Dark horses of business : overseas entrepreneurship in seventeenth-century Nordic trade in the Indian and Atlantic oceans

Abstract

This dissertation deals

with the development of seventeenth-century overseas business through the

perspective of individuals. The way individuals acted in the overseas business,

especially in connection to the Nordic trading companies, allows for an in-depth study of how they projected, established, coordinated and developed business through entrepreneurial mechanisms. The dissertation closely follows the careers of two businessmen and simultaneously studies their careers through a conceptual framework of overseas entrepreneurship in two oceanic spaces.