This 2009 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.
• A new approach to Dutch imperialism in the history of the Indian Ocean • Examines forced migration as a spectrum of bondage including slavery, penal transportation, and political exile within one realm • Examines indigenous networks in the Indian ocean, arguing that the Dutch East India Company's network facilitated the spread of Islam
Contents
1. Networks of empire and the imperial diaspora; 2. The company's imperial legal realm and forced migration; 3. Crime and punishment in mid-eighteenth century Batavia; 4. The Cape cauldron: tales of a trans-oceanic past; 5. Cross-circuits in the Indian Ocean: the VOC and Dar al Islam; 6. Social webs at the Cape of Good Hope; 7. Disintegrating imperial networks.
Review
'… Ward's intriguing and suggestive detail will be a revelation for historians of South Africa.' Journal of African History
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