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.