In 2006 the ENCOMPASS (ENcountering a COMmon Past in ASia) programme was launched by Leiden University in cooperation with several universities in South East Asia. In total, sixty 2-year Bachelor/Master scholarships are being made available for outstanding Asian students for the years 2006-2010. Encompass is designed for Asian students who obtained an Honours BA or MA degree in history or archival and library sciences. This year (2008) a research programme has been launched within the framework of Encompass. This research programme aims to study the dialectics of 400 years of Asian-European interaction by focussing on 3 watersheds in history (1650-1720; 1780-1830 and 1910-1960) that may be seen as shake-ups of changing relationships. This research programme fits in the theoretical framework of the study of regime change or transition of regimes. The archival part of this research programme will explore knowledge production, archives creation and the use of information, knowledge systems and archives by the successive governments during these periods of regime change. In our time we probably would use the word ‘governance' for this approach. The archival research programme first wants to explore change and continuity in managing information during periods of regime change. A second goal is about the workability of archives as historical sources. Knowledge systems and archives can be regarded as a complex tangle of information, in which explanation, cause and effect are mixed in an almost inextricable way. The idea is that the better we understand the mechanisms behind production of knowledge systems and archives, the more we can say about their role as historical sources.