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&
While the English and Dutch factories in the town of Chinsura in West Bengal have long disappeared from the urban fabric, another monument to the town's rich economic history continues to dominate the skyline: the Hooghly Imambara. A Twelver Shiʿi congregation hall, the imambara was established by a
One of the misconceptions in studying the European factories of the Indian Ocean is to assume that they hugged the coasts. Arguably, this is a consequence of a wider maritime bias in the study of early modern Asia's economic history. Yet in several parts of South Asia, in
In 1789 the Spanish political economist and merchant Tomás Antonio de Marien y Arróspide published an enormously ambitious treatise cataloging the world’s currencies (Marien y Arróspide, Tratado general de monedas). Over previous decades Marien had acquired some experience trading in the Atlantic world (Goenaga, “Tomás de Marien y Arróspide”
For better or worse, a small set of usual suspects dominate existing accounts of Asian merchant activity in early modern port cities in the Indian Ocean. This is in large measure a reflection of the limitations of existing source material. Because pre-1800 Asian commercial records are sparse for many corners
27 April 2023, Florence: Speaker: Tirthankar Roy (London School of Economics) Time and place: 27 April 2023, 17.00 CEST, Hybrid (Villa Salviati, Sala del Consiglio, and via Zoom) The talk confronts an anomaly in the history of European colonialism in Asia and Africa, namely that prior to the eighteenth