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The first chapter of Part I begins by taking stock of European theories of fever, and of the importance of the work of the Hippocratic revival, particularly as reflected in the work of Sydenham, Boerhaave, and Hoffman. The discussion then turns to medical work in the tropical colonies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, placing British medicine in the context of earlier work by the Portuguese and Dutch. The chapter examines both the East and the West Indies. It shows the growing importance of climate and morbid anatomy in theories of disease and how ideas about disease had a bearing on concepts of race. The strongly natural‐historical orientation of colonial practice is emphasized, along with its connections to the politics of medical reform in Britain.

This chapter analyses slave professions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Indian Ocean. It explores the activities of the English East India Company in the Indian Ocean and the utilisation of slave labour within the company itself. It tackles the use of slaves in maritime industry; the obfuscation of slavery with titles that resembled employment; the movement and forced migration of slaves; the routes into slavery; methods of slave-stealing; and the slave professions - sailors, soldiers, interpreters, doctors, builders, gardeners, domestic slaves, and concubines. It concludes that slaves were a source of revenue for the company, and were forcibly relocated both to quell resistance and to further distribute and exploit their skillsets.

This chapter provides the microstudy for the Dutch East India Company (VOC). VOC constituted an incomplete transition from ruler-owned enterprise to business corporation. Its closer connection with state objectives and state elites places it somewhere on the continuum that leads from the Portuguese ruler-owned enterprise to the English East India Company (EIC). The chapter explains how the VOC did not represent, at its inception, a full shift from personal to impersonal collaboration. But as it continued to evolve, and as investment through the secondary stock market became the norm, the VOC gradually became more impersonal. It explains that in the first decade of the VOC, the republic and the corporation insiders worked hand in hand to attract and capture outside investors.

This chapter is a regional study of the emerging “successor state” of Arcot in southern India, drawing upon the Persian chronicling tradition and the records of the Dutch East India Company. The early eighteenth century in northern Tamil saw at that time a rise of a new type of state, the autonomous nizāmat, or what the British were apt to call the “nawabi” state, operating under the carapace of Mughal sovereignty. This state emerged as a sort of condominium of a Deccani (Nawayat) elite and Persianized Hindu communities such as the Khatris. This chapter attempts to sketch the main lines of development in the Arcot nizāmat, under Da'ud Khan Panni, and then the founder of the Nawayat “dynasty”, Muhammad Sa'id, or Sa'adatullah Khan.

This chapter examines how the trading of shares of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) began. A total of 1,143 investors subscribed to the initial capital of the VOC’s Amsterdam chamber. They had been encouraged to invest by the charter that the States General, the highest administrative body in the Dutch Republic, had granted the VOC on March 20, 1602. This charter was the Company’s deed of incorporation, and it spelled out, among other things, the monopoly it had been granted. “All the residents of these lands,” stated article 10, “may buy shares in this Company.” Investors could decide which of the Company’s six chambers to put their money into. There were share registers in Enkhuizen, Hoorn, Delft, and Rotterdam, as well as in Amsterdam and Middelburg. Almost 6.5 million guilders was subscribed to the VOC’s initial capital—a large sum for the world’s first public subscription to an enterprise’s share capital.

This chapter provides historical context for understanding the legal treatment of companies that commit wrongdoing. Section I traces the experience of two early joint ventures—the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company, which were founded to establish colonial economic units, create new trade routes, and secure monopolies on key commodities. The brutality with which both companies pursued these objectives led to human rights abuses, slavery, and ultimately genocide. Section II discusses the role of corporations in the context of wartime in the early twentieth Century. In both world wars, companies were major players furthering the efforts of their home states. But the German corporations displayed a much more egregious callousness toward humanity than companies in other belligerent states. Developing poison gas for battlefield use in World War I, and deploying gas to the extermination camps and openly using slave labor in World War II, sets German companies apart from the rest generally and the I.G. Farben firm in particular. Section III provides an update on civil liability within the United States of foreign corporations engaged in tortious conduct abroad.

This chapter examines the role of the “king of Holland”—a fictive sovereign built around the Prince Maurits, the Stadhouder—in the story of the Dutch encounter with the Tokugawa Bakufu, by looking at what the Dutch East India Company representatives actually said (or wrote) and by assuming that such statements carried weight. When envoys explained that they came from the “king of Holland,” this was not an accident of translation or a kind of diplomatic garnish loosely sprinkled over something more substantial. Instead, as the Tokugawa records make clear, it provided both structure and logic to the first phase of negotiations between the company and the shogun, during a time when European attempts to establish diplomatic engagements in Asia proved complicated and inefficient.

Drawing on the gift registers of the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company, this chapter shows that the gifts bestowed by European merchants in Yemen may not be collapsed indistinguishably with other types of offerings, such as diplomatic bestowals, imperial gifts, and acts of pious charity. By contrast, European merchants’ gifts were comprised of relatively routine trade items and were remarkably formulaic in nature, thus overlapping with Indian Ocean commodities in uneven and unexpected ways and drawing their power and meaning from their association with extended commercial geographies. A close perusal of European commercial gifting practices also reveals that foreign merchants became quite adept at the local grammar of giving, even if they decried its legitimacy in their letters back to home offices.

This chapter sketches a profile of the Amsterdam prostitutes, and of their main clients, the sailors. Statistics and data from the judicial records enable to construct a collective biography of the arrested prostitutes; the majority (75 %) of whom were immigrants, from Dutch and German cities, single, and by trade textile workers or seamstresses. In comparison, Amsterdam brides were mostly native girls and if immigrants, maidservants from the countryside. Seafaring was extremely important for Dutch society, especially for the lower classes. Recruitment for the Dutch East India Company (VOC) among lower class men caused a large surplus of women, many of them poor immigrants with little prospect of marriage. VOC sailors not only were prominent clients of prostitutes, but they often came from the same backgrounds and regions.

This introductory chapter describes an oft-neglected aspect of Japan's initial contact with the West. In particular, it focuses on the interaction between the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) and the Tokugawa regime. Although there had been a fairly short span of European dominance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for a far longer period the dynamic was reversed. Because of this, when an earlier fleet of foreign warships appeared in Japanese harbors in the seventeenth century, it received a very different reception from that afforded to Perry. While the arrival of this first generation of black ships also triggered a process of socialization, it was one in which Europeans were forced to adapt in order to claim a place in a political order that they could do little to alter.

This chapter focuses on the Dutch East India Company’s early share trading. The correspondence between Antoine l’Empereur, a silk trader, and his nephew who lived in Amsterdam, Jacques de Velaer Jr., paints a clear picture of the perceptions of share dealers during the period. Despite the very limited supply of information about the Company’s activities, there were investors like l’Empereur who wanted to own shares. This was because shareholders expected the Company to pay big dividends. In August 1609, the Company announced its first dividend payment. How long did l’Empereur hold on to his share? He must have sold it at some time between 1612 and 1628.

Drawing on company inventories and request lists, this chapter delves into the relatively mundane objects that English and Dutch merchants imported from Bombay and Batavia, but also London and Amsterdam, for their daily use. Certain items, such as imported scales, basic writing materials, and the company seal, were essential for their trade, whereas others, such as food, drink, and raised furniture, were key to preserving European lifestyles far from home. When considered along with the cargo that was transported to be sold at port, these objects were far more than utilitarian goods. They allow us to reflect on the dynamic and multifaceted character of the import, which was not only intended for the purposes of exchange, but also to sustain the very structure of the overseas trade enterprise.

The earliest recorded reference to ownership in South African law occurs just five years or so after the servants of the Dutch East India Company waded ashore in Table Bay on 9 April 1652 to found a European settlement at the Cape of Good Hope. In the journal kept by the commander of the settlement it is noted on 21 February 1657 that grants of land are to be made to certain men ‘in vollen eygendom’. Thereafter, title deeds were issued. This chapter discusses the historical development of eygendom in South African law.

A little known group in the universal history of forced migration comprises men and women from the Indonesian archipelago who were taken as slave laborers to the Dutch East India Company settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in the eighteenth century. My study is based on examination of inventories in Cape archives that list in great detail the possessions of deceased European slaveholders and of Indonesians who had achieved manumission. The key elements of the inventory - names and possessions - provide a research methodology for discovering a surprising amount and range of data. Names give us the individual, the individual's connections to others and relationship to society. Possessions reveal how a life was lived. The inventories demonstrate that in new environments Indonesians developed skills, launched small businesses, formed families, and acted to improve the social and economic standing of their children.

Southeast Asia was linked to the Ottoman Empire by economic ties, in particular the spice trade, but the nature of this relationship is poorly understood, especially for the seventeenth century. Its study is hampered by the lack of archival evidence, and this chapter draws on a variety of sources, both literary and archival, to investigate Southeast Asian exports to the Ottoman lands. It argues, in contrast to much existing scholarship, that direct commercial links remained important throughout the period, and that European traders such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC) remained largely excluded from this trade till the end of the seventeenth century. Ottoman exports to Southeast Asia, predominantly textiles and horses, are also examined. The chapter also considers the role of Ottoman subjects who sought to make their fortunes in Southeast Asia.

This chapter discusses the European claims to sovereignty over territories in Asia. The conflict over the bay of Tayouan provides a rare case example of a clash played out between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise over rights to a nonaligned space. The result was yet more frustration for the Dutch East India Company, which discovered that carefully constructed arguments about legal rights yielded no benefit when deployed before Bakufu officials who shared none of the same assumptions. As these points suggests, the conflict over Tayouan can best be understood as a clash between two world orders. On the one side was a distinctively European model of direct sovereignty over colonial possessions, and on the other was a hierarchical model of foreign relations organized around the voluntary submission of tribute and justified in those terms.