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

Ward, Kerry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107404738 ISBN 13: 9781107404731

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Ward 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

Book Description:

In this examination of the Dutch East India Company, Ward grapples with the theoretical nature of empire, examines how empires exist through the movement and control of people within its realm, and proposes a new concept of diaspora to demonstrate how all empires have unique networks of free and forced migration.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1107404738
• ISBN 13: 9781107404731
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 358