Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CAPASIA (The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism: European Factories in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2025-03-31
The CAPASIA project investigates the genesis, evolution, activities, and connections of over 150 European factories operating in the Indian Ocean between 1500-1800. Today factories are places of industrial production, but they owe their name to these pre-modern Asian trading ports, European-controlled trade hubs headed by company employees called ‘factors’. These factories were hubs for the intercontinental movement of goods, people and information, and the port areas from which the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, English, French, and other European East India companies operated in the Indian Ocean as part of a new global history of the origins of modern capitalism.
CAPASIA investigates the genesis, evolution, activities, and connections of over 150 small and large such factories as the foundation for a new global, spatial theory of capitalist development — complementing and challenging the current Atlantic plantation-based interpretations. Among the implications of CAPASIA’s integration of the large archival repositories of the different European East India companies and Asian archives is the ‘decolonization’ of the history of capitalism.
Plainly stated, CAPASIA has three main aims:
1. to shift the perspective on early modern long-distance trade to Asia, emphasizing not only connections between Europe and Asia, but also the less-studied, albeit perhaps more significant, intra-Asia trading connections;
2. to expand the narrative of economic globalization by moving away from the recent past to incorporate the early modern period;
3. to recast the narrative about capitalism’s development from an internal European story that goes global to a polycentric one in which Europe was for several centuries the ‘apprentice’ of Asia.
CAPASIA investigates the genesis, evolution, activities, and connections of over 150 small and large such factories as the foundation for a new global, spatial theory of capitalist development — complementing and challenging the current Atlantic plantation-based interpretations. Among the implications of CAPASIA’s integration of the large archival repositories of the different European East India companies and Asian archives is the ‘decolonization’ of the history of capitalism.
Plainly stated, CAPASIA has three main aims:
1. to shift the perspective on early modern long-distance trade to Asia, emphasizing not only connections between Europe and Asia, but also the less-studied, albeit perhaps more significant, intra-Asia trading connections;
2. to expand the narrative of economic globalization by moving away from the recent past to incorporate the early modern period;
3. to recast the narrative about capitalism’s development from an internal European story that goes global to a polycentric one in which Europe was for several centuries the ‘apprentice’ of Asia.
The past two years have been highly productive for CAPASIA. Over the period October 2022 – when the project began – until May 2023 we assembled our full five-person team. During that same period, the team began to produce several ‘thick descriptions’ of factories in the western Indian Ocean. The research for which will appear in some further research publications, including a collaborative book on the history of the factories between 1500 and 1800. Two ‘databases’ comprising visual representations of the factories and a master-list of the factories (complete with their respective open and closure dates) are works in progress that are regularly updated by the team. These will be shared with the public in due course.
At the same time, the PI and senior research fellow began work on two project-defining collaborative research papers. The first of these – “What is a Factory?” – is still in progress and will be submitted as a peer review publication in November 2024. A second paper - “Where is Asia in global histories of early modern capitalism?” - appeared as an EUI department of history working paper in December 2023 and a revised version has been submitted to the Journal of Global History in July 2024. An additional research paper focused on the Portuguese factories - “Building the First European Enterprise in Early Modern Asia: The Portuguese Estado and the Carreira(s) System” - was completed by CAPASIA research assistant Renata Cabral Bernabé and published as an EUI department of history working paper in September 2024.
Several other research outputs are under review at a range of journals. A roundtable sponsored by CAPASIA on ‘spaces of making’ in early modern South Asia has also been accepted by the journal Itinerario. A complete list of publications to date is available on the CAPASIA project website: www.capasia.eu
In the context of its digital strategy, CAPASIA also set up a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) composed of open-source software tools has successfully enabled the team to share digitised sources and research data internally and with external collaborators. Through the standardised application programming interfaces (APIs) integrated into the VRE the research data is available for immediate re-use for analysis and visualisation using a variety of digital methods. So far, CAPASIA has experimentally applied named-entity recognition, natural language processing, semantic search and geovisualisation to the source material and research data. Over the next project phases, the project will increasingly employ Large Language Models and other Machine Learning techniques to make the sources and research data more discoverable. To this end, the project will also intensify the existing relationship and data exchange with the Dutch ERC research project GLOBALISE.
At the same time, the PI and senior research fellow began work on two project-defining collaborative research papers. The first of these – “What is a Factory?” – is still in progress and will be submitted as a peer review publication in November 2024. A second paper - “Where is Asia in global histories of early modern capitalism?” - appeared as an EUI department of history working paper in December 2023 and a revised version has been submitted to the Journal of Global History in July 2024. An additional research paper focused on the Portuguese factories - “Building the First European Enterprise in Early Modern Asia: The Portuguese Estado and the Carreira(s) System” - was completed by CAPASIA research assistant Renata Cabral Bernabé and published as an EUI department of history working paper in September 2024.
Several other research outputs are under review at a range of journals. A roundtable sponsored by CAPASIA on ‘spaces of making’ in early modern South Asia has also been accepted by the journal Itinerario. A complete list of publications to date is available on the CAPASIA project website: www.capasia.eu
In the context of its digital strategy, CAPASIA also set up a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) composed of open-source software tools has successfully enabled the team to share digitised sources and research data internally and with external collaborators. Through the standardised application programming interfaces (APIs) integrated into the VRE the research data is available for immediate re-use for analysis and visualisation using a variety of digital methods. So far, CAPASIA has experimentally applied named-entity recognition, natural language processing, semantic search and geovisualisation to the source material and research data. Over the next project phases, the project will increasingly employ Large Language Models and other Machine Learning techniques to make the sources and research data more discoverable. To this end, the project will also intensify the existing relationship and data exchange with the Dutch ERC research project GLOBALISE.
The breakthroughs made by CAPASIA have occurred at the level of historical scholarship, digital humanities, and academic collaboration. Let us begin with the instance of historical scholarship. Our project has begun to push the field of early modern economic history into new trajectories by 1) articulating a new spatial conceptualisation of the early modern global economy as a series of nodes; 2) moving attention away from an inordinate focus on port cities to inland spaces of procurement; 3) positioning the European East India Company factories squarely within their Asian environments rather than treating them as European islands divorced from Asia. In other words, we have successfully transcended a literature that is rather Eurocentric in character by incorporating new actors and geographies. Moving to our second them, digital humanities, we have shown what a project can achieve when it marries traditional archival scholarship with novel methods of text recognition software and data mining. Lastly, our engagement with scholars and institutions outside of Europe has been a central ambition of our project from the beginning. To that end, we have successfully established partnerships with universities in India and China, and our body of individual collaborators from these countries continues to grow.