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.

This book represents the account of the history changing naval battle of Queen Elisabeth against the Spanish Armada and the famous ship that was decisive in the victory. Sir Walter Raleigh or Ralegh (c. 1552 – 29 October 1618), was a famed English writer, poet, soldier, courtier, and explorer.

The French Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s 1744 journal of his voyage through French North America—New France, Louisiana, and the Caribbean—is among the richest eighteenth-century accounts of the continent’s colonization, as well as its indigenous inhabitants, flora, and fauna. Micah True’s new translation of this influential text is the first to appear since 1763. It provides the first complete and reliable English version of Charlevoix’s journal and reveals the famous Jesuit to have been a better literary stylist than has often been assumed on the basis of earlier translations. Complemented by a detailed introduction and richly annotated, this volume finally makes accessible to an Anglophone audience one of the key texts of eighteenth-century French America.

The Dutch East India Company was a unique, hybrid organization acting as both company and state, aggressively intervening in Asian political matters in which it had no place. This study focuses on the company’s clashes with Tokugawa Japan in the seventeenth century, particularly in the areas of diplomacy, sovereignty, and violence. In each encounter, the Dutch were forced to abandon claims to sovereign powers and refashion themselves—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial rule to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company as more than a commercial enterprise, this text offers unprecedented perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting unions between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise and the surprisingly limited influence of Europeans operating in early-modern Asia.

Volume: v.5-6 Publisher: Dublin Publication date: 1882 Subjects: Irish philology -- Societies, etc Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

Traces the impact of world events on St Helena's topography, ecology and human population, from the early 1500s to the present day. Since its discovery in the early 1500s, St Helena - though remotely situated - has repeatedly participated in events taking place on a world stage; evidence of those encounters is etched on the topography, ecology and human population of the island. This book examines the impacts of a century of casual but destructive visits from sailing ships of various nations followed by settlement by the East India Company; the fortification and population of the island by the Company, including the importation of an enslaved population; efforts to make it economically self-reliant; its employment a base for scientific observations from Edmond Halley to Joseph Hooker and beyond; its role as a prison-fortress from Napoleon to the twentieth century and as a base for anti-slavery patrols in the South Atlantic following the Abolition of Slavery; its decline since the end of the days of sail; measures taken to reconnect it with the modern world in terms of sea and air travel as well as electronic communication; and efforts to regain to some degree the ecological diversity of the virgin island setting.

This handbook offers a systematic exploration of current key topics in travel writing studies. It addresses the history, impact, and unique discursive variety of British travel writing by covering some of the most celebrated and canonical authors of the genre as well as lesser known ones in more than thirty close-reading chapters. Combining theoretically informed, astute literary criticism of single texts with the analysis of the circumstances of their production and reception, these chapters offer excellent possibilities for understanding the complexity and cultural relevance of British travel writing.