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‘Inhabitants of the universe’: global families, kinship networks, and the formation of the early modern colonial state in Asia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

David Veevers
David Veevers*
Affiliation:
School of History, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NX, UK E-mail: dv54@kent.ac.uk
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Abstract

New research on the early modern colonial state in Asia has emphasized the agency of actors and their networks in a process of state formation, while the rise of global history has similarly highlighted the importance of global connections in forming sites of empire. This article seeks to contribute to this growing literature. It does so by revealing that the families of English East India Company servants, following their counterparts in other European East India companies in Asia, underwent a global transition in which they established Asian-wide networks of kinship, transcending the local and regional spaces in which they had previously operated. Through their increasing ability to operate across the social, cultural, economic, and political borders of Asia, Company kinship networks facilitated the formation of a politically amorphous colonial state. Furthermore, while previous scholarship has confined colonial state formation to the later eighteenth century, this article challenges the historiography by relocating this process to the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Keywords

agencyEast India Companyfamilynetworksstate formation
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 99 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Pratik Chakrabarti and Will Pettigrew for their support, encouragement, and guidance. I also thank the editors for their invaluable comments and utmost professionalism, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for the expert and generous feedback they provided on the draft of this article. Finally, I would like to thank seminar audiences at the Colonial/Postcolonial New Researchers’ Workshop at the Institute of Historical Research and in the School of History at the University of Kent, all of whom provided insightful comments during the preparation of the article.

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152 Ibid.

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