Free Trade, the Abolition of Monopoly, and the Dissolution of East India Company Factories in India and Canton, 1813-1833

In 1813, and again in 1833, the East India Company (EIC) successfully lobbied to have its charter extended by twenty years. Yet each victory came at a heavy cost: whereas in 1813 the company lost its trading monopoly, in 1833 it forfeited all semblance of its commercial operations. While 1833

Port Cities Conference 2025

5-7 June 2025, Shanghai, China: "Ports, Factories, and Special Economic Zones: Infrastructures of Circulation and Exchange in the Indian Ocean, 1200-Present" This conference, jointly organized by the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai, and the CAPASIA Project, European University Institute, examines the role of infrastructure in Asia’s

Seminar: GLOBALISE

21 May 2024, Amsterdam: In light of the ongoing collaboration between GLOBALISE and CAPASIA, two members of the CAPASIA team, digital advisor Sebastian Majstorovic and postdoc Maarten Draper visited the GLOBALISE team at the Spinhuis in Amsterdam on 21 May 2024. Different members of the GLOBALISE team offered their views

Workshop: Spaces of Making

11 June 2024, Florence: This one-day workshop will take place on 11 June 2024. The morning session features papers by the CAPASIA team and two collaborators on 'spaces of making' in Global Asia, while the afternoon is dedicated to a series of presentations by a variety of guest

A Successful Adaptation to Failure: the Portuguese on the island of Socotra during the sixteenth century

Socotra (pt. Socotorá, ar. Suquṭrā) is the largest of the 258 islands dispersed throughout the Arab Middle East. It is located at the easternmost point of the Horn of Africa, at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. With its arid climate, hilly terrain, limited natural resources and, as a

Silk for prayers – Jesuit and Franciscan polemics over the Macau-Nagasaki trade

At the beginning of 1614, Tokugawa Hidetada (1581-1632) – the second Tokugawa shogun – promulgated the edict called Hai Kirishitan bun with the sanction of his father Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616). The edict officially banned Christianity from the whole Japanese archipelago. At that point in history, the order did not surprise Catholic missionaries

Workshop: Circuits of Exchange and Indian Ocean Hinterlands

16-18 Feb 2024, Chennai: In mid-February 2024 the CAPASIA team organized a two-day workshop at IIT Madras in Chennai alongside Professor John Bosco Lourdusamy and Dr. Thamarai Selvan Kannan. The papers from the workshop will appear in time as a journal roundtable dedicated to 'Spaces of Making' in

A schemer’s plan to create a Portuguese Calcutta (1784)

When, in 1784, a certain George Gearmain submitted to the Queen of Portugal a plan to found a colony in Bengal, the Portuguese involvement in the lands of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta was already more than two and a half centuries old. The Portuguese were quick in adapting to the geographical