Guido van Meersbergen

Covering trade, diplomacy, and colonial governance, this book demonstrates how the activities of the Dutch and English East India Companies took shape in direct response to European ideas about, understandings of, and attitudes towards Asian peoples and societies.

The Dutch and English in Seventeenth-Century South Asia

Ethnography and Encounter

Aske Laursen Brock

Edmond Smith

Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World explores the links between trade, empire, exploration, and global information trans>fer during the early modern period. By charting how the leaders, members, employees, and supporters of different trading companies gathered, pro>cessed, employed, protected, and divulged intelligence about foreign lands, peoples, and markets, this book throws new light on the internal uses of information by corporate actors and the ways they engaged with, relied on, and supplied various external publics. This ranged from using secret knowl>edge to beat competitors, to shaping debates about empire, and to forcing Europeans to reassess their understandings of specific environments due to contacts with non-European peoples. Reframing our understanding of trading companies through the lens of travel literature, this volume brings together thirteen experts in the field to facilitate a new understanding of how European corporations and empires were shaped by global webs of information exchange

Guido van Meersbergen

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