Project description
Remembering Europe’s forgotten migration to Asia
Sailors, soldiers, missionaries, convicts and orphans: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tens of thousands of Europeans boarded ships bound for Asia. Just how many made the voyage, and who they were, has never been firmly established since historians still lean on decades-old estimates. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the MIGRASIA project aims to answer these questions. Focusing on Portugal's maritime empire, the Estado da Índia, between 1500 and 1650, it will build the first open dataset tracking these migrants voyage by voyage and then dig into archival records to recover individual lives – including women, enslaved people and religious minorities long left out of the story. Comparing the Portuguese case with the Spanish, Dutch and English empires, the project will reframe Europe's empire building.
Objective
Migration has become a central issue in today’s public and political discourse. This discourse is often instrumentalized against migrants portrayed as “invading” Europe, forgetting that the early modern period was defined by a reverse flow: the mass emigration of mostly poor Europeans that enabled the construction of global colonial empires. Although the imperial migrations that shaped the Americas and Africa are well-studied, the equally significant movements to Asia remain largely understudied.
MIGRASIA addresses this gap by reconstructing in the scale, demographic composition, and social logic of these migrations at macro-, meso- and micro-level, using the Portuguese Empire in Asia (Estado da Índia) and the Portuguese Carreira da Índia (India Run) between 1500-1650, as a case study. A comparative approach with other European colonial polities (Spanish, Dutch (VOC), and English (EIC)) will situate the findings in a global context.
MIGRASIA hypothesizes that European empire building in Asia was shaped not only by top-down policies, but by the migration dynamics and the formation of new hybrid social structures involving subaltern populations, so far grossly overlooked by the scholarship. The project's central objective is to re-evaluate the social structure and quantitative dimensions of migration from Europe to the Estado da Índia, challenging what is known about its role in the empire-building process itself.
Methodologically, the project combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to reconstruct trans-oceanic migration flows, as well as individual trajectories. By adopting a bottom-up perspective focusing on the agency of subaltern migrants and the gender dimension of these migratory flows, this project deepens our perspective on global mobility and social change, contributing to a more inclusive history of migration and empire building.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences political sciences political communication
- humanities history and archaeology history
- social sciences sociology demography human migrations
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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1011 JV AMSTERDAM
Netherlands
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