Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World explores the multiple links between trade, empire, exploration, and global information transfer during the early modern period. By charting how the leaders, members, employees, and supporters of different trading companies gathered, processed, employed, protected, and divulged intelligence about foreign lands, peoples, and markets, the book throws new light on the internal uses of information by corporate actors and the ways they engaged with, relied on, and supplied various external publics. This ranged from using secret knowledge to beat competitors, to shaping debates about empire, and to forcing Europeans to reassess their understandings of specific environments due to contacts with non-European peoples. Reframing our understanding of trading companies through the lens of travel knowledge, this volume brings together thirteen experts in the field to facilitate a new understanding of how European corporations and empires were shaped by global webs of information exchange.
To celebrate the launch of this new volume, we were joined by the book’s contributors, the editors of the volume, Aske Laursen Brock, Guido van Meersbergen and Edmond Smith, and the series editors, Dan Carey and Joan-Pau Rubies. The launch event will feature comments from the President of the Hakluyt Society, Gloria Clifton, leading expert in the field, Claire Jowitt, and two of the book’s contributors, Jyotsna Singh and Amrita Sen.