Abstract
abstract: This article proposes that English East India Company initiatives in seventeenth-century Madras—including the 1687 edict promoting the marriage of Company soldiers to “native women”—can best be understood as attempts to control the settlement’s mobility, and here “mobility” refers to both its residents’ capacity for physical movement and their susceptibility to social and cultural change. By embracing and even promoting some aspects of this mobility, East India Company authorities successfully changed the narratives that went along with it, thereby recasting not just the meanings that those narratives conveyed, but also the identities that they authorized. In so doing, Company authorities also prioritized corporate and state interests over those of the settlement’s transcultural community.
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