1st Edition
Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World
1. Trading Companies and Travel Writing: An Introduction
Aske Laursen Brock, Guido van Meersbergen and Edmond Smith
Part One: Managing Information
2. Mapping Travel Knowledge: The Use of Maps on the First Dutch Voyages to Asia
Djoeke van Netten
3. Writing that Travels: The Dutch East India Company’s Paper-Based Information Management
Guido van Meersbergen and Frank Birkenholz
4. Written Reports and the Promotion of Trans-Oceanic Trade in Tuscany and Genoa in the Seventeenth Century
Giorgio Tosco
5. Information and Encounter in England’s North American Colonies, 1585-1650
Edmond Smith
Part Two: Multiple Actors and Perspectives
6. William Hawkins in the Mughal Court, 1608-1611: Cultural, Social, and Affective Boundary-Crossings
Jyotsna Singh
7. Writing the Macabre: Travel, Taxation and the Bengal Famine of 1770
Amrita Sen
8. Reading Marginalised, Non-European Agency in EIC-Nepalese Encounters: The Expeditions of William Kirkpatrick, 1793, and Maulvi Abdul Kadir Khan, 1795
Sam Ellis
Part Three: Company Lives
9. For Which Company? Guy Tachard S.J.’s Unpublished Relation de Voyage aux Indes, 1690-99
Stefan Halikowski Smith
10. ‘Passages Recollected from Memory’: Remembering the Levant Company in Seventeenth-Century Merchants’ Life Writing
Eva Johanna Holmberg
11. ‘Blackened and Whispered Away my Reputation’: Fashioning a Reputation in the Late Seventeenth-Century Levant Company
Aske Laursen Brock
12. ‘Unburying’ Company History: Reconstructing European Company Narratives through Digital Cemetery Archives
Souvik Mukherjee
Afterword
Nandini Das
Biography
Aske Laursen Brock is Carlsberg Postdoctoral Fellow at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research focuses on the social origins of trading companies and early global capitalism.
Guido van Meersbergen is Assistant Professor of Early Modern Global History at the University of Warwick, UK. His research focuses on early modern diplomacy, travel, ethnography, and the Dutch and English East India Companies.
Edmond Smith is Presidential Fellow in Economic Cultures at the University of Manchester, UK. His work focuses on commercial communities and the institutions of early modern global trade.
