خرید و دانلود نسخه کامل کتاب Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World – Original PDF

In late January 1601, just two weeks before launching its inaugural voy- age, the London-based East India Company (EIC) called on the assistance of ‘Mr Hacklett’.1 Aside from five years spent in Paris as chaplain to the English ambassador, Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616) never travelled much, nor was he a merchant or courtier. Yet when the trading company sought to implement a strategy for its incipient trade with Asia, the editor of The Principal Navigations (1589; 1598–1600) was one of the people to whom it looked for instruction.2 The company’s leadership did so for one simple rea- son: as ‘historiographer of the viages of the East Indies’, Hakluyt had access to some of the most complete and up-to-date information about Asian commerce available in Elizabethan England. Over the previous decades he had acquired, edited, translated, and published a vast array of texts that detailed the experiences of European travellers across the world. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and English travellers to Asia, Hakluyt was well-versed in the region’s geography, politics, and cultures, and could offer advice ranging from the principal places where pepper grew to the type of herb (China root) thought to most effectively cure syphilis.3 Having commissioned the free- lance expert to compile written notes of advice detailing Asian products and markets, the company’s Court of Committees in February 1601 accorded Hakluyt the sum of £10 as a reward for ‘his travelles taken in instruc- cons and advyses touching the preparing of the voyage and for his former advyses in setting the voyage in hand the Last yere’