scholarly journals “Intirely the Kings Vassalls”: East India Company Gifting Practices and Anglo-Mughal Political Exchange (c. 1670–1720)

Diplomatica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-290
Author(s):  
Guido van Meersbergen
Keyword(s):  
East India Company ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Hierarchical Relationships ◽  
Gift Exchanges ◽  
The Continuum

Abstract This article examines the role of gift exchanges in political relations between the East India Company and the Mughal imperial administration. Focusing on the period 1670–1720, it discusses the items selected for presentation, the occasions at which they changed hands, and the hierarchical relationships expressed and acknowledged through these transactions. It argues that in exchanges both with the central court and with provincial authorities, transfers of valuables in cash and kind between English and Indian actors were embedded in a wider imperial discourse regarding sovereignty and service. By acknowledging the continuum running from courtly engagements to everyday political interactions at local sites of power, a notion of Company diplomacy comes into view that straddled the boundaries between inter-polity relations and intra-imperial solicitation. As such, the case study invites us to rethink our notion of diplomacy as it pertained to relations between the English Company and Mughal state.

scholarly journals The East India Company (1661–1698): Territorial Acquisition and the ‘Amsterdam of Liberty’

2022 ◽  
pp. 207-248
Author(s):  
Haig Z. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Governance ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Corporate Form ◽  
Broad Form

AbstractThe final chapter highlights the differences in global corporate governance, providing a case study of how differing governing models could ensure corporate success rather than failure. It continues the story of the EIC’s evolving religious governance in the second half of the century. It investigates how, following the acquisition of Bombay in the 1660s, company leaders such as Strenysham Master, Gerald Aungier and Josiah Child, developed the company’s religious governance to deal with administrating over a variety of peoples and faiths. Following 1662, in the post-Braganza era of the EIC, the flexibility of the corporate form was accentuated because of its adoption of an ecumenically broad form of governance, which allowed it to establish government over not only English Protestants but also Catholics, Armenians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews. The chapter also investigates the role of passive evangelism in the EIC’s religious governance as a way to encourage conversion. In doing so, the company hoped to bring local Indians not only into the Protestant faith, but under the English government.

scholarly journals Mobilising the dispositive: Exploring the role of dockless public bike sharing in transforming urban governance in Shanghai

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 004209802093794
Author(s):  
Wen-I Lin ◽  
Justin Spinney
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Bike Sharing ◽  
Virtual Mobility ◽  
Hierarchical Relationships

This paper contributes to debates on urban governance and mobility through a case study of the transformation of public bike sharing schemes in Shanghai (China) from fixed/docked (PBSS 1.0) to flexible/dockless (PBSS 2.0). Based upon stakeholder interviews and observations between 2015 and 2017, we use the concept of a dispositive to foreground two related processes. The first is the reformulation of the governmental dispositive that coalesces around PBSS in Shanghai. We show how the relations within the dispositive shift from more hierarchical, bounded, regulated and state-led to those characterised by a more dispersed, disconnected, horizontal and distant set of social relations. Second, we show how this dispositive both produces and is produced by an emergent environmentality that manifests in a fixed territoriality in PBSS 1.0 and a more fluid and deterritorialised digital environmentality in PBSS 2.0. In framing this shift, we demonstrate how PBSS 2.0 produces a new dispositive of urban governmentality where the conduct of users is dispersed through a much less co-ordinated network of actors and technologies. Ultimately we argue that it is no longer possible to separate physical and virtual mobility when trying to understand the internal dynamics and external manifestations of mobility governance, which in our example are characterised by less localised and less hierarchical relationships that are more fluid, voluntary and physically distant.

scholarly journals Between system maker and privileges taker: the role of China in the Greater Mekong Sub-region

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (spe) ◽  
pp. 157-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Truong-Minh Vu
Keyword(s):  
Driving Forces ◽  
Energy Systems ◽  
Chinese Foreign Policy ◽  
Regional Power ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Set Up

Utilizing China's leadership projects in the Great Mekong Sub-Region (GMS) as a case study, this paper aims to investigate whether China qualifies as an international leader. This work argues that its geographic position and economic rise allow China to be a "system maker and privilege taker," which is a dual role forming in economic-political relations in the GMS in the last ten years. China is among major driving forces to set up an economic zone in GMS. Growing Chinese regional power is intimately related to the creation of various hubs connecting regional transportation, communication and energy systems that foster the economic development of this region. However, China also proves dark sides of rising powers which take advantage of their privileges to gain benefits. As a "system maker" with its own position and capability, China has notably benefited from building hydropower systems. More importantly, while China is pursuing its benefits and privileges, its hydropower projects have caused some negative effects for the ecosystem in the region. The inflation of dam constructions in both China and GMS countries is raising concerns about using natural resources of the Mekong River. Our concluding part addresses the pressing need to start a serious discussion on the balance between national interests and regional solidarity within the formulation of Chinese foreign policy in GMS.

The role of multiplicity in a cult: A case study

1987 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Worrall ◽  
Ann W. Stockman

Endangered Butterflies and their Non-Native Host Plants: Examining Shifting Values of Belonging in Restoration

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Robert M. Anderson ◽  
Amy M. Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Ecological Restoration ◽  
Native Species ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
A Value ◽  
The Social ◽  
Remote Island ◽  
Scientific Truth ◽  
Native Host

The island marble butterfly (Euchloe ausonides insulanus), thought to be extinct throughout the 20th century until re-discovered on a single remote island in Puget Sound in 1998, has become the focus of a concerted protection effort to prevent its extinction. However, efforts to “restore” island marble habitat conflict with efforts to “restore” the prairie ecosystem where it lives, because of the butterfly’s use of a non-native “weedy” host plant. Through a case study of the island marble project, we examine the practice of ecological restoration as the enactment of particular norms that define which species are understood to belong in the place being restored. We contextualize this case study within ongoing debates over the value of “native” species, indicative of deep-seated uncertainties and anxieties about the role of human intervention to alter or manage landscapes and ecosystems, in the time commonly described as the “Anthropocene.” We interpret the question of “what plants and animals belong in a particular place?” as not a question of scientific truth, but a value-laden construct of environmental management in practice, and we argue for deeper reflexivity on the part of environmental scientists and managers about the social values that inform ecological restoration.

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