Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This article examines the role of gift exchanges in political relations between the East India Company and the Mughal imperial administration. Focusing on the period 1670–1720, it discusses the items selected for presentation, the occasions at which they changed hands, and the hierarchical relationships expressed and acknowledged through these transactions. It argues that in exchanges both with the central court and with provincial authorities, transfers of valuables in cash and kind between English and Indian actors were embedded in a wider imperial discourse regarding sovereignty and service. By acknowledging the continuum running from courtly engagements to everyday political interactions at local sites of power, a notion of Company diplomacy comes into view that straddled the boundaries between inter-polity relations and intra-imperial solicitation. As such, the case study invites us to rethink our notion of diplomacy as it pertained to relations between the English Company and Mughal state.

Abstract
Gifts and tribute have become a mainstay of scholarship on early modern diplomacy, particularly in studies of intercultural contacts. While New Diplomatic History has shown that a much wider and more global range of actors participated in shaping diplomatic contacts than was traditionally assumed, we still remain some distance removed from a truly global account of the interactive development of diplomatic norms and practices. This introduction situates the contributions in the special issue on "Gifts and Tribute in Early Modern Diplomacy: Afro-Eurasian Perspectives" within a survey of recent literature. It suggests that future scholarship on early modern diplomacy ought to focus on the ways in which global entanglements affected the structures, norms, and practices of inter-polity relations on a global scale. To achieve such an integrated account, future research will need to draw on an expanded range of voices, languages, concepts, and sources, as well as more concerted scholarly collaborations.

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.