For more than a century, from about 1600 until the early eighteenth century, the Dutch dominated world trade. Via the Netherlands the far reaches of the world, both in the Atlantic and in the East, were connected. Dutch ships carried goods, but they also opened up opportunities for the exchange of knowledge. The commercial networks of the Dutch trading companies provided an infrastructure which was accessible to people with a scholarly interest in the exotic world. The present collection of essays brings together a number of studies about knowledge construction that depended on the Dutch trading networks. Contributors include: Paul Arblaster, Hans den Besten, Frans Blom, Britt Dams, Adrien Delmas, Alette Fleischer, Antje Flüchter, Michiel van Groesen, Henk de Groot, Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Grégoire Holtz, Siegfried Huigen, Elspeth Jajdelska, Maria-Theresia Leuker, Edwin van Meerkerk, Bruno Naarden, and Christina Skott.

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

In Encounters of the Opposite Coast Markus Vink provides a narrative of the first half century of cross-cultural interaction between the Dutch East India Company (VOC), one of the great northern European chartered companies, and Madurai, one of the 'great southern Nayakas' and successor-states of the Vijayanagara empire, in southeast India (c. 1645-1690). A shared interest in trade and at times converging political objectives formed the unstable foundations for a complex relationship fraught with tensions, a mixture of conflict and coexistence typical of the 'age of contained conflict'. Drawing extensively on archival materials, Markus Vink covers a topic neglected by both Company historians and their Indian counterparts and sheds important light on a 'black hole in South Indian history'.

An examination of how farming expertise could be shared and extended, over four centuries.

Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular offers a collection of studies that deal with the cultural exchange between Neo-Latin and the vernacular, and with the very cultural mobility that allowed for the successful development of Renaissance bilingual culture. Studying a variety of multilingual issues of language and poetics, of translation and transfer, its authors interpret Renaissance cross-cultural contact as a radically dynamic, ever-shifting process of making cultural meaning. With renewed attention for suitable theoretical and methodological frames of reference, Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular firmly resists literary history’s temptation to pin down the Early Modern relationship between languages, literatures and cultures, in favour of stressing the sheer variety and variability of that relationship itself. Contributors are Jan Bloemendal, Ingrid De Smet, Annet den Haan, Tom Deneire, Beate Hintzen, David Kromhout, Bettina Noak, Ingrid Rowland, Johanna Svensson, Harm-Jan van Dam, Guillaume van Gemert, Eva van Hooijdonk, and Ümmü Yüksel.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, objects, texts and people travelled around the world on board Dutch ships. The essays in this book explore how these circulations transformed knowledge in Asian and European societies. They concentrate on epistemic consequences in the fields of historiography, geography, natural history, religion and philosophy, as well as in everyday life. Emphasizing transformations, the volume reconstructs small semantic shifts of knowledge and tentative adjustments to new cultural contexts. It unfolds the often conflict-ridden, complex and largely global history of specific pieces of knowledge as well as of generally-shared contemporary understandings regarding what could or could not be considered true. The book contributes to current debates about how to conceptualize the unsettled epistemologies of the early modern world.

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.

The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) remains a puzzling and complex subject for students and scholars alike. This is hardly surprising since it is often contested among historians whether it is actually appropriate to speak of a single war or a series of conflicts. Similarly emphasis is also put on the different motives for going to war, as conflicting religious and political interests were involved. This research companion brings together leading scholars in the field to synthesize the range of existing research on the war, which is still fragmented and divided along national historical lines, and to further explore the complexities of the conflict using an innovative comparative approach. The companion is designed to provide scholars and graduate students with a comprehensive and authoritative overview of research on one of the most destructive conflicts in European history.

By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise, this study addresses the history of emotions in relation to cross-cultural movement, exchange, contact, and changing connections in the later medieval and early modern periods. All essays in this volume focus on the performance and negotiation of identity in situations of cultural contact, with particular emphasis on emotional practices. They cover a wide range of thematic and disciplinary areas and are organized around the primary sources on which they are based. The edited volume brings together two major areas in contemporary humanities: the study of how emotions were understood, expressed, and performed in shaping premodern transcultural relations, and the study of premodern cultural movements, contacts, exchanges, and understandings as emotionally charged encounters. In discussing these hitherto separated historiographies together, this study sheds new light on the role of emotions within Europe and amongst non-Europeans and Europeans between 1100 and 1800. The discussion of emotions in a wide range of sources including letters, images, material culture, travel writing, and literary accounts makes Matters of Engagement an invaluable source for both scholars and students concerned with the history of premodern emotions.

Asia was the principle focus of empire-builders from Alexander and Akbar to Chinggis Khan and Qianlong and yet, until now, there has been no attempt to provide a comprehensive history of empire in the region. Empire in Asia addresses the need for a thorough survey of the topic. This volume traces the evolution of a constellation of competing empires in Asia from the 13th through to the 18th centuries. Separate chapters will describe the history and characteristic features of imperial regimes in each major sub-region of Asia, from the Ottomans and Safavids in the West, Romanovs in the North, Mughals in the South, the Mongols & their successors in Inner Asia, to the Ming and Qing Dynasties in the East. The contributors address common questions in considering the various empires, including: - How did imperial Asian states understand themselves and their place in the world? - How were these empires constructed and how did they attain such prominence? - To what extent did imperial repertoires of rule differ? The two volumes of Empire in Asia offer a significant contribution to the theory and practice of empire when considered globally and comparatively and are essential reading for all students and scholars of global, imperial and Asian history.