The years 1997–1998 witnessed Britain's return of Hong Kong toChina; the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan;and the much less publicized 500th anniversary of the arrival ofthe Portuguese in Asia. So were marked the beginnings and end of Europeanempire in the East, and so, too, a new global distribution of power wasrecognized. The appearance on 20 May 1498 of a Portuguese fleet commandedby Vasco da Gama at Calicut (Kerala, S. India), combined with thepenetration of the Caribbean six years earlier by a Spanish flotillaunder Christopher Columbus were, it hasoften and eloquently been urged, the prelude to a fearful saga. In nextto no time Europe was enriched, non-European populations and ecologiesdestroyed, indigenous states and economies overthrown, a peculiarlyEuropean violence introduced into lands previously innocent of such ways,and the yoke of European colonial rule and hegemony eventually imposed. Inshort, as India's Independence Day Pledge (1930) pithily put it,subjection to empire meant economic, political, cultural and spiritual ruin.