Networks of empire : forced migration in the Dutch East India Company /Kerry Ward.

"Kerry Ward argues that the Dutch East India Company empire manifested itself through multiple networks that amalgamated spatially and over time into an imperial web whose sovereignty was effectively created and maintained but always partial and contingent. Networks of Empire proposes that early modern empires consisted of durable networks of trade, administration, settlement, legality, and migration whose regional circuits and territorially and institutionally based nodes of regulatory power operated not only on land and sea but discursively as well." "By closely examining the Dutch East India Company's network of forced migration, this book explains how empires are constituted through the creation, management, contestation, devolution, and reconstruction of these multiple and intersecting fields of partial sovereignty."--Jacket.