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,
As Michael O'Sullivan has outlined in his blogpost ‘What is a Factory?’ (www.capasia.eu/what-is-a-factory/), understanding the factory is at the core of the CAPASIA project. This world of European factories in Asia was an extremely heterogeneous one. Some factories existed only for a few years, others
The following simulation was produced by CAPASIA's technical advisor, Sebastian Majstorovic, in the course of the pilot project, European Factories in the Indian Ocean (EFIO). Visitors are encouraged to press the 'play' button to observe the general expansion and contraction of the factory system over the
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&
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