Petitioning 'John Company': Women and the English East India Company, 1600-1635.

This thesis examines how ordinary women, wives, widows, mistresses, sisters and nieces, negotiated the political and economic bureaucracy of the English East India Company in the first three decades of the seventeenth century. It focuses on hundreds of previously neglected petitions presented to the Court of Committees, the organisation's governing body, by women, between 1600 and 1635. By analysing these documents, the nature of these women's requests and how the Company responded, this thesis sheds new light on an organisation that has been viewed almost exclusively in terms of its male employees.