Academic Profile

2019-present: Assistant Professor in Early Modern Global History, University of Warwick

I am a historian of early modern global encounters whose research focuses on cross-cultural trade and diplomacy in the Indian Ocean world, with a particular interest in the activities of the European East India Companies in the Mughal Empire. My first monograph, provisionally entitled Corporate Ethnography and Cultural Encounter: The Dutch and English East India Companies in South Asia (1600-1720), will map the role of ethnographic ideas and assumptions in the management and operations of the Dutch and English East India Companies (VOC and EIC). Focusing on encounters in different parts of India and Sri Lanka in the realms of commerce, diplomacy, and colonial governance, it analyses the intricate ways in which corporate writing cultures and early modern ethnography both reflected and drove the Companies’ engagement in cross-cultural contacts. In addition to preparing my book for publication, I am currently co-editing a volume of essays entitled Trading Companies and Travel Writing, 16th-19th centuries, as well as a special issue on the role of diplomatic gift-giving and tribute relations in early modern Afro-Eurasia for the journal Diplomatica. With colleagues at UT Austin, Monash, and McGill, I also coordinate an international collaborative project on the embassy of Sir William Norris to Mughal India (1699-1702), which aims to result in a scholarly edition of Norris' embassy diaries.

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My ongoing research, started as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2016-2019), draws on approaches from diplomatic history, cultural history, and global history to reconsider the place of European actors within the diplomatic world of early modern South Asia. It investigates how early modern European and South Asian diplomatic actors interacted at different South Asian courts, forged diplomatic relationships, and mediated cultural difference. It questions established Europe-centred narratives of the rise of early modern diplomacy by highlighting the significance of Asian actors and polities in this wider development. The research aims to result in a comparative monograph on European diplomatic practices in early modern South Asia. For a fuller description of the project and its activities, see 'Cross-Cultural Diplomacy Compared: European Diplomats in South Asia'.

• 'The Diplomatic Repertoires of the East India Companies in Mughal South Asia, 1608-1717', The Historical Journal 62.4 (2019), 875-898. Link.
• 'Diplomacy in a Provincial Setting: The East India Companies in Seventeenth-Century Bengal and Orissa', in: Adam Clulow and Tristan Mostert (eds.), The Dutch and English East India Companies: Diplomacy, Trade and Violence in Early Modern Asia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 55-78. Open access.

• ‘Writing East India Company History after the Cultural Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century East India Company and Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie’, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 17.3 (2017): 10-36.

• 'The Merchant-Diplomat in Comparative Perspective: Dutch and other Embassies to the Court of Aurangzeb, 1660-1666’, in Tracey Sowerby and Jan Hennings (eds.), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410-1800 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 147-165.

• ‘Dutch and English Approaches to Cross-Cultural Trade in Mughal India and the Problem of Trust, circa 1600-1630’, in Cátia Antunes and Amélia Polónia (eds.), Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500-1800 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016), 69-87.

• ‘Kijken en bekeken worden: Een Nederlandse gezant in Delhi, 1677-1678’, in Lodewijk Wagenaar (ed.), Aan de overkant: Ontmoetingen in dienst van de VOC en WIC (1600-1800) (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2015), 201-216.

• ‘‘In goede en vertroude handen’: Communicatie en beleid bij de VOC tijdens de Hollandse Oorlog (1672-1678)’, De Zeventiende Eeuw 27.1 (2011), 80-101.