The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750

The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750
Author: David Veevers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2020-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108752519

This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealing how it was this integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies which was central to British imperial and commercial success rather than national or mercantilist enterprise. As their servants skilfully adapted to this rich and complex environment, the East India Company became enfranchised by the eighteenth century with a breadth of privileges and rights – from governing sprawling metropolises to trading customs-free. In emphasising the Asian genesis of the British Empire, this book sheds new light on the foreign frameworks of power which fuelled the expansion of Global Britain in the early modern world.

Selling Empire

Selling Empire
Author: Jonathan Eacott
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2016-02-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469622319

2017 Bentley Book Prize, World History Association Linking four continents over three centuries, Selling Empire demonstrates the centrality of India--both as an idea and a place--to the making of a global British imperial system. In the seventeenth century, Britain was economically, politically, and militarily weaker than India, but Britons increasingly made use of India's strengths to build their own empire in both America and Asia. Early English colonial promoters first envisioned America as a potential India, hoping that the nascent Atlantic colonies could produce Asian raw materials. When this vision failed to materialize, Britain's circulation of Indian manufactured goods--from umbrellas to cottons--to Africa, Europe, and America then established an empire of goods and the supposed good of empire. Eacott recasts the British empire's chronology and geography by situating the development of consumer culture, the American Revolution, and British industrialization in the commercial intersections linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. From the seventeenth into the nineteenth century and beyond, the evolving networks, ideas, and fashions that bound India, Britain, and America shaped persisting global structures of economic and cultural interdependence.

Edge of Empire

Edge of Empire
Author: Maya Jasanoff
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307425711

In this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff uncovers the extraordinary stories of collectors who lived on the frontiers of the British Empire in India and Egypt, tracing their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Jasanoff delves beneath the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance to look at the British Empire through the eyes of the people caught up in it. Written and researched on four continents, Edge of Empire enters a world where people lived, loved, mingled, and identified with one another in ways richer and more complex than previous accounts have led us to believe were possible. And as this book demonstrates, traces of that world remain tangible—and topical—today. An innovative, persuasive, and provocative work of history.

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
Author: David Armitage
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2000-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521789783

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire presents a comprehensive history of British conceptions of empire for more than half a century. David Armitage traces the emergence of British imperial identity from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, using a full range of manuscript and printed sources. By linking the histories of England, Scotland and Ireland with the history of the British Empire, he demonstrates the importance of ideology as an essential linking between the processes of state-formation and empire-building. This book sheds light on major British political thinkers, from Sir Thomas Smith to David Hume, by providing fascinating accounts of the 'British problem' in the early modern period, of the relationship between Protestantism and empire, of theories of property, liberty and political economy in imperial perspective, and of the imperial contribution to the emergence of British 'identities' in the Atlantic world.

How the East Was Won

How the East Was Won
Author: Andrew Phillips
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 662
Release: 2021-10-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009064193

How did upstart outsiders forge vast new empires in early modern Asia, laying the foundations for today's modern mega-states of India and China? In How the East Was Won, Andrew Phillips reveals the crucial parallels uniting the Mughal Empire, the Qing Dynasty and the British Raj. Vastly outnumbered and stigmatised as parvenus, the Mughals and Manchus pioneered similar strategies of cultural statecraft, first to build the multicultural coalitions necessary for conquest, and then to bind the indigenous collaborators needed to subsequently uphold imperial rule. The English East India Company later adapted the same 'define and conquer' and 'define and rule' strategies to carve out the West's biggest colonial empire in Asia. Refuting existing accounts of the 'rise of the West', this book foregrounds the profoundly imitative rather than innovative character of Western colonialism to advance a new explanation of how universal empires arise and endure.

The Business of Empire

The Business of Empire
Author: H. V. Bowen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2005-12-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139447882

The Business of Empire assesses the domestic impact of British imperial expansion by analysing what happened in Britain following the East India Company's acquisition of a vast territorial empire in South Asia. Drawing on a mass of hitherto unused material contained in the company's administrative and financial records, the book offers a reconstruction of the inner workings of the company as it made the remarkable transition from business to empire during the late-eighteenth century. H. V. Bowen profiles the company's stockholders and directors and examines how those in London adapted their methods, working practices, and policies to changing circumstances in India. He also explores the company's multifarious interactions with the domestic economy and society, and sheds important new light on its substantial contributions to the development of Britain's imperial state, public finances, military strength, trade and industry. This book will appeal to all those interested in imperial, economic and business history.

Scotland and the British Empire

Scotland and the British Empire
Author: John M. MacKenzie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2011-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199573247

Examines the key roles of Scots in central aspects of the Atlantic and imperial economies from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and demonstrates that an understanding of the relationship between Scotland and the British Empire is vital both for the understanding of the histories of that country and of many territories of the Empire.

The Dutch Empire between Ideas and Practice, 1600–2000

The Dutch Empire between Ideas and Practice, 1600–2000
Author: René Koekkoek
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2019-11-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030275167

This volume explores the intellectual history of the Dutch Empire from a long-term and global perspective, analysing how ideas and visions of empire took shape in imperial practice from the seventeenth century to the present day. Through a series of case studies, the volume critically unearths deep-rooted conceptions of Dutch imperial exceptionalism and shows how visions of imperial rule were developed in metropolitan and colonial contexts and practices. Topics include the founding of the Dutch chartered companies for colonial trade, the development of commercial and global visions of empire in Europe and Asia, the continuities and ruptures in imperial ideas and practices around 1800, and the practical making of empire in colonial court rooms and radio broadcasting. Demonstrating the relevance of a long-term approach to the Dutch Empire, the volume showcases how the intellectual history of empire can provide fresh light on postcolonial repercussions of empire and imperial rule. Chapter 1, Chapter 3, Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550-1750

The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550-1750
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2018-12-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004387854

William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers put forward a new interpretation of the role Europe’s overseas corporations played in early modern global history, recasting them from vehicles of national expansion to significant forces of global integration. Across the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Pacific, corporations provided a truly global framework for facilitating the circulation, movement and exchange between and amongst European and non-European communities, bringing them directly into dialogue often for the first time. Usually understood as imperial or colonial commercial enterprises, The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History reveals the unique global sociology of overseas corporations to provide a new global history in which non-Europeans emerged as key stakeholders in European overseas enterprises in the early modern world. Contributors include: Michael D. Bennett, Aske Laursen Brock, Liam D. Haydon, Lisa Hellman, Leonard Hodges, Emily Mann, Simon Mills, Chris Nierstrasz, Edgar Pereira, Edmond Smith, Haig Smith, and Anna Winterbottom.