Exhibitions

Long before Asia became the epicentre of global manufacturing at the end of the twentieth century, it was home to sophisticated cultures of production in the early modern period (1500-1800). This rich history has been obscured by narratives that see the Industrial Revolution of the period 1780-1830 as a domestic story of British (or at best, European) ingenuity. This exhibition, Making Things in Early Modern Asia, puts Asia centre stage. Early modern Asia was the world’s economic nexus, responsible for two-thirds of manufacturing. Commodities produced in early modern Asia transformed the consumption patterns of people worldwide, including in West Africa and the Americas. And this intercontinental demand for Asian commodities generated a truly global form of capitalism.

This exhibition explores the knowledge that Europeans gained from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries about different environments, and the flora and fauna of the Indo-Atlantic world. From pearls to porcelain, from cod to coffee, passing though sugar and shells, this exhibition is a journey around the world through commodities

In the period 1500-1800 several cities across the Indian Ocean were cradles of global capitalism. Rather than a single center, numerous nodes of capitalist activity existed in select cities from East Africa to East Asia. These nodes were home to diverse artisanal industries, various forms of free/unfree labour, diasporic