving aristocratic contenders, with the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) playing a key role by supporting whichever side aligned with its interests. In addition to these main figures, quasi-aristocratic actors—often labeled "rebels"—also significantly shaped the course of the war. By analyzing VOC political correspondence between its Central Java branch and its headquarters in Batavia, as well as the company’s battlefield reports and Javanese chronicles (Babad), this study integrates official documents with court historiography designed to legitimize the ruling monarchs and their predecessors. Far from being a supplementary source, Javanese chronicles offer a deeper understanding of how Javanese aristocratic contexts position violence as a plausible option, particularly during this period. The paper concludes that no two belligerents shared a uniform perspective on how the war should be waged, making this conflict a fascinating cross-cultural phenomenon worthy of study.

The twentieth century was a pivotal era of imperial decline and national liberation. Against this backdrop of decolonisation, which reshaped social norms as well as global power dynamics, imperial rulers like Britain and Japan systematically concealed aspects of their colonial legacies. These colonial cover-ups often left scant traces, creating an archival silence that complicates our historical understanding to this day. In 2011, however, a significant revelation emerged when the British government admitted that it had been holding approximately 20,000 files previously believed to be non-existent. These documents had originally been shipped to Britain from 37 former colonies as part of ‘Operation Legacy,’ a policy initiated in the late 1940s that destroyed or secretly transferred embarrassing colonial records. This paper proposes to compare Britain’s practices with those of the Japanese Empire, which similarly obscured sensitive imperial records across Asia. By analysing primary sources from both contexts, this paper aims to elucidate the significance of empirical comparisons in understanding these historical erasures that shape collective our memory and inform contemporary debates on decolonisation.