At the beginning of 1614, Tokugawa Hidetada (1581-1632) – the second Tokugawa shogun – promulgated the edict called Hai Kirishitan bun with the sanction of his father Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616). The edict officially banned Christianity from the whole Japanese archipelago. At that point in history, the order did not surprise Catholic missionaries
16-18 Feb 2024, Chennai: In mid-February 2024 the CAPASIA team organized a two-day workshop at IIT Madras in Chennai alongside Professor John Bosco Lourdusamy and Dr. Thamarai Selvan Kannan. The papers from the workshop will appear in time as a journal roundtable dedicated to 'Spaces of Making' in
When, in 1784, a certain George Gearmain submitted to the Queen of Portugal a plan to found a colony in Bengal, the Portuguese involvement in the lands of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta was already more than two and a half centuries old. The Portuguese were quick in adapting to the geographical
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