Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company
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.
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