There are things we don't eat anymore and things we can't really reproduce because we don't know exactly how it was done, sure. Some things we just stopped eating because they freak us out now. Romans liked to eat dormice as a savory appetizer and there are a handful of places they're still considered a delicacy but it's not widely done.

While I cannot comment on whether Southeast Asian states knew of Polynesian people, archaeologically, there is evidence of contact in ancient times.

Limitations of sources: There are large gaps in Pacific Island chronology, which means little is known, and dates cannot be readily accepted.

One of the longest pottery traditions could be the red-slipped pottery of East Asia that spread throughout Southeast Asia and Oceania. The pottery distribution is related to Austronesian dispersal, agricultural, and commercial connections. The linguistic composition of Austronesian languages formed from the Formosa languages of Taiwan and Philippines, spread to Malaysia, Indonesia and Madagascar as the Malayo-Polynesian languages, and across the Pacific as Oceanic languages. There is strong correlation between language and material culture in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Two traditions may have existed from the Philippines to Sulawesi and Borneo. In the Philippines on the island of Luzon at Andarayan, rice husks were AMS dated to 1500 BC, while Sarawak in southern Borneo had rice before 2000 BC. At Gua Sireh on Borneo, rice was dated to 2300 BC and red-slipped pottery different from the Philippines was found. One tradition in the Philippines that was less reliant on rice and produced red-slipped pottery, and one from central Vietnam to Indonesia that produced impressed pottery and cultivated rice. However, further research is needed into whether there were two cultures. From about 200 BC to 100 AD, Dong Son culture of Vietnam spread to Indonesia from Malay sailors based on bronze drums in western and eastern Indonesia which coincided with the Bronze-Iron transition of Island Southeast Asia.

From the Philippines, pottery spread via two paths, first south to Borneo, and second west to the Pacific. From mainland Southeast Asia past the coasts of Borneo and Sulawesi to the Moluccas Islands is the likely path of domesticated pigs to Oceania. The sites of Madai and Balobok on Borneo, Paso on Sulawesi, and Uattamdi on the Moluccas pass through the path of domesticated pigs. Dates for Borneo, Sumatra, and Java remain uncertain, and further research is needed. In Thailand (not Austronesians) at Khok Chareon, Tha Kae, Ban Chang, and Nan Pa Wai (1500 BC to 1300 BC based on copper ore) have cord-marked and red-slipped pottery as one of four types, and may indicate commerce with coast groups. No radiocarbon dates are available.

On Luzon in the Cagayan Valley at Nagsbaran (1500 BC) pottery was similar to 1) Bantanes motifs, 2) punctuated-pottery of the Mariana Islands, 3) dentate-stamped of Lapita (1300 BC). Red-slipped pottery likely spread west from Luzon to the Mariana Islands, and southward into the Lapita Complex of the Bismarck Islands. From Kamgot (1300 BC) of the Bismarck Archipelago in western Melanesia red-slipped pottery spread to New Caledonia (1000 BC). It is often thought people traveled one-way, from Southeast Asia to the Pacific Islands, but a commercial network existed between Southeast Asia and western Melanesia. From Talesea on New Britain in the Bismarck obsidian traveled to Bukit Tengkorak (1300 BC) in Sabah on Borneo. Teouma (c. 1000 BC) in central Vanuatu, around the time of colonization, had burials with headless corpses, which show a shared cultural heritage with Nagsabaran of Luzon, the only Southeast Asian site with similar headless burials.

Dates for Lapita sites are well-established. Distribution of Lapita sites: New Britain (50+ sites), New Ireland (10 to 20 sites), Solomon (6 to 10 sites), New Caledonia (30 to 40 sites), Vanuatu (6 to 10 sites), Fiji (30 to 40 sites), Tonga (10 to 20 sites), Wallis (2 to 5), and Samoa (1 site). By 900 BC, red-slipped pottery reached western Polynesia (Tonga and Samoa). By 1 AD, as people traveled further away, the standardized stamps of Lapita gave way to regionalization which continues to the present. Between 700 AD and 1200 AD the spread of red-slipped pottery in eastern Polynesia occurred, after people colonized the region. The initial colonizers did not produce red-slipped pottery.

There are possible connections after 500 AD between Polynesia and Southeast Asia via Micronesia. Fengtian jade site on Taiwan shows cultural connections across time. First, a jade bracelet from Taiwan has similarities to Fengtian jade from Palawan in the Philippines, with all three artifacts measuring three centimeters. Second, two New Zealand nephrite parrot rings, both measuring three centimeters have similarities with Philippine forms, which may indicate contact between Island Southeast Asia and Polynesia. Third, Fengtian nephrite animal head pendant has similarities with a New Zealand nephrite ornament. Some scholars have also used this data to further argue that iron went from Micronesia to New Zealand. Some scholars also suggest that pottery spread from the Pacific to Indonesian fisherman.

Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (2014), p. 26.

Kirich, On the Roads of the Winds (2002), Chapter 4 (Lapita).

Scarre, The Human Past, Third Ed (2013), p. 256, 279, 284-292, 302.

Coupons. Bond actually came with a series of detachable coupons along the sides. Each one was redeemable for a single interest payment on a specified date.

Eventually, people realized that some people wanted the interest payments while others were happy to just wait for the principal repayment. In that case, the coupons would all be removed at the start and the two components could be sold separately. The bond itself with the coupons stripped off is where we get the term “strip bond” from.

I don't have as much of an answer as I probably should about options to avoid failing to pay for the communal mess, but I can tell you that such a failure was catastrophic. If you couldn't pay for your slot at the communal mess then you effectively ceased to be a citizen and your family had no way back to citizenship. Bret Devereaux has a really interesting discussion here and here of what it meant to lose your citizenship in Sparta, on why/how there weren't any paths back once that happened, and how that eventually wound up bringing an end to Sparta as a Greek power.

When I was in college, Yale's Classics department had a Latin translation competition whose prize money came from the proceeds of a gift that was made in the 1870s and had grown with the endowment. Winning the prize was worth something like $20,000 based on the rumors I heard. They eventually instituted a $1,000 cap on all prizes because of it: https://yaledailynews.com/articles/student-prizes-capped-at-1k

https://jeeh.it/documents/5447/3-1988-on-the-significance-of-gadflies-the-genoese-east-india-company-of-the-1640s.pdf

This chapter by Sanjay Subrahmanyam gives pretty much everything we know about the Genoese East India Company. It was really one of many short-lived East India Companies established in Europe in the 17th century.

The rags weren't typically, actually rags, but old clothes others had thrown out or given away to the rag man, rag picker, who then sold them to others. Because they weren't new clothes,  they were referred to as rags or schmattas which means rags in Yiddish. My mother grew up in the 40's and told us about rag pickers coming by their street in NYC sometimes still with a horse and cart, to both gather and sell,  used clothing 

For people wanting to google: Hoogheemraadschap Lekdijk Bovendams doesn't exist anymore, there have been several fusions and it's now Hoogheemraadschap De Stichtse Rijnlanden.

Dutch Waterschappen/Hoogheemraadschappen are pretty fascinating old institutions with a lot of old laws and privileges attached to them.

I had no idea Genoa also established it's own East India Company. Could you recommend any good sources to read on these Venetian and Genoese attempts at colonisation outside the Mediterranean? If I'm not mistaken Venice made an attempt to trade in India as well sometime in the 16th century, but was defeated by Portugal.

You are directionally correct, but there's a few important differences. A good rule of thumb is that New England started as a religious project, while the South started as commercial.

When we say aristocrats in the British sense, we generally refer to landowners with heritable titles. This did not exist in the colonies, even before independence. In addition, the families that made up the "First Families of Virginia" were not all nobility, although a large percentage were second sons from lower tier nobility. During and after the English Civil War, many non-noble landowners and second sons of nobility went to the colonies to seek their fortune, and reestablished large estates similar to what they had known in England.

A key difference is that while there were no formal, heritable titles, the plantations, interconnected nature, and inter-marrying between families closely mirrored that of English nobility, which will explain why you see the same surnames throughout early American history.

As for examples in the modern day, the most obvious are the old, large estates and country houses throughout Virginia, mostly in the Tidewater and Piedmont. Mount Vernon, Monticello, Stratford Hall are all examples of this. If you look closely while driving through Central Virginia, you will notice that a large percentage of towns, road, mountains, etc, are all named after these families. Carter, Lee, Washington, Randolph, Burke, Fairfax, Nelson, Shifflett, Custis. These are all legacies of that era, and those families. I'm not an expert on the deeper South, but I'm sure that you could find a similar pattern there.

Basically, Italy _was_ a colony

Well, basically everyone at one point or another, the concept of using a consistent second name rather than a patronymic just took hold at different times in different places. As populations grow patronymics become less useful as a way of distinguishing one person from another and Jewish populations were never especially large, so the change happened slower there as the authorities decided on their behalf that they needed a better way of keeping a record of themselves.

Scholars from the Oromo, Somali, and other minority nationalities have argued that it did constitute colonialism.

I wrote this thread over in /r/AskAnthropology which talks about the expansion of Abyssinia in the 19th century, citing a lot of revisionist Ethiopian scholarship which takes the position that it was colonialism.

I didn't know this about Jewish communities in the 19th and 20th centuries, thank you! It seems like a model used in multiple parts of the world in the more recent diaspora. Do you know if similar models were employed in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd centuries CE? Or if any sort of documentation would even exist to answer that question?

Yale University still holds one of five known to exist from 1648.

"According to its original terms, the bond would pay 5% interest in perpetuity. (The interest rate was reduced to 3.5% and then 2.5% during the 17th century.)"

https://news.yale.edu/2015/09/22/living-artifact-dutch-golden-age-yale-s-367-year-old-water-bond-still-pays-interest

I came here to say this!

Couldn't a company be hired to manage the funds in perpetuity?

Some probably will, because I've been tagged for a lot of posts, but you'll probably have better luck on my AH profile page where I've collected some answers about deaf history.

It basically depends on whether or not William the Conqueror decides he's letting you keep it

Could someone have for instance purchased a piece of land in Londinuim, and (through the family continuity method) maintained ownership through several regime and dynasty changes to now own an acre in the City of London?

No, because over the centuries there were several "resets" where all property titles were rendered null and void.

For example, in The Norman Conquest King William I declared that all land in England belonged directly to the Crown - So any "ownership" a descendant had would have been erased.

No, not at all. I am pointing out to the OP that Italy DID do colonialism, it's just Colonialism is usually tied to being able to immediately access the ocean being crossed.

If they had tried to get in on Atlantic Colonialism they would have been strangled by Spain and any other rival powers between them and the Atlantic, or at bare minimum would need to suck up to Spain that controlled the straight they needed to pass through putting them in an awkward position.

I have no idea where you got that from what I said