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The chapter explores how trading companies relied on global networks to ply their trade and secure the position far from British shores. The companies constituted a very fertile and durable global space for exchange and dissemination of commodities, information and ideas over large distances. To successfully do this, the forming and strengthening of networks with other numerous agents, companies, and English trading companies with knowledge of long distance extra-European trade became increasingly important. Between 1550–1750 new connections were formed to answer the changing political and commercial realities globally and domestically. England developed from a peripheral power in Europe to a country at the centre of a global commercial imperial web. Corporate interests spanned from America and the Caribbean to South-East Asia and from Russia to southern Africa. The early modern corporations were created by networks and would come to facilitate a space globally where new networks were formed and, in time, strengthen the corporations.

This article traces the strategies that women deployed, and the resources upon which they drew, in order to challenge the East India Company (EIC) and ultimately lay claim to property that they believed was rightfully theirs. It focuses on three women, Elizabeth Dale, Rebecka Duteil and Mary Goodal, who navigated the EIC, parliament and the courts in seventeenth-century London to try to secure their inheritance from husbands and siblings. It offers a fresh perspective on early modern women's public lives by focusing on a wide array of agentic strategies that women employed in their encounters with various institutions. Using a range of sources, including company records, petitions, court depositions and wills, it argues that exploring women's interactions with the EIC, especially in their role as adversaries, enriches understandings of women's agency in early modern England. This article suggests that such a lens can further nuance how we understand the inherent tensions of early modern women's public lives: as inflected by global as well as local contexts and shaped by conflict as well as collaboration.

AbstractFocusing on the shipping sector, this article discusses the influence of labour migrants from rural areas on economic development in Copenhagen and Stockholm during the long eighteenth century. During this period, the two cities developed in markedly different ways; Copenhagen flourished while Stockholm stagnated, and the qualitative and quantitative contribution of migrants was essential in facilitating these differences. Both capitals were maritime hubs that relied on a constant influx of mariners who originated from the two cities' rural hinterlands. By examining different characteristics of the migrant mariners and the improvements of mariners' human capital across the eighteenth century, this article emphasises the importance of the shipping sector as well as labour migration in the socio-economic development of Copenhagen and Stockholm.

Trading companies and travel writing: an introduction / Aske Laursen Brock, Guido van Meersbergen and Edmond Smith -- Part One. Managing information -- Mapping travel knowledge: the use of maps on the first Dutch voyages to Asia / Djoeke van Netten -- Writing that travels: the Dutch East India company's paper-based information management / Guido van Meersbergen and Frank Birkenholz -- Written reports and the promotion of trans-oceanic trade in Tuscany and Genoa in the seventeenth century / Giorgio Tosco -- Information and encounter in England's North American colonies, 1585-1650 / Edmond Smith -- Part two: multiple actors and perspectives -- William Hawkins in the Mughal Court, 1608-1611: cultural, social, and affective boundary-crossings / Jyotsna Singh -- Writing the macabre: travel, taxation and the Bengal famine of 1770 / Amrita Sen -- Reading marginalised, non-European agency in EIC-Nepalese encounters: the expeditions of William Kirkpatrick, 1793, and Maulvi Abdul Kadir Khan, 1795 / Sam Ellis -- Part three: company lives -- For which company? Guy Tachard S.J.'s unpublished relation de voyage aux indes,1690-99 / Stefan Halikowski Smith -- 'Passages recollected from memory': remembering the levant company in seventeenth-century merchants' life writing / Eva Johanna Holmberg -- 'Blackened and whispered away my reputation': fashioning a reputation in the late seventeenth-century levant company / Aske Laursen Brock -- 'Unburying' company history: reconstructing European company narratives through digital cemetery archives / Souvik Mukherje.