Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Studies in Comparative World History) - Hardcover

Ward, Kerry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521885868 ISBN 13: 9780521885867

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Synopsis

This book argues that the Dutch East India Company empire manifested itself through multiple networks that amalgamated spatially and over time into an imperial web whose sovereignty was effectively created and maintained but always partial and contingent. Networks of Empire proposes that early modern empires were comprised of durable networks of trade, administration, settlement, legality, and migration whose regional circuits and territorially and institutionally based nodes of regulatory power operated not only on land and sea but discursively as well. Rights of sovereignty were granted to the company by the States General in the United Provinces. Company directors in Europe administered the exercise of sovereignty by company servants in its chartered domain. The empire developed in dynamic response to challenges waged by individuals and other sovereign entities operating within the Indian Ocean grid. By closely examining the Dutch East India Company's network of forced migration this book explains how empires are constituted through the creation, management, contestation, devolution and reconstruction of these multiple and intersecting fields of partial sovereignty.

About this title

About the Author

Dr Kerry Ward is currently Assistant Professor of World History at Rice University. She has a PhD from the University of Michigan, an MA from the University of Cape Town, and a BA from the University of Adelaide. She has published in the fields of comparative slavery and forced migration, comparative imperialism and colonialism, Indian Ocean history, South African and Southeast Asian history, historical memory, and public history in South Africa.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521885868
• ISBN 13: 9780521885867
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 356