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Department of History

Dr Guido van Meersbergen

Guido Van Meersbergen

Assistant Professor in Early Modern Global History

Co-director of the Global History and Culture Centre (GHCC)

Office: FAB 3.73 (third floor, Faculty of Arts Building)

Email: g dot van-meersbergen at warwick dot ac dot uk

Office hours: Tuesday 11-12 & Wednesday 11-12 (please book here)

Faculty of Arts Building, 6 University Road
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7EQ

+44(0)24765 22163

Academic Profile

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

2016-2019: Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, University of Warwick

2015-2016: Max Weber Fellow, European University Institute, Florence

2014-2015: Tutor, Universiteit van Amsterdam and Universiteit Leiden

2010-2014: PhD, History, University College London

Research

I am a historian of early modern global encounters whose research focuses on the activities of the European East India Companies in the Indian Ocean world, particularly in the Mughal Empire. My first monograph, Ethnography and Encounter: The Dutch and English in Seventeenth-Century South Asia, maps 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 the realms of commerce, diplomacy, and colonial governance, it analyses the ways in which corporate writing cultures and early modern ethnography both reflected and drove the Companies’ engagement in cross-cultural contacts. I am the co-editor of a volume of essays entitled Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World and one of the coordinators of an international collaborative project on the embassy of Sir William Norris to Mughal India (1699-1702), which will result in a scholarly edition of Norris' embassy diaries published by the Hakluyt Society.
My ongoing research, started as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career FellowLink opens in a new window, 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. I am one of three coordinators of the Global Diplomacy Network,Link opens in a new window an international network that seeks to advance the fields of global and diplomatic history by fostering a comparative, trans-regional, and connected understanding of the development and practice of inter-polity relations across the globe in the period between 1400 and 1900.

Teaching

A Global History of Travel: Odyssey to Aeroplane (HI3K2)Link opens in a new window

Go-Betweens: Crossing Borders in the Early Modern WorldLink opens in a new window (HI2B2)

Caravans and Traders: Global Connections, 1200-1500Link opens in a new window (HI2B8)

Europe in the Making 1450-1800 (HI113)Link opens in a new window

Themes & Approaches to the Historical Study of Empire (HI995)Link opens in a new window

Supervision

I welcome postgraduate students interested in the history of diplomacy, travel, trade, empire, and ethnography in the early modern world.

Publications

Books

Ethnography and Encounter: The Dutch and English in Seventeenth-Century South AsiaLink opens in a new window (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022).

Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern WorldLink opens in a new window, co-edited with Aske Laursen Brock and Edmond Smith (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022).

Articles

  • '"Intirely the Kings Vassalls": East India Company Gifting Practices and Anglo-Mughal Political Exchange (c. 1670-1720)', Diplomatica 2.2 (2020), 270-290. LinkLink opens in a new window.
  • 'Introduction. Gift and Tribute in Early Modern Diplomacy: Afro-Eurasian Perspectives' (with Birgit Tremml-Werner and Lisa Hellman), Diplomatica 2.2 (2020), 185-200. Link.Link opens in a new window (open access)
  • 'The Diplomatic Repertoires of the East India Companies in Mughal South Asia, 1608-1717', The Historical Journal 62.4 (2019), 875-898. LinkLink opens in a new window.

  • ‘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 StudiesLink opens in a new window 17.3 (2017), 10-36.

  • ‘‘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.

  • ‘De uitgeversstrategie van Jacob van Meurs belicht: De Amsterdamse en ‘Antwerpse’ edities van Johan Nieuhofs Gezantschap (1665-1666), De Zeventiende Eeuw 26.1 (2010), 73-90.

Book chapters

  • 'Writing that Travels: The Dutch East India Company's Paper-Based Information Management' (with Frank Birkenholz), in: Aske Laursen Brock, Guido van Meersbergen and Edmond Smith (eds.), Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Abingdon and New York: 2022), 43-70.
  • 'Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge: An Introduction' (with Aske Laursen Brock and Edmond Smith), in: Aske Laursen Brock, Guido van Meersbergen and Edmond Smith (eds.), Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Abingdon and New York: 2022), 1-20.
  • '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 accessLink opens in a new window.

  • '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.1410-1800Link opens in a new window (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, 1500-1800Link opens in a new window (Leiden and 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 WICLink opens in a new window (1600-1800) (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2015), 201-216.

Other

'The East India Company's Relations with the VOC and South Asian Powers in the 17th-18th centuries', East India CompanyLink opens in a new window, Adam Matthew (2020).

External Roles