Revisiting the expansion thesis: international society and the role of the Dutch East India company as a merchant empire

This paper breaks new ground by looking at the role played by merchant empires, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC), in shaping European interactions with the non-Western world. It offers a critique of the English School’s state-centric narrative of the expansion of international society by looking to how the VOC and its expansion in Asia influenced developments within Europe. As a non-state actor, the VOC developed networks of trade and power, which were intertwined with the Dutch struggle against Iberian hegemony. As this paper shows, the development of international law, sovereign equality and European international society needs to be understood as being constituted through these colonial encounters. Looking to the VOC as a merchant empire presents a more nuanced approach to the expansion narrative that recognises that states, empires and early modern companies developed in a co-evolutionary manner. This critical approach calls for the recognition of international society as an ongoing process formed by the contestation of hybrid cultures.

Milton, Alexander’s Pirate, and Merchant Empires in the East

This chapter examines John Milton’s allusions to Alexander the Great in Paradise Lost, with particular emphasis on his critique of the Dutch East Indies Empire and their English imitators. It considers how Alexander figures mercantile heroism in the age of commerce by focusing on the ways in which Paradise Lost responds to the global spice trade from both sides of the Euro-Asian encounter. The chapter analyzes Milton’s dual characterization of Satan in Paradise Lost as emperor and merchant as well as his depiction of both God and Satan as monarchs. These divergent characterizations of Satan as merchant and as king may be reconciled by recognizing Milton’s allusion to Augustine’s anecdote about the pirate’s critique of Alexander as a tyrant. The chapter also explores colonialism in Paradise Lost, Asia as a significant context for intra-European relations, and Milton’s concern with issues of sovereignty in the East Indies trade.