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Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.

A history of colonial encounters in maritime Southeast Asia, through the lens of an underexplored group of nineteenth-century travelogues.

What did nineteenth-century travellers actually see when they journeyed through the Malay Archipelago—and what did they miss? The travelogues penned by British and Dutch explorers reached a wide readership; they have shaped how we imagine this region with their accounts of island kingdoms, volcanic landscapes, and maritime crossroads. Other voices—Javanese nobles venturing beyond their courts, Eurasian tourists navigating between worlds, French administrators, Scandinavian adventurers, Italian naturalists—remained in the shadows.

The Malay Archipelago through Travellers’ Eyes recovers these overlooked perspectives alongside fresh readings of celebrated figures like James Brooke, the “White Rajah” of Sarawak, and the intrepid Isabella Bird. Here we encounter Purwalelana, whose groundbreaking Javanese travelogue in modern prose abandoned centuries of poetic tradition; Kartini, whose letters became a means of traversing boundaries she could not physically cross; and Dé-Lilah, whose Eurasian heritage gave her writing an unsettling double vision. The naturalist Junghuhn scaling Java’s volcanoes, Raffles burnishing British reputation against Dutch rivals, Italian explorers charting New Guinea's coasts—each constructed not only the lands they described but also themselves.

Travel writing has often claimed to offer transparent windows onto foreign worlds. This collection reveals it as something far more interesting: a literature of encounter where imperial ambition, personal identity, and genuine curiosity intertwine. For anyone captivated by the arts of travel and observation, these essays open new ways of reading a genre we thought we knew.