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Summary:

Through the histories of English trading companies - the Levant Company, the East India Company, and the Royal African Company - this book shows how non-European peoples in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Western India used their control over these companies to shape the emergence of English freedom.
This book offers a new account of the connections between seventeenth-century English history and the history of the rest of the world. Eschewing nationalist narratives, it demonstrates how greater engagement with the world beyond Europe shaped signature aspects of the English experience. Early modern trading corporations are the central actors in the story. The book offers a profoundly altered reading of the practices of these entities. The companies were not monolithic entities pursuing narrow nationalist interests overseas. Nor were they inefficient monopolies doomed to commercial failure. In the seventeenth century, as this book shows, they were driven and transformed by the immediate and local interests of company agents and their foreign networks. Because the trading companies were the most important bridge between international contexts and English legal and political debates, they connect non-European power and preference to those debates. These unappreciated actors within the corporate sphere play leading roles in this book as the shapers of English debate about the meaning of English freedom and the futures of the trades they participated in overseas. The book offers a new perspective on the foreign actors who shaped English commercial and legal ideas and practices in the seventeenth century, as well as the Ottoman, Bantenese, Huedan, Siamese, and Mughal contributions to the ideological, institutional, and procedural underpinnings that would develop, slowly but surely, into the British Empire.

Table of Contents:

• Intro
• Halftitle page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Maps
• 1. Introduction: Trading Corporations, Cross-Cultural Alliances in Global Settings, and the Meanings of English Freedom
• 2. Smyrna, Venice, and the Rise of Statute in Trade Regulation, 1619-1647
• 3. Abu al-Mafakhir Mahmud Abdulkadir, the Skinner brothers, and the Constitutional Right to Free Trade, 1650-1668
• 4. Prince Bibe of Ouidah and the Freeing of the English Slave Trade, 1679-1694
• 5. King Nrai of Siam and the Redefinition of English Subjecthood, 1678-1698
• 6. Itimad Khan and the Statute to Suppress Piracy, 1694-1700
• 7. Conclusion: Free to Dominate
• Bibliography
• Index.

Author/Creator:

Pettigrew, William A. (William Andrew), 1978- , author

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

Global trade and the shaping of English freedom [by Pettigrew, W.A.]

Subjects:

International trade — History — 17th century

Trading companies — Great Britain — History — 17th century

Great Britain — Commerce — History — 17th century

General Notes:

Also issued in print: 2023.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description based on: Online resource and publisher information; title from PDF title page (viewed on September 26, 2023).

Audience:

Specialized.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : maps (black and white)

Call Numbers:

HF3505.4 .P48 2023eb

ISBNs:

9780191881718 (electronic book)
0191881716 (electronic book)
9780192585912 (electronic book)
0192585916 (electronic book)
0192585924 (electronic book)
9780192585929 (electronic bk.)
9780198846710 (print) [Invalid]

OCLC Numbers:

1399536530