Read in the latest issue of the IJMH (November 2024) the Editorial by Cátia Antunes and Michiel van Groesen
Available in open access
https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241278882
The final issue of the Journal this year opens with a forum that emerges from a conference at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, organised in September 2023 by a team of scholars led by Richard W. Unger, on empires and economies in the early modern Indian Ocean world. After an introduction by Unger, the forum incorporates six research contributions, more or less in chronological order as per usual. The opening article, by Amélia Polónia, focusses on the agency of women as go-betweens and brokers in the Estado da Índia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and argues that women – Portuguese and autochtone alike – were very influential in the reconfiguration of colonial power relations. Archa Neelakandan Girija, writing on the cosmopolitan port of Calicut, reflects on the city’s position in oceanic trade in the seventeenth century. Richard Unger himself argues for the hybrid nature of ship construction in the age of colonialism, tracing the exchanges of knowledge, methods, designs and techniques between European and Asian shipbuilding traditions. The fourth contributor, David Eltis, examines the value of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org) he helped to set up and expand for research into Indian Ocean slavery. Margaret Schotte subsequently explores the practice of (not) documenting unfree labour by the French Compagnie des Indes in the eighteenth century. And finally, Noelle Richardson provides a close analysis of the Amfioensociëteit, the company established in 1745 to regulate the import and retail trade in opium under the wing of the Dutch East India Company.
IMHA 