Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World

Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World explores the links between trade empire exploration and global information transfer during the early modern period. By charting how the leaders members employees and supporters of different trading companies gathered processed employed protected and divulged intelligence about foreign lands peoples and markets this book throws new light on the internal uses of information by corporate actors and the ways they engaged with relied on and supplied various external publics. This ranged from using secret knowledge to beat competitors to shaping debates about empire and to forcing Europeans to reassess their understandings of specific environments due to contacts with non-European peoples. Reframing our understanding of trading companies through the lens of travel literature this volume brings together thirteen experts in the field to facilitate a new understanding of how European corporations and empires were shaped by global webs of information exchange