The VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company) was the largest of the early modern European trading companies operating in Asia. Its operations produced not only warehouses packed with spices, coffee, tea, textiles, porcelain and silk, but also shiploads of documents. Data on political, economic, cultural, religious, and social conditions spread over an enormous area circulated between the VOC establishments, the administrative centre of the trade in Batavia, now the city of Jakarta, and the Board of Directors in the Netherlands. The co-operation between the National Archives of Indonesia and the Netherlands resulted in this extensive catalogue of fifteen archives of VOC institutions in Jakarta. The VOC records are included in UNESCO ́s Memory of the World Register.

The analysis of original documents is a means for economists to focus on the primary text, to analyze and interpret the object and to move to interpretation and understanding of its relationship to modern financial instruments and markets. The result is a collection of interdisciplinary studies of the key innovations in finance from the Old Babylonian loan tablets, to the 1953 London Debt Agreement that span regions in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe.

In scarcely 200 pages, Professor Kuhns has surveyed the factors that compelled roughly 100,000 emigrants from the Palatinate, Wurtenberg, Zweibrucken, and other principalities in southern Germany to settle in Pennsylvania between 1683 and 1776 and establish a new way of life in their adopted homeland. Most of these immigrants were farmers, and their customs and manners are recounted in an examination of housing, provisions, agricultural methods, superstitions, and so forth. There is a chapter on language, literature, and education and a separate appendix on German family names. Perhaps the most informative chapter in the book covers the extraordinarily diverse religious life of these Protestant Germans, which, while dominated by the Lutheran and Reformed churches, also accommodated Moravians, Mennonites, Brethren, Dunkards, Seventh-Day Baptists, Schwenckfelders, and others.