History

This book rethinks the nature of the early English East India Company as a form of polity and corporate sovereign well before its supposed transformation into a state and empire in the mid-eighteenth century. It explores the Company’s political and legal constitution as an overseas corporation and the political institutions and behaviors that followed from it, from tax collection and public health to war-making and colonial plantation. This book also traces the ideological foundations of those institutions and behaviors, revealing how Company leadership wrestled with typically early modern problems of governance, authority, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. the book thus reframes some of the most fundamental narratives in the history of the British Empire, questioning traditional distinctions between public and private bodies, “commercial” and “imperial” eras in British India, a colonial Atlantic and a “trading world” of Asia, European and Asian political cultures, and the English and their European rivals in the East Indies. At its core, the book offers a view of early modern Europe and Asia, and especially the colonial world that connected them, as resting in composite, diffuse, hybrid, and overlapping notions of sovereignty that only later gave way to more modern singular, centralized, and territorially- and nationally-bounded definitions of political community. Given growing questions about the fate of the nation-state and of national borders in an age of globalization, this study offers a perspective on the vitality of non-state and corporate political power perhaps as relevant today as it was in the seventeenth century.

This book shows that from the moment European expansion commenced through to the 19th century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. Colonisation was countered not only by force but also by ideas. Indigenous peoples made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law which applies between peoples: that is, a kind of law of nations which was comparable to that being developed by Europeans. Confronted by indigenous claims, Europeans were forced to make rival claims. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonisation is, of course, well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. In the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonisation should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim. Indigenous claims show that a dialogue was being held between colonisers and colonised which can only be restored by staging all the participants and showing how they dealt with and reacted to each other. By enlightening the history of indigenous legal opposition to dispossession from the beginning of colonisation, this book will provide the general community with a means of engaging with the political challenges and responses posed by legal conflicts with indigenous peoples over the question of land.

This book applies a patron-client model to case studies of imperial over-rule to examine the political relationships between administrative and indigenous hierarchies derived from existing social structures and surviving into the period of decolonization. It goes beyond classification of administration as ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’, and rejects the notion that imperial rule was simply maintained by threat of force. From the range of cases presented it is argued that there was a continuity between pre-colonial regimes and succeeding European hierarchies that incorporated indigenous leaders. There are common themes in the initial dependency of European agencies (evangelical, commercial, official) on the patronage of indigenous rulers in states and reversal of this status at the onset of colonial rule. Remarkably few indigenous governments disappeared; and most subordinated leaders accommodated willingly or unwillingly within a new hierarchy deficient in resources and administrative personnel. In short, Europeans became imperial patrons and brokers between a distant metropolis and local systems of government in ways that were symbiotic, rather than hegemonic, subject to compromise beneath the rhetoric of colonial policies.

This book traces the evolution of religious attitudes in this important transitional period in Russian history. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Russia saw the gradual decline of monastic spirituality, the rise of miracle cults, and ultimately the birth of a more personal and private faith that stressed morality instead of public rituals. The book not only skillfully reconstructs these rapid and fundamental changes in the Russian religious experience, but also shows how they were influenced by Western European religious ideas and how they foreshadowed the secularization of Russian society usually credited to Peter the Great.

This book presents the first broad intellectual response by labor and working-class historians to the larger transnational turn in historical studies. Drawing on an international conference of U.S., Canadian, Latin American, and Caribbean scholars, the book brings together emerging studies on workers, the state, and international labor activism and institutions. Fourteen chapters, each transnational in scope, address themes of indigenous peoples and labor systems, labor and empire, international feminism and reproductive labor, labor recruitment and immigration control, transnational labor politics, and labor internationalism. In addition, five chapters lead off the volume with critical commentaries on the very project of transnational labor history.