
Networks of Empire
Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company
Kerry Ward(Author)
Cambridge University Press
Published on 1. December 2008
Book
Hardback
356 pages
978-0-521-88586-7 (ISBN)
Description
This book argues that the Dutch East India Company empire manifested itself through multiple networks that amalgamated spatially and over time into an imperial web whose sovereignty was effectively created and maintained but always partial and contingent. Networks of Empire proposes that early modern empires were comprised of durable networks of trade, administration, settlement, legality, and migration whose regional circuits and territorially and institutionally based nodes of regulatory power operated not only on land and sea but discursively as well. Rights of sovereignty were granted to the company by the States General in the United Provinces. Company directors in Europe administered the exercise of sovereignty by company servants in its chartered domain. The empire developed in dynamic response to challenges waged by individuals and other sovereign entities operating within the Indian Ocean grid. By closely examining the Dutch East India Company's network of forced migration this book explains how empires are constituted through the creation, management, contestation, devolution and reconstruction of these multiple and intersecting fields of partial sovereignty.
Reviews / Votes
'... Ward's intriguing and suggestive detail will be a revelation for historians of South Africa.' Journal of African HistoryMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Paper over boards
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 26 mm
Weight
734 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-521-88586-7 (9780521885867)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Book
02/2012
Cambridge University Press
€46.80
Shipment within 15-20 days

E-Book
01/2009
1st Edition
Cambridge University Press
€30.99
Available for download
Person
Dr Kerry Ward is currently Assistant Professor of World History at Rice University. She has a PhD from the University of Michigan, an MA from the University of Cape Town, and a BA from the University of Adelaide. She has published in the fields of comparative slavery and forced migration, comparative imperialism and colonialism, Indian Ocean history, South African and Southeast Asian history, historical memory, and public history in South Africa.
Content
1. Networks of empire and the imperial diaspora; 2. The company's imperial legal realm and forced migration; 3. Crime and punishment in mid-eighteenth century Batavia; 4. The Cape cauldron: tales of a trans-oceanic past; 5. Cross-circuits in the Indian Ocean: the VOC and Dar al Islam; 6. Social webs at the Cape of Good Hope; 7. Disintegrating imperial networks.