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
13 June - 20 September 2023, Florence: Join us for our 2023 Lecture Series Summer Talks on Connected Histories of Capitalism at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and on Zoom in June and September! Programme and links for registration Jointly organised by CAPASIA with the the European Research Council
Between 1857 and 1859 the Novara, a ship of the Austrian Empire, completed a round-the-world trip. In the official history commissioned after the voyage, the introduction was dedicated to the handful of earlier Habsburg entrepreneurs who had made their way to Asia from the late seventeenth century (Ritter von Scherzer,
As Michael O'Sullivan has outlined in his blogpost ‘What is a Factory?’ (www.capasia.eu/what-is-a-factory/), understanding the factory is at the core of the CAPASIA project. This world of European factories in Asia was an extremely heterogeneous one. Some factories existed only for a few years, others