ABSTRACT
The study of Denmark's imperial ambitions in Asia opens up new perspectives on early modern Nordic state building. Building an overseas empire required special practices that were different from purely domestic affairs. This chapter explores seventeenth-century Danish empire building in Asia. The first Danish–East India Company (DEIC), which was run and headquartered in Dansborg in Tranquebar, remained Danish until it was sold to the British Empire in 1845. In the seventeenth century, Danish–East Asian trade had an unsettled relationship with state building and empire. Empire building is about expanding political authority and territory outside the state borders of Denmark under one sovereign. The DEIC provides an important case for state building as it offered the state the means to attract capital and exercise patronage outside the normal government institutions. Leyel and the other DEIC employees draw attention to empire building as they pushed and pulled in their relationships with those who were higher and lower in the hierarchy of empire.
