Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500-1800

Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500-1800 PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004304150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
Beyond Empires explores the complexity of empire building from the point of view of self-organized networks, rather than from the point of view of the central state. This focus takes readers into a world of cooperative strategies worldwide that emphasises the role played by individuals, rather than institutions, in the overseas expansion and consequent development of European empires. While unveiling the practices and mechanisms of cooperation between individuals, this volume show cases the role played by individuals for the creation, development and maintenance of self-organized networks in the Early Modern period. Applying new conceptual and theoretical inputs, this book values the contributions of different ‘worlds’, bringing to the fore the interactions of Europeans and non-Europeans, Christians and non-Christians, people living within-, on- or just outside the border of empire.

Outsourcing Empire

Outsourcing Empire PDF Author: Andrew Phillips
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691206198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
How chartered company-states spearheaded European expansion and helped create the world’s first genuinely global order From Spanish conquistadors to British colonialists, the prevailing story of European empire-building has focused on the rival ambitions of competing states. But as Outsourcing Empire shows, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, company-states—not sovereign states—drove European expansion, building the world’s first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in Asia, while other company-states pushed forward European expansion through North America, Africa, and the South Pacific. In this comparative exploration, Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman explain the rise and fall of company-states, why some succeeded while others failed, and their role as vanguards of capitalism and imperialism. In dealing with alien civilizations to the East and West, Europeans relied primarily on company-states to mediate geographic and cultural distances in trade and diplomacy. Emerging as improvised solutions to bridge the gap between European rulers’ expansive geopolitical ambitions and their scarce means, company-states succeeded best where they could balance the twin imperatives of power and profit. Yet as European states strengthened from the late eighteenth century onward, and a sense of separate public and private spheres grew, the company-states lost their usefulness and legitimacy. Bringing a fresh understanding to the ways cross-cultural relations were handled across the oceans, Outsourcing Empire examines the significance of company-states as key progenitors of the globalized world.

Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era

Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era PDF Author: Ronald Kroeze
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811602557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
Answering the calls made to overcome methodological nationalism, this volume is the first examination of the links between corruption and imperial rule in the modern world. It does so through a set of original studies that examine the multi-layered nature of corruption in four different empires (Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and France) and their possessions in Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. It offers a key read for scholars interested in the fields of corruption, colonialism/empire and global history. The chapters ‘Introduction: Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era: Towards a Global Perspective’, ‘“Corrupt and rapacious”: Colonial Spanish-American past through the eyes of early nineteenth century contemporaries. A contribution from the history of emotions’, and ‘Colonial Normativity? Corruption in the Dutch-Indonesian Relationship in the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries’ are Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

The Smugglers' World

The Smugglers' World PDF Author: Jesse Cromwell
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469636913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
The Smugglers' World examines a critical part of Atlantic trade for a neglected corner of the Spanish Empire. Testimonies of smugglers, buyers, and royal officials found in Venezuelan prize court records reveal a colony enmeshed in covert commerce. Forsaken by the Spanish fleet system, Venezuelan colonists struggled to obtain European foods and goods. They found a solution in exchanging cacao, a coveted luxury, for the necessities of life provided by contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean. Jesse Cromwell paints a vivid picture of the lives of littoral peoples who normalized their subversions of imperial law. Yet laws and borders began to matter when the Spanish state cracked down on illicit commerce in the 1720s as part of early Bourbon reforms. Now successful merchants could become convict laborers just as easily as enslaved Africans could become free traders along the unruly coastlines of the Spanish Main. Smuggling became more than an economic transaction or imperial worry; persistent local need elevated the practice to a communal ethos, and Venezuelans defended their commercial autonomy through passive measures and even violent political protests. Negotiations between the Spanish state and its subjects over smuggling formed a key part of empire making and maintenance in the eighteenth century.

Borderless Empire

Borderless Empire PDF Author: Bram Hoonhout
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820356085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
Introduction: borderless societies -- The borderland -- Political conflicts -- Rebels and runaways -- The centrality of smuggling -- The web of debt -- Borderless businessmen -- Conclusion: the shape of empire.

Architectural Encounters in Asia Pacific

Architectural Encounters in Asia Pacific PDF Author: Amanda Achmadi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350421383
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Book Description
Architectural Encounters in Asia Pacific explores the architecture of colonial trade and industry, revealing a complex network of transnational connections across the built heritage of the world's most dispersed and culturally diverse region. A wide-ranging collection of case studies uncover these forgotten connections, drawing together stories of migratory architects, imperial commodities, and indentured labour. From Iran to Tasmania, Japan to Java, and Imperial China to the Pacific Islands, the chapters reveal how remnants of colonial trade and industry shed light on the many multi-faceted mobilities of the imperial age, and their enduring legacy in the postcolonial built environments of Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia and beyond. The chapters also reveal deep strands of cultural influences and material imprints long neglected by national histories of architecture, and showcase new methodologies to analyse the interconnectivities and bordering practices which are shaping our experiences of the 21st century. With almost every chapter arising from new archival sources, this richly interdisciplinary volume brings together the work of architectural historians, geographers and heritage practitioners to provide a new understanding of the rich and contested history of this region.

Connecting Worlds

Connecting Worlds PDF Author: Fabiano Bracht
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527527263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
This book establishes a dialogue between colonial studies and the history of science, contributing to a renewed analytical framework grounded on a trans-national, trans-cultural and trans-imperial perspective. It proposes a historiographical revision based on self-organization and cooperation theories, as well as the role of traditionally marginalized agents, including women, in processes that contributed to the building of a First Global Age, from 1400 to 1800. The intermediaries between European and local bearers of knowledge played a central role, together with cultural translation processes involving local practices of knowledge production and the global circulation of persons, commodities, information and knowledge. Colonized worlds in the First Global Age were central to the making of Europe, while Europeans were, undoubtedly, responsible for the emergence of new balances of power and new cultural grounds. Circulation and locality are core concepts of the theoretical frame of this book. Discussing the connection between the local and the global, in terms of production and circulation of knowledge, within the framework of colonialism, the book establishes a dialogue between experts on the history of science and specialists on global and colonial studies.

Mastering the Worst of Trades

Mastering the Worst of Trades PDF Author: Julie M. Svalastog
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004446214
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
An account of the emergence of England’s earliest chartered Africa companies and their traders. It questions the interaction between company and private interests and their mutual impact on the emerging Atlantic of the seventeenth century and beyond.

Conflict Management in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1000-1800

Conflict Management in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1000-1800 PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004407995
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
Conflict Management in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1000-1800 offers a comparative long-term perspective on the complexity of various approaches to conflict management by those involved in long-distance trade across political and jurisdictional boundaries.

Ethnography and Encounter

Ethnography and Encounter PDF Author: Guido van Meersbergen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004471820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
The global operations of the East India Companies were profoundly shaped by European perceptions of foreign lands. Providing a cultural perspective absent from existing economic and institutional histories, Ethnography and Encounter is the first book to systematically explore how Company agents’ understandings of and attitudes towards Asian peoples and societies informed institutional approaches to trade, diplomacy, and colonial governance. Its fine-grained comparisons of Dutch and English activities in seventeenth-century South Asia show how corporate ethnography was produced, how it underpinned given modes of conduct, and how it illuminates connections across space and time. Ethnography and Encounter identifies deep commonalities between Dutch and English discourses and practices, their indebtedness to pan-European ethnographic traditions, and their centrality to wider histories of European expansion.