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.
