Historical and Social Scientific Methods Sample Clauses

Historical and Social Scientific Methods. While historians have primarily examined the companies as economic institutions, and a few have focused on the EIC and VOC as political institutions, this dissertation examines the ways in which the companies fashioned a supranational political economy for the East Indies trade: an intellectual and institutional construction that blended together issues of law, finance, commerce, politics, and governance. Uniting the companies’ internal and public records, as well as the records of European states and of individuals, the dissertation traces the debates and terms of these issues. It advances an understanding of how a mutual focus drove the EIC and VOC, and how the products of this relationship—ideologies, arguments, and policies—powerfully impacted the English and Dutch state governments and the crystalizing international community of Europe. In order to assess these documents and to form and advance its arguments, this dissertation brings together a range of methodologies from intellectual, political, and economic history, as well as from political science and organizational studies. Using the concept of political economy to interpret the relationship between the EIC and VOC, the dissertation draws from several key approaches in intellectual history. Contemporaries and historians alike have identified this period as the cradle of a new kind of science: political economy. French political theorist ▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇-▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ first coined the term to describe the responsibilities of a sovereign to his citizens.66 In his 1776 Wealth of Nations, ▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇ established the term’s enduring definition: “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services.”67 While ▇▇▇▇▇ summarized the objectives of political theorists and sovereigns during the seventeenth century, this dissertation argues that, responding to political and commercial exigencies in Europe and in Asia, the leaders of the two East India companies leveraged their shared operational networks and strategic challenges to craft a political economy of their own. Tailored to the imperatives of their entwined supranational structures, a common programmatic and intellectual system linked the two organizations for nearly half a...