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Speaker: Giorgio Riello and CAPASIA Project Team (EUI)
The ports of maritime Asia were important sites of global trade and nodes of intense economic dynamism in the period c. 1500-1800. Today ‘factories’ are places of industrial production, but they owe their name to these pre-modern Asian trading ports, European-controlled commercial hubs headed by company servants called ‘factors’. Factories were places where commodities were assembled, stored and shipped for intercontinental trade. This paper presents some of the findings of the CAPASIA project, based at the European University Institute, which investigates the origins, evolution, activities, and connections of over 150 small and large factories, asking: what kind of economic activities were carried out in these Asian trading centres? What were the interactive roles of European and local merchants? Based on the analysis of the large archival repositories of the various European East India companies and on Asian archives, the project’s aims to provide a more balanced narrative of global capitalism that includes both Asian and European economic actors, and their interactions, in the space of the still understudied Indian Ocean factories.
Giorgio Riello is Chair of Early Modern Global History at the EUI. Prior to this appointment, he was the Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick. Giorgio has published extensively on the economic and material culture history of trade and consumption in early modern Asia and Europe. He was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize and he was the coordinator of the Leverhulme-funded 'The Luxury Network'. He is currently co-writing a book (with Dagmar Schaefer, Max Planck Institute, Berlin) entitled 'Cultures of Innovation: Silk in Pre-Modern Eurasia', and collaborating with colleagues at Stanford, Syracuse and Warwick on a project entitled ‘Carletti’s World: An Early Modern Global Voyage’. He is the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant for the project ‘CAPASIA. The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism: The European Factories of the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800’ considering the early modern system of trade of the Indian Ocean and the rise of global capitalism.
Image: Anonymous, View of the port of Surat (Gujarat). ca. 1670, Rijksmuseum
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