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

Studies in Comparative World History

by Kerry Ward

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.

Genres: History

356 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2008

Reviews

[Lizza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptionally well-researched, this is a story seldom told that is a must-read for everyone, in other words all of us, who have been brain-washed by the self-serving myths of imperialism. It is of particular interest to South Africans, as it supplies missing pieces to the puzzle of our violent history.