Conference: "Commodities and Environments in Early Modern Global Asia, 1400–1800"
13-15 November 2024, Florence:
The international conference ‘Commodities and Environments in Early Modern Global Asia, 1400–1800’ is organized under the auspices of the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant Project, CAPASIA ‘The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism’, hosted at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. The conference explores the relationship between environments and commodities in early modern Global Asia between 1400 and 1800. It investigates the environmental consequences in these regions of the extraction, production and trade in commodities.
This conference aims to integrate multiple historiographies which have sometimes operated in mutual isolation: (i) the literature on material culture and commodities in global history; (ii) the growing field of environmental history; and (iii) studies in the history of science which have examined how the natural sciences and ethnography served Europe’s quest for trade, profit, and colonial domination.