In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new patterns of knowledge, credit, and capital were created by global expansion. These, in turn, created new opportunities for groups of people who previously had little access to global trade. These individuals—women as well as men—increasingly engaged in commercial transactions, some of them relatively autonomous, others challenged and hindered by various forms of institutional control and constraint. Emphasising the intimate nature of networks means examining the quality rather than the quantity of certain networks, which ultimately facilitates a shift away from well-known historical agents such as influential merchants, powerful politicians, and various nobility and royals. The Gender, Intimate Networks, and Global Commerce in the Early Modern Period forum seeks to add to our knowledge of the diverse ways that intimate economic networks developed in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, in Europe as well as en route elsewhere, among the well-off as well as the relatively poor, and among free people as well as the enslaved.

This article explores how women in England, using a range of economic and legal tools and methods, managed wealth and property in Barbados during the seventeenth century. Being distant from the colony had implications for how English women managed their property in Barbados, as direct oversight was impossible. Instead, women were forced to broker arrangements with overseers and agents who could act on their behalf. We can make sense of how they established these connections through the lens of women's intimate networks, as they appointed trusted friends, family, and associates to manage their affairs. Women's intimate networks are a lens through which we can explain not just how women acquired property, but also their continued investment in plantation economies and slavery during the first decades of English colonisation in Barbados.

This contribution to the forum Gender, Intimate Networks, and Global Commerce in the Early Modern Period follows the career of a single late seventeenth-century English East India Company ship and her crew, in order to challenge the claim that long-haul ships were isolated spaces. Specifically, it looks at the many kinds of connections —intimate and otherwise—that characterised early modern ships and their crews. These included connections between and among sailors themselves, between ships at sea, and between ships’ crews and the diverse communities from which they came.

“Catherine Nicks's Intimate Economy” introduces an intimate network that spanned Europe and Asia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, underlining how women created opportunities for themselves and their extended network. Using the case study of Catherine Nicks, the article examines how a trading company's network, in spite of the company's desire for impermeable monopolies, lent itself to women and others who could form durable intimate networks underneath the larger corporate umbrella for personal and familial economic gains. It questions how the early modern maritime and global economy worked while also examining the nature of company monopolies.

This article deals with the practice of buying wedding jewellery and furniture for a new home during mercantile marriage initiation in the eighteenth century. At the centre of the paper is the act of marriage initiation between the Hamburg burgher's daughter Ilsabe Engelhardt and wholesale merchant Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens, who travelled France in the two years preceding his marriage. Luetkens postponed the marriage several times in order to finish business in France. As a compensation, Ilsabe Engelhardt instructed him to buy precious jewellery and valuable furniture. In order to comply with her requests, and to do so as quietly as possible, Luetkens had to mobilise their intimate network of close confidants in London and Amsterdam, who helped him to purchase the precious items.

This article looks at the specific early modern trade practice of the pacotille and at pacotille commercial networks, particularly of free women of colour, as a means of approaching female trade knowledge and intimate networks in the ancien régime Caribbean colonies. Surviving documentation of this flexible commerce allows us to approach women of highly different backgrounds as knowledgeable and skilled agents within the socioeconomic framework of eighteenth-century global trade, who combined their knowledge of the male-dominated trading spheres with their own intimate networks in highly profitable ways. This essay explores not only what these women knew about long-distance trade, but also how they used their local expertise (e.g., of time regimes, landscape, and people) as well as their intimate networks for personal gain in the eighteenth-century French colonial worlds.

The article sheds new light on colonial encounters in eighteenth-century Luzon by viewing them through the lens of mobility. Historical actors—both Spaniards and indigenes—created and sustained ties with each other through reciprocal visits punctuated by feasts. Encounters were not singular events but rather pertained to a series of multiple mobilities and multisited celebrations. The very act of travelling transformed the visitors’ identities, which became ever more entangled with their hosts’. In the colonial context, encounters did not involve a simple unilateral or unidirectional penetration and conquest of the island's interior on the part of Spanish missionaries and officials. They were embedded in a combination of Spanish and indigenous practices of reciprocal mobilities.

The kingdoms of Kandy (now Sri Lanka) and Ayutthaya (now Thailand) were briefly connected across Indian Ocean waters in the mid-eighteenth century by Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC) traders, leading to the importation of valuable Siamese Buddhist monks and their ordination lineage to the island. Two series of events related to the VOC's search for and delivery of these monks demonstrate that the patronage of connected religious dynamics—not just the contingencies of trade, land, labour, and statecraft—was an essential aspect of Company business. At the same time, mediating Buddhist connection was a dangerous, sometimes perilous undertaking. Analysing VOC records alongside Laṅkān and Siamese historical chronicles and travelogues reveals that what were initially friendly connections at first necessitated, and later intensified certain forms of danger. We begin with perilous shipwrecks and diplomatic impasses across monsoon waters that eventually led to the restoration of an important but defunct Kandyan Buddhist ordination lineage, and conclude with the aftermath of a failed assassination attempt in 1760 against the royal patron of that lineage transmission. I advance the notion of “dangerous friendships” to characterise how Buddhist courts and European traders worked together to first generate, and then exploit, friendly religious connections.

This article posits that friendship has been a particularly fertile and creative category against the backdrop of imperial expansion and consolidation in the Himalayas. As a small but strategically perceived sovereign Himalayan country, Bhutan's history through the last centuries has been marked simultaneously by imperial and post-colonial asymmetries of power. The term “friendship” is deployed as a key diplomatic category in Bhutan's most significant relationship, that with its much larger neighbour India. However, the origin of this friendship is always traced back to the mid-twentieth-century post-colonial period. In contradistinction to this, I constellate a much longer history of this friendship with a special focus on the landmark 1910 Treaty of Punakha between Bhutan and Britain, which was a key turning point in Bhutan's relations with its southern neighbour (British India at the time). Scholars typically state as a matter of fact that in the year 1910, with the initiative of Political Officer Charles Bell, a treaty was signed between Britain and Bhutan that placed Bhutan's external relations under the guidance of Britain. This present work is situated within the oeuvre of critically rereading imperial sources and evaluating their historical legacies, and is the first detailed scholarly analysis of why this treaty was significant and how it came to be signed. I identify the factors that were at work in how and why the 1910 friendship treaty was realised for imperial British purposes—the interpersonal friendships fostered by the British Political Officers; the threat of China as an Other; and the representation of material and ideational advantages from associating with an imperial power. In making this argument, I analyse the role played by the vocabulary of friendship and draw upon primary archival sources to illustrate the factors that were at work as well as the dissonance between the archival and public rationales provided by Political Officer Bell. The 1910 treaty was signed at a watershed moment after the then-recent installation of a monarchy in Bhutan in 1907, and against the great game backdrop of Qing activities in Tibet and British interests in the region; throughout the twentieth century, the impact of this friendship treaty was of paramount significance, and its shadow continues into the twenty-first century.

Chartered companies provided one solution for the problems posed by long-distance trade in the early modern world. Accordingly, these organisations have been studied exhaustively. Yet the field is by no means depleted, as the books reviewed here attest. These six books cover questions ranging from whether the chartered companies acted as real business organisations or rather as appendages of state power, the relations between companies and states, the institutional development of the corporate form, and the nature of some of these companies as “company-states.” In addition, two edited volumes deal with specific aspects of the chartered companies and with noncorporate forms of merchant organisation. The works raise new questions and engage in ongoing debates. The review also raises a number of issues which could be addressed in future research, including the dominance of the East India Companies in our understanding of the corporate form as a whole.

Historians working on slavery always must perform a balancing act between narrating the atrocities of oppression and the possibilities of resistance to and escape from it. The three books under review all do a wonderful job in showing us a way out of this conundrum. Jessica Johnson and Sophie White do so by analysing the intimate lives of enslaved women in early modern New Orleans and West Africa (Johnson) and enslaved women and men in Louisiana (White), while Stella Dadzie looks at the means of resistance taken by the enslaved in the British Atlantic world. Their work allows us to better understand the historical reality of slavery as it applied to at least 15 million people, while stressing the notion that the historical actors whose voices were recovered, were first of all humans, all of them different, and all of them, in their own way, able to deal with the horrors imposed on them – by being intimate with their peers, by running away, or by fighting their oppressors.