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"In the century following Elizabeth I's rise to the throne, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants launched ventures across the globe. Through the efforts of these "mere merchants," England developed from a peripheral power on the fringes of Europe to a country at the center of a global commercial web, with interests stretching from Virginia to Ahmadabad and Arkhangelsk to Benin.0Edmond Smith traces the lives of English merchants from their earliest steps into business to the heights of their successes. Smith unpicks their behavior, relationships, and experiences, from exporting wool to Russia, importing exotic luxuries from India, and building plantations in America. He reveals that the origins of "global" Britain are found in the stories of these men whose livelihoods depended on their skills, entrepreneurship, and ability to work together to compete in cutthroat international markets. As a community, their efforts would come to revolutionize Britain's relationship with the world."

Africa has often been seen as a barrier between oceanic systems, and a dividing line within English imperial activity – with colonialism a key strategy to the west and trading favoured to the east of the continent. This article will consider English plans for colonisation on the islands of Madagascar and Assada on the east African coast and question how these can help us understand how the English thought about Africa as a geographical and imagined space within England's developing imperial activities. This, in turn, will support an argument that English activities overseas operated within an environment where information was carefully controlled, created and disseminated to support the aims of the commercial community.

"This volume publishes for the first time, the journal kept by John Looker (?1670-1715) recording his service as ship's surgeon on the Blackham Galley, a London-built merchantman on its second trading voyage to the Levant, between December 1696 and March 1698. Preserved in the Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum, Looker's 'Journall' describes his experiences on the voyage from the point at which he joined the ship at Gravesend, to March 1698, when the journal breaks off abruptly in mid-sentence when the ship was off the Kentish 'Narrows'. John Looker was a Londoner, brought up in one of the parishes to the east of the City which furnished large numbers of mariners to the English sea-borne trades. He served an apprenticeship to a London barber-surgeon, and became a Freeman of the Company of Barber-Surgeons. His fifteen months of service on board the Blackham Galley appears to have been his only employment at sea, but his ready knowledge of maritime ways and language, which are apparent from the first pages of his 'Journall', make it more than likely that he came from a seafaring family. Subsequent to his voyage, he married, raised a family, practiced in London as a surgeon, and acquired land in East Anglia. He died at Bath in 1715. Looker's 'Journall' divides naturally into three parts. The Blackham Galley's outward and homeward voyages were largely without incident. The time spent by the Blackham Galley in Turkish waters, covers its voyage from Smyrna to Constantinople, where the ship stayed for a month, and then returned to Smyrna. Captain Newnam's ill-advised and disastrous attempt at privateering in Ottoman waters on the return journey to Smyrna, led to the detention of his vessel at Smyrna under a double interdict from the English ambassador at the Porte and from the Ottoman authorities. Looker's account of the Blackham Galley's enforced stay in Smyrna furnishes a vigorous and detailed account of social life in the international merchant community, as well as portside life seen 'from below', with its taverns and prostitutes, and the activities and frequent 'debauches' of an increasingly bored and fractious crew. Looker's record also provides interesting detail of his professional approach to treatment of the illnesses, accidents and occasional deaths of members of the company of his own and other ships anchored off Smyrna"--

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.