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
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.
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.