TY - JOUR
T1 - Prussia all at sea? The Emden-based East India Companies and the challenges of transnational enterprise in the eighteenth century
AU - Gottmann, Felicia
N1 - Funding Information:
* Research for this article was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Early Career Research Fellowship 2014-396). I am very grateful to the Trust for their support and to Hanna Hodacs and Leos Müller for their helpful comments.
Funding Information:
Felicia Gottmann is Senior Lecturer in History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. She is the author of Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France 1680–1760 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and, with Maxine Berg et al. editor of Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). After completing her D.Phil at the University of Oxford and prior to joining Northumbria she held research fellowships at the Universities of Warwick and Dundee. Her work has been funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 by University of Hawai‘i Press.
PY - 2020/9/3
Y1 - 2020/9/3
N2 - Against the prevailing view of the smaller, “interloping” East India companies as either national instruments of imperial expansion or mere covers for foreign enterprise, this article demonstrates that they were genuinely transnational operations with strong links to the state. Such transnationalism made it possible for small Central and Eastern European enterprises to engage in early modern globalization processes alongside the larger chartered companies of Europe’s “Atlantic façade.” Focusing on Prussia’s Emden Companies, this article evaluates the challenges and opportunities of such a transnational institutional set-up. Using Flemish, German, British, French, and American archives it analyses the roles of state-intervention, international relations, selection and enforcement problems to demonstrate that the development of commercial capitalism was a transnational and transimperial phenomenon. It thus reinforces the argument that European economic and imperial expansions were not purely market-driven and national processes but transnational phenomena that relied on private transnational networks as much as on state and state-like institutions.
AB - Against the prevailing view of the smaller, “interloping” East India companies as either national instruments of imperial expansion or mere covers for foreign enterprise, this article demonstrates that they were genuinely transnational operations with strong links to the state. Such transnationalism made it possible for small Central and Eastern European enterprises to engage in early modern globalization processes alongside the larger chartered companies of Europe’s “Atlantic façade.” Focusing on Prussia’s Emden Companies, this article evaluates the challenges and opportunities of such a transnational institutional set-up. Using Flemish, German, British, French, and American archives it analyses the roles of state-intervention, international relations, selection and enforcement problems to demonstrate that the development of commercial capitalism was a transnational and transimperial phenomenon. It thus reinforces the argument that European economic and imperial expansions were not purely market-driven and national processes but transnational phenomena that relied on private transnational networks as much as on state and state-like institutions.
KW - Business history
KW - Capitalism
KW - East India Companies
KW - Emden
KW - Global history
KW - Prussia
KW - Transnational history
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85089935887&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1353/jwh.2020.0031
DO - 10.1353/jwh.2020.0031
M3 - Article
SN - 1045-6007
VL - 31
SP - 539
EP - 566
JO - Journal of World History
JF - Journal of World History
IS - 3
ER -