scholarly journals Mixed Company in the Contact Zone: the “Glocal” Diplomatic Efforts of a Prussian East Indiaman in 1750s Cape Verde

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 423-441
Author(s):  
Felicia Gottmann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Modern Period

Abstract This article takes a micro-historical actor-centered approach to study the encounter between the officers of a Prussian East India Company Ship and local elites in 1750s Praia, Cape Verde. Combining recent advances in New Diplomatic History and in Company Studies with insights from the study of Contact Zones and transculturation, it analyzes the diplomatic strategies marginalized and hybrid players could adopt to project themselves onto the early modern global stage and locally counterbalance the hegemonic Northern European Atlantic powers. It thus proposes an alternative model of nonprofessional diplomatic interaction in the early modern period.

scholarly journals Merchants and States: Private Trade and the Fall of Madras, 1746

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Søren Mentz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The State ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Economic Surplus ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Private Entrepreneurs ◽  
British State

Michael Pearson has argued that “rights for revenue” was an important element in the European way of organizing long-distance trade in the early modern period. The state provided indigenous merchant groups with commercial privileges and allowed them to influence political affairs. In return, the state received a part of the economic surplus. The East India Company and the British state shared such a relationship. However, as this article demonstrates, the East India Company was not an impersonal entity. It consisted of many layers of private entrepreneurs, who pursued their own private interests sheltered by the Company’s privileged position. One such group was the Company servants in Asia. The French conquest of Madras in 1746 and the following period of British sub-imperialism in India demonstrate that the state had traded off too many rights. Through the business papers of Willian Monson, a senior Company servant in Madras, the historian can describe the fall of Madras as a consequence of deteriorating relationships between private interests within the Company structure. Directors, shareholders, Company servants and private merchants in India fell out with each other. In this situation, the British state found it difficult to intervene.

Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T. Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Personal Law ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

An account of theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (dāya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharmaśāstra). This book examines the evolution of different?juridical models of inheritance—in which families held property in trusts or in tenancies-in-common—against the backdrop of related developments in the philosophical understanding of ownership in the Sanskrit text-traditions of hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) and logic (Nyāya) respectively. Ownership and Inheritance reconstructs medieval Sanskrit theories of property and traces the emergence of various competing schools of Sanskrit jurisprudence during the early modern period (roughly fifteenth to nineteenth centuries) in Bihar, Bengal, and Varanasi. The book attends to the ways in which ideas from these schools of jurisprudence shaped the codification of Anglo-Hindu personal law by administrators of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While acknowledging the limitations of colonial conceptions of Dharmaśāstra as positive law, Ownership and Inheritance argues for far greater continuity between pre-colonial and colonial Sanskrit jurisprudence than accepted previously. Finally, this monograph charts the transformation of the Hindu law of inheritance—through precedent and statute—over the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.

scholarly journals Symbolic Communication in Early Modern Diplomacy: Naval Incidents and the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1667–1672)*

2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (573) ◽  
pp. 337-358
Author(s):  
David Onnekink
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Symbolic Language ◽  
Symbolic Communication ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Public Debates

Abstract This article underscores the significance of symbolic communication in early modern international relations. Taking naval incidents during the period leading up to the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1667–72) as a case-study, it shows how the use of imagery constituted an undervalued symbolic language in which vital interests were communicated by diplomats. Moreover, it argues that the way in which these incidents were discussed in diplomatic circles was relevant to and congruous with public debates. It also highlights the often-ignored international dimension of popular disputes. An overall objective is to further the debate on a New Diplomatic History for the early modern period.

scholarly journals Introduction: Cross-Confessional Diplomacy and Diplomatic Intermediaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 93-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maartje van Gelder ◽  
Tijana Krstić
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Mediterranean History ◽  
The One

This special issue, an exercise in integrated Mediterranean history through the lens of diplomacy, demonstrates that diplomatic genres and practices associated with a European political and cultural tradition, on the one hand, or an Islamic tradition, on the other, were not produced in isolation but attained meaning through the process of mediation and negotiation among intermediaries of different confessional and social backgrounds. Building on the “new diplomatic history,” the essays focus on non-elite (e.g. Christian slaves, renegades, Jewish doctors, Moriscos) and less commonly studied (mid- and high-ranking Muslim officials) intermediaries in Mediterranean cross-confessional diplomacy. The issue argues that the early modern period witnessed a relative balance of power among Muslim- and Christian-ruled polities: negotiations entailed not only principles of reciprocity, parity, and commensurability, but these were actually enforceable in practice. This challenges the notion of European diplomatic supremacy, prompting scholars to fundamentally rethink the narrative about the origins of early modern diplomacy.

The World Soul in Early Modern Philosophy

2021 ◽  
pp. 186-222
Author(s):  
Alison Peterman
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World

The world soul was often a target of attack in early modern natural philosophy, on grounds of impiety and explanatory vacuity. But it also played an important role in debates about two of the most important questions in natural philosophy: How does nature depend on God, and what explains nature’s organization? As an answer to those questions, it lived on through the early modern period, sustained especially by philosophers who argued that individuals in nature cannot be understood in isolation from the whole. In this chapter it is argued that in this guise, it served as an alternative model of explanation in a context that increasingly emphasized explanation in terms of laws of nature, and that this reflects the fact that these two models represent two fundamentally competing approaches to natural philosophical explanation.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Bashevkin
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Women Leaders ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Gender And Politics ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
International Responsibility

Chapter 1 situates the study in the context of feminist diplomatic history. It shows how women leaders in positions of international responsibility have been evaluated since the early modern period. The discussion then considers how the gender and politics field evolved within political science in recent decades, demonstrating the emphasis of that literature on institutions and especially legislatures, rather than on the actions of individuals in executive office. It examines a key theoretical pivot of the field, political representation, and suggests ways in which the concept can be reconceived for contemporary research on foreign policy leaders. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book.

scholarly journals War, Piracy and Religion: Godfried Udemans' Spiritual Helm (1638)

Grotiana ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-214
Author(s):  
Joris van Eijnatten
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
West India Company

AbstractThe Calvinist minister Godfried Udemans (1581/2–1649) is generally considered to be one of the more important seventeenth-century theologians from the province of Zeeland. He specialized in writings for a broader public, including, in particular, publications on ethical and religious codes in trade and seafaring. Of his various writings on moral theology, 't Geestelyck roer van 't coopmans schip, first published in 1638, is the most important.The Spiritual helm appeared in print some thirty years after Grotius occupied himself with De jure praedae (the manuscript dates from 1604), but Udemans had already begun articulating his thoughts in 1608. It is instructive to examine the ethical writings of a contemporary of Grotius. It has been claimed that in the early modern period, Calvinism, especially in its English Puritan variety, did much to propagate the medieval traditions of holy war that to all appearances had been laid to rest by Spanish theoreticians during the sixteenth-century Renaissance. In this article, I examine the extent to which Udemans draws upon religion as a means of legitimizing violence on behalf of secular political authorities such as the prince (or, as in the case of the Dutch Republic, the States or States General), and, more in particular, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and West India Company (WIC). If Udemans is representative of the religious tradition to which he reckoned himself, holy war thought did not figure prominently in Dutch Calvinism.

From Craft to Institution: Accounting in Italy from the Middle ages to the Early Modern Period

2012 ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Volkova
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Technical Standards ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Professional Field

The article describes the evolution of accounting from the simple registration technique to economic and social institution in medieval Italy. We used methods of institutional analysis and historical research. It is shown that the institutionalization of accounting had been completed by the XIV century, when it became a system of codified technical standards, scholar discipline and a professional field. We examine the interrelations of this process with business environment, political, social, economic and cultural factors of Italy by the XII—XVI centuries. Stages of institutionalization are outlined.

Becoming “Indians”: The Jesuit Missionary Path from Italy to Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-50
Author(s):  
Camilla Russell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Jesuit Missions ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Italian Provinces ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Jesuit Missionary

The Jesuit missions in Asia were among the most audacious undertakings by Europeans in the early modern period. This article focuses on a still relatively little understood aspect of the enterprise: its appointment process. It draws together disparate archival documents to recreate the steps to becoming a Jesuit missionary, specifically the Litterae indipetae (petitions for the “Indies”), provincial reports about missionary candidates, and replies to applicants from the Jesuit superior general. Focusing on candidates from the Italian provinces of the Society of Jesus, the article outlines not just how Jesuit missionaries were appointed but also the priorities, motivations, and attitudes that informed their assessment and selection. Missionaries were made, the study shows, through a specific “way of proceeding” that was negotiated between all parties and seen in both organizational and spiritual terms, beginning with the vocation itself, which, whether the applicant departed or not, earned him the name indiano.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document