Adam Clulow is Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Monash University. He is the author of The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Columbia University Press, 2014) which won multiple awards including the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History from the American Historical Association. He is, most recently, the editor with Lauren Benton and Bain Attwood of Protection and Empire: A Global History (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Tristan Mostert is a PhD candidate at Leiden University. His dissertation focuses on conflicts over access to the clove trade in the eastern Indonesian archipelago in the seventeenth century. His earlier publications include Silk Thread: China and the Netherlands from 1600 (co-authored with Jan van Campen, Rijksmuseum, 2015).

List of Illustrations, Acknowledgements, Introduction, The Companies in Asia Adam Clulow and Tristan Mostert, Part 1: Diplomacy 1. Scramble for the spices: Makassar's role in European and Asian Competition in the Eastern Archipelago up to 1616. Tristan Mostert 2. Diplomacy in a Provincial Setting: The East India Companies in Seventeenth-Century Bengal and Orissa Guido van Meersbergen 3. Contacting Japan: East India Company Letter to the Shogun Fuyuko Matsukata, Part 2: Trade 4. Surat and Bombay: Ivory and Commercial Networks in Western India Martha Chaiklin 5. Interdependence, Competition, and Contestation: The English and the Dutch East India Companies and Indian Merchants in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Ghulam Nadri, Part 3: Violence 6. Empire by Treaty: The role of written documents in European overseas expansion, 1500-1800 Martine van Ittersum 7. 'Great help from Japan': The Dutch East India Company's Experiment with Japanese Soldiers Adam Clulow 8. The East India Company and the foundation of Persian Naval Power in the Gulf under Nader Shah, 1734-47 Peter Good, Epilogue The Dutch East India Company in Global History: A Historiographical Reconnaissance Tonio Andrade