One of the most influential theorizations of the relationship between Asian and European merchant capital in the Indian Ocean is Rajat Kanta Ray’s model of the “bazaar economy” (Ray, “Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800-1914,” Modern Asian Studies 29/3 (1995)
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
Events
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
“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
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,
In 1719 Daniel Defoe, writing under his pen name Andrew Moreton, published The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers Truly Represented. The treatise advocated the introduction of import controls to protect England's weavers from Indian textiles (a subject to which Defoe turned his attention on at least one
One of the constant frustrations faced by a historian of early modern Asian economic life is to encounter the name of an Asian merchant in European sources and then search fruitlessly for any corresponding 'indigenous' source. Little, however, is said concerning the inverse problem, namely: what does one
In the 1760s an Armenian resident in India, Tovmas Khojamalian, completed a sweeping history of India. One of the latter chapters of his work concerned, as the chapter subtitle had it, "The manner in which the English conquered India [and] how the Armenians rose to power and lost it&