The Dutch and English East India Companies were formidable organisations that were gifted with expansive powers that allowed them to conduct diplomacy, raise armies and seize territorial possessions. But they did not move into an empty arena in which they were free to deploy these powers without resistance. Early modern Asia stood at the center of the global economy and was home to powerful states and sprawling commercial networks. The companies may have been global enterprises but they operated in a globalised region in which they encountered a range of formidable competitors who frequently outmaneuvered or outfought their representatives. This groundbreaking collection of essays explores the place of the Dutch and English East India Companies in Asia and the nature of their interactions with Asian rulers, officials, merchants, soldiers, and brokers. With contributions from the most innovative historians in the field, this book presents new ways to understand these organisations by focusing on their diplomatic, commercial, and military interactions with Asia.
is a scholar of the history of science and medicine based at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Readers of Itinerario probably know him best as the author of the monograph Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, published in 2007. The book investigates, among other things, the global dimension of scientific and medical knowledge-production in the seventeenth century. His most recent study, on the early life of Descartes, was published only a couple of weeks before we conducted this interview. It shifts the focus back to the history of Europe, with travel central to Descartes' development. We met with Professor Cook on an unseasonably warm day in June at Museum Boerhaave, the Dutch national museum for the history of science and medicine in Leiden, where we discovered that his work had also been consulted in the context of the redesign of the museum's permanent exhibition about science and medicine in the Dutch Golden Age. We looked at some of the objects and books that were a source of inspiration when he wrote Matters of Exchange, and learned that part of his fascination for medicine in the Dutch Republic started in the museum library as he was leafing through the pamphlets about medicine kept there. But our conversation also brought us to the American Civil War, Mensheviks in Ann Arbor, Rhode Island traders in a painting from Surinam, and American accounting methods. Why and how did you decide to become a historian? When I was coming into my teenage years in the 1960s, there was an anniversary of the American Civil War, and my father gave me a birthday gift of a book on the war from
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