The Local and Global East India Company Jyotsna Singh (bio) I begin with some evocations of personal, intellectual, and cultural "journeys" that have involved early modern Anglo-Indian encounters as they are represented in the travel narratives of Thomas Roe, Edward Terry, and Thomas Coryate—studies of which began in the mid to late 1980s. As a student of Renaissance studies, which at the time was a largely Eurocentric cultural formation, I was surprised and heartened to "travel" beyond the confines of the European world and look afresh at India through the eyewitness accounts of these early travelers, all of whom were directly or indirectly affiliated with the East India Company. Thomas Coryate (Traveller for the English Wits [1616], Mr. Thomas Coriat to his Friends in England Sendeth Greeting [1618]) was not a functionary, but a supplicant and "hanger on" of the East India Company during its first years in India. Writing from Agra, the dominion of the Great Mughal Jahangir, Coryate left behind an idiosyncratic personal memoir and cultural text that invoked both the local and global with a refreshing chutzpah. Thomas Roe was King James' ambassador in the Court of the Great Mughal and also a representative of the Company interests, as reflected in his journals and letter, later published as The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India 1615–1619. And Edward Terry also traveled at the behest of the Company as an accompanying chaplain to Ambassador Roe, and left us his rich account of his stay, published later as A Voyage to East India (1655). The imperatives of promoting English trade in Mughal India are conjoined with these travelers' complex and mixed reactions to the culture and society of India, often framed by the Christian view that their hosts were unbelievers and infidels. Since the 1980s, the postcolonial "turn" in English studies has influenced [End Page 121] early modern studies, opening up sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel archives such as those above, while re-evaluating racial, sexual, ethnic, and religious inflections within early modern literary works. A case in point: the seemingly innocuous "Indian boy" in A Midsummer Night's Dream now globalizes the play, taking it to Indian shores. Directors and critics today offer distinctly global productions of the play which take into account the early modern English engagements with East India. And the 2016 production of the play at the Globe Theatre locates the action in a culturally Indian world! Thus we are at a promising moment in early modern studies, with the convergence of the literary, historical, and ethnographic in reappraisals of cross-cultural interactions—and what constitutes the boundaries of Renaissance England. These shifts in turn have complicated and pluralized the empirical—mostly economic and political—histories of the East India Company, often doing so by recovering new stories about the actors who were brought to the shores of various East India locations as well as the native interlocutors such as translators, traders, and in few cases wives, who all functioned and often interacted under the auspices of the Company.1 The local, the quotidian, the commonplace have begun to constitute a new prism through which the East India Company's global workings are coming to light in novel ways. This collection of essays expands the parameters of this research by, for instance, including the the VOC (Dutch East India Company) and by examining the East India Company's failed forays in Japan. In all instances, while we learn of the knowledge-production imperatives accompanying the commercial and political endeavors of the trading entity, we can also view the cultural and affective mediations of individual actors in the activities of the company. Thus this special issue of JEMCS, I believe, gestures toward a historiographical shift, pushing beyond the ubiquitous trope of the cross-cultural, face-to-face encounters between Europeans and the East Indian actors; the fixity of this trope falls apart along shifting chronologies that include a range of interactions, and this instability is evident in a theatricalized history of Anglo/European-Indian encounters under the auspices of the East India Company. Following and expanding on the imperatives of this volume, I want to reflect further on the possibilities of "connected...