Abstract:Imperial and world history have revealed how chartered companies led early modern European colonial and commercial expansion, and have demonstrated the critical role of go-betweens, permeable borders, and transnational networks in shaping these processes. Despite these insights, the scholarship largely continues to treat such companies as coherent, self-contained, and primarily national institutions. This special issue explores the ways in which these overseas companies were in fact constituted by people, ideas, capital, and goods that cut across both national and institutional boundaries. It examines both the ways more famous concerns, such as the Dutch and English East India Companies, as well as a range of lesser-studied European overseas companies were defined by such transnational networks. Applying the approaches of world history to the constitution of overseas European companies in turn reveals how early modern world history came to define “Europe” itself in the early modern period.

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简介：穿越公司

摘要：帝国和世界历史揭示了特许公司如何领导现代早期的欧洲殖民和商业扩张，并证明了中间人、可渗透的边界和跨国网络在塑造这些过程中的关键作用。尽管有这些见解，奖学金在很大程度上继续将这些公司视为连贯的、自给自足的、主要是国家机构。本期特刊探讨了这些海外公司实际上是如何由跨越国家和机构边界的人员、思想、资本和商品构成的。它考察了更著名的问题，例如荷兰和英国的东印度公司，以及一系列研究较少的欧洲海外公司是如何被此类跨国网络定义的。