ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how trading companies operated as maritime organizations and will question how being seaborne organizations and communities affected the ways corporations, their members, and their employees understood and sought to navigate the world. It considers the ways trading companies used their great privileges as maritime organizations to establish, or attempt to establish, their control over maritime regions. Shifting to the Persian Gulf, the East India Company (EIC’s) engagement with the Safavid state rested, in part, on the perceived strength of the English traders as a maritime power. Throughout the 1610s, the EIC had sent numerous merchants into the region, establishing a successful but relatively small commercial presence. One of the strengths of trading corporations, and of less formalized partnerships, was the ability to pool resources to fund longer voyages, hire more mariners, and acquire specialist shipping suitable for maritime conditions across the world.
