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Introduction: With one little blast of their mouths : speech, humanity, and slavery -- On our bare word : oath taking, evidence giving, and the law -- The deliberative voice : politics, speech, and liberty -- Master, i can cure you : talking plants in the sugar islands -- They must be talked to one to one : speaking with the spirits -- They talk about free : abolition, freedom, and the politics of speech -- Last words.

Global lives -- The Elizabethan world -- Savage tales : settlement in North America -- East meets west : the English East India Company in India -- Into the Atlantic : the triangular trade? -- Maritime labour : sailors and the seafaring world -- Maritime violence : buccaneers, privateers and pirates -- Human cargo : the Atlantic slave trade -- Sugar islands : plantation slavery in the Caribbean -- In black and white : fighting against the slave trade -- Navigation and discovery : voyagers of the Pacific

Enlightenment ideas of the "the Great Map of Mankind" established relationships between historical and geographical distance which provided the problematic for eighteenth-century natural and civil histories. This raised issues of evidence for writing such histories that were particularly acute in the Caribbean, where natural history was—via the movement and transplantation of plants, animals and peoples—always a matter of "civil" history; and where the question of what (or who) was "civil" (or civilized) was addressed via discussions of the boundary between humanity and nature. It is shown that how these questions were asked provoked the use of an array of evidence that varied in its management of the relationships of proximity and distance: including travellers' tales, eyewitness observations, classical authors and philosophical speculation. The epistemological disjunctures that this evidence brought with it meant that the questions that were opened up could not be closed down.

Sometime in the 1760s, a Constantinople-born, French-educated Muslim arrived at the port of Balassor in north-east India. Known variously as Mustapha or Monsieur Raymond, he had, he later wrote, "with a mediocre dictionary and a bad grammar", and by conversing with the ship's captain en route from Bombay, "learned enough of English . . . as I might delight in Bolingbroke's Philosophical works". This student of contemporary intellectual history soon put his knowledge to work, securing a position translating for Robert Clive, the conquering hero of the English East India Company's new imperial administration in India. Subsequently falling from favour, Mustapha crossed over to seek employment with the English company's French rivals, earning himself a spell in prison as a spy. He also travelled to Mecca, where he gained the honorific "Haji" but lost his fortune, his cabinet of curiosities and his collection of books and manuscripts. He then became the keeper of a zenana (to the Europeans, a harem or seraglio), and he entered the world of publishing. In 1789, in Calcutta, Mustapha had printed for himself a pamphlet-length diatribe on the iniquitous administration of the law in British Bengal entitled Some Idea of the Civil and Criminal Courts of Justice at Moorshoodabad. In the same year he was also involved, as the pseudonymous editor "Nota Manus", in the publication of a three-volume English translation of a Persian work of Indian history—Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai's Seir Mutaqherin, or View of Modern Times (written in 1781–2)—which dealt with the British conquest and administration of Bengal, and offered a stern critique of the new rulers who seemed to have "an aversion to the Society of Indians, and a disdain against conversing with them". Finally, Mustapha (who called himself a "Semi-Englishman" who had the interests of his "adopted countrymen" at heart) claimed to have published in London a work of futurology entitled State of Europe in 1800. In his encounters with Europeans, his travels within and beyond India (although he never made it to England as he had planned), and his involvement in the production of historical and geographical knowledge, Mustapha was deeply interested in that which shaped his own fortunes: the relationships of knowledge and power between Europe and other parts of the world.

This paper examines the uses of writing in early modern global trade in order to argue for the constitutive role of inscription practices in the making of the social and spatial relations of mercantile capitalism. At the heart of this is a detailed study of the reform of the accounting and bookkeeping practices of the English East India Company at Fort St George carried out by Streynsham Master (1640–1724) in the late 17th century. This is used to show that the collective decision-making, social and moral order, and relationships of respect upon which the Company relied were constructed in and through the factory's consultation books, accountancy ledgers and the letters sent between England and India. This paperwork was part of the making of institutional structures and spaces which worked through a series of divisions between 'public' and 'private', and which made the 'logic' of mercantile capital evident to the Company's servants.

Abstract
It is argued that a consideration of the relationship between 'discipline'(discourses and practices of normalisation) and 'law'(discourses of abstract, universal rights and duties and their application in concrete situations) is necessary to an understanding of nineteenth century state formation. A discussion of this relationship in relation to the public health movement concludes that it is a fundamentally ambiguous one: their articulation is productive of interventionist programmes but it also introduces irreducible and irresolvable tensions. This understanding of the relationship is then used to consider the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866 and 1869), showing how it shaped the construction of an arena for intervention, the Acts' apparatus, and the conflicts to which the Acts were subject.