Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500-1800 explores trans-imperial ‘networks of exchange’ that ‘transcended the borders imposed by empires, forced the frontiers negotiated between polities and fostered a cross-cultural, multi-religious and trans-national world’ (2). The contributions here build on the historiography of early globalization and ‘connected histories’ pioneered by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Michael N. Pearson, and James Tracy. The editors, Cátia A.P. Antunes and Amelia Polónia, and many of the contributors share methodological approaches drawn from the DynCoopNet research project sponsored by the European Science Foundation. The book presents new research on ‘cooperation-based, self-organizing networks’ that transcended frontiers and borders in the early modern world (4-6). These networks and state-supported monopolies together constructed informal empires.
Beyond Empires examines global trading networks across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Early modern mercantile companies such as the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC or Dutch East India Company), English East India Company (EIC), and the Dutch West India Company (WIC), naturally figure prominently in many chapters. Guido van Meersbergen interprets EIC and VOC traders’ distrust of Gujarati merchants, customs house officials, and town governors in the Mughal Empire. English and Dutch merchants often expressed cultural stereotypes that ascribed untrustworthiness to all Muslims, even before they arrived in Surat to trade. EIC and VOC merchants seem to have been especially suspicious of local brokers who facilitated cross-cultural interactions and trade negotiations.
Smaller mercantile companies—including the Danish Asiatic Company (DAC), Middleburg Commercial Company (MCC), Royal African Company of England (RAC), and the Swedish East India Company (SEIC)—are also analysed. For example, Leos Müller studies the SEIC, a small mercantile company (composed largely of Swedish, Scottish, and Flemish agents) that nonetheless managed to capture 15 percent of the Canton tea trade in the late eighteenth century. The evidence from small mercantile companies helps to realize the book’s aim of ‘decentralizing the history of empire’ (11).
Individuals and families often conducted their own commerce outside of the official structures of mercantile companies. Ana Crespo Solana focuses on the identities of mercantile ‘nations’ in port cities within the early modern Spanish Empire. Solana concentrates on the Flemish ‘nation’ in Cadiz and the Spanish ‘nation’ in Bruges, considering the relationships between privileges and ‘diasporic consciousness’ (172). Merchant families represented integral parts of the Carrera de Indias, as shown by mapping kinship networks. Ana Sofia Ribeiro examines the network of merchant-banker Simon Ruiz, an important creditor for Philip II of Spain, using his company’s bills of exchange and commercial correspondence. She finds that the network relied on merchant relationships that were based on reputation and trust (rather than kinship ties) and managed through expulsions for cheating.
Private entrepreneurs played a vital role in early modern global commerce, operating through trans-imperial networks on an impressive scale. Filipa Ribeiro da Silva probes private companies’ involvement in the slave trade, finding that state-sponsored companies accounted for a mere 6 percent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—allowing private companies to dominate the slave trade through their informal cross-cultural business networks. Chris Nierstrasz examines the private entrepreneurship in commodities such as tea in ostensibly monopolistic trade companies, focusing particularly on the role of silver and credit mechanisms in financing global commerce by the VOC and EIC. He finds that ‘the caricature of East India Companies as monopolistic is hard to maintain’, since private trade goods flowed freely (194). VOC officials had ‘personal use’ privileges to import products from across Asia into Batavia, for example. Nierstrasz finds that Company officers initially profited from conquest and plunder, but gradually shifted to a strategy of amassing private fortunes through gifts and bribes.
Private entrepreneurs could easily engage in illegal commerce, smuggling, and piracy. Jurre Knoest studies illicit trade and smuggling networks in Nagasaki, employing the Nagasaki Criminal Records to document smuggling activity. An analysis of 194 criminal cases of smuggling between 1666 and 1742 reveals that most prosecutions targeted illicit trade with Chinese or Japanese individuals. Knoest focuses especially on two famous cases of smuggling involving illegal weapons trading and official complicity, demonstrating the limits of the Tokugawa bakufu’s control of foreign trade and the incomplete closure of Tokugawa Japan. Bram Hoonhout explores efforts by the Dutch WIC to stamp out smuggling by colonial planters, who imported slaves from foreign providers and exported sugar, coffee, and cotton to external markets.
Maritime and colonial warfare shaped the commercial and trading networks of the early modern world. Michael Kempe follows groups of buccaneers on the ‘pirate round’ of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Ship captains and crews forged cross-imperial connections in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, often blurring legitimate privateering and illegal piracy activities. Silva Marzagalli argues that warfare frequently disrupted the principles of trading exclusivity and monopolistic controls in the Atlantic World. She focuses especially on the reorganization of French trading patterns in the Caribbean during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815) when the Haitian Revolution and British occupations forced French colonists to alter their trading patterns with French ports and to construct new commercial relationships with ports in the Caribbean and the United States.
The historiographical approaches employed in the book raise some methodological and definitional questions. The contributors sometimes deploy rather loose definitions of families, social groups, and economic organizations. The conceptions of networks blur distinctions between kinship ties, epistolary connections, information networks, shipping lanes, and economic relationships. The informal associations between merchants may encompass unique encounters, incidental connections, or sustained cross-cultural interactions.
Beyond Empires succeeds in constructing a history of unofficial global networks and informal commercial activities in the early modern period. Cátia A.P. Antunes and Amelia Polónia argue that ‘this informal empire that was brought to fruition by the individual choices of free agents and their networks as a reaction to state-imposed monopolies was … a borderless, self-organized, often cross-cultural, multi-ethnic, pluri-national and stateless world that can only be characterized as global’ (10). This collective volume offers fresh evidence on private entrepreneurs, merchant families, and mercantile companies—exposing the ways in which they practiced commerce in the early modern world.
