21-22 Sep 2023, Florence: 'World cities' and 'global cities' have received considerable attention in studies of contemporary globalisation and the twentieth-century rise of financial capitalism. More recently, work on 'special economic zones' and the concept of 'archipelago capitalism' (referring to tax havens)
Today Sadras is a sleepy coastal village in Tamil Nadu, 40 miles south of Chennai. Tourists heading 10 miles north to visit the ancient temples of Mamallapuram might easily miss it. Just over a mile away is Kalpakkam, the site of the Madras Atomic Power Station. Between modern and ancient
The French are often described as latecomers in the world of global Asia and its trade during the early modern period. Standard historical accounts tend to posit that it was only with the creation by Colbert in 1664 of the “Compagnie des Indes Orientales” that France began to capture a
Hunched over the South China Sea, Portuguese Macau began as a shadowy settlement (povoação) in the mid-1550s and eventually received city status three decades later. In its early phase, Macau’s political and commercial success rested largely on the city’s pivotal role in the silk-for-silver trade between China and
In contemporary geopolitics, the Strait of Hormuz, giving access from the Indian Ocean to the waters of the Persian Gulf, constitutes a pinch point of global maritime commerce. Super tankers and flows of oil transit through this narrow passage, dominated by the rugged mountains of the Ras Musandam peninsula. The
Dressed to impress: an English gentleman fashioned in Persia One of the treasures of the art collection of Petworth House, located in Sussex in England, is a fascinating pair of portraits by the Flemish artist Anthony Van Dyck. Painted in Rome in 1622, these depict the Englishman Sir Robert Shirley
Carreira da Índia is the name given to the state-controlled ships from Portugal that dominated the passage from Europe to India during the beginning of the early modern period. In the 16th century, the Portuguese crown sought to monopolise the traffic of goods from the Asian continent to Europe through
“Sufficiently have I already criss-crossed the Indian Ocean, passing from Pondicherry to Pegu, from Pegu to Mergui in the kingdom of Siam, from Mergui to the Coromandel coast, from that coast to Bengal, from Bengal to Syriam. These journeys, added to the first passage of Europe to India, form many