Mission Statement
CAPASIA aspires to construct an innovative narrative of global capitalism’s origins through an analysis of the approximately 150 European ‘factories’ established in maritime Asia between 1500-1800. Rather than positioning these factories as zones of European commerce detached from their Asian context, CAPASIA envisions these institutions as sites of material and information exchange between Europeans and Asians. In so doing, CAPASIA studies these factories as incubators of nascent capitalist practices at the local level, and as interlinked nodes in a polycentric economic framework connecting Asia and Europe. During its five-year duration, CAPASIA will create a user-friendly website that will simultaneously serve as a repository for data on the factories, a meeting place for scholars, and a medium for de-colonizing histories of global capitalism.
Project Description
In the present age of de-industrialisation in the West and the rise of Asian countries as centers of industry, finance, and services, the origins and evolution of global capitalism matters. CAPASIA locates the origins of modern industrial capitalism in the ‘factories’ established by Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and other European actors in the early modern period (1500-1800). Today ‘factories’ are places of industrial production, but they owe their name to these early modern trade hubs headed by European actors called ‘factors’. Well before the rise of twentieth-century Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and world financial centres, these factories were sites where European and Asian economic actors competed and collaborated. The byproduct of their exchanges was a polycentric, hybrid framework of commercial capitalism best captured by a study of factories at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Accordingly, CAPASIA investigates the genesis, evolution, activities, and connections of over 150 small and large such factories as the foundation for a new spatial theory of capitalist development — complementing and challenging the current Atlantic plantation-based explanations proposed by the New History of Capitalism (NHC). Historians affiliated with the NHC have compelled scholars to ask novel questions about the plantation as an incubator for capitalist practices. More specifically, these historians have documented the coercive and recognizably capitalist labor and financial regimes often missed in earlier studies of New World Slavery. In like measure, CAPASIA de-familiarizes the histories of the factories in maritime Asia by distinguishing them from the better-known histories of European trading companies and state monopolies. To be sure, as subsidiaries of their European principals, the factories cannot be examined without reference to them. But a conflation of the factories with their Europe-based parent institutions obscures the factories’ variegated Asian histories.
At the same time, attention to the factories’ Asian environment demands a diachronic account of the factories as economic institutions that changed over time and space. In a general sense, factories were places where commodities for intercontinental trade were assembled, stored and shipped, and sites for the accumulation of scientific and political knowledge. Yet this is only a shorthand definition of the factory that demands further elucidation. As such, a series of questions guide CAPASIA’s research: what exactly is a factory? Was it nothing more than a glorified trading post? Did factories change much in the three centuries covered by the project (1500-1800)? Were factories organized differently among European powers? How did local conditions modulate their personality? How interlinked were factories with one another? How did they function as meeting points between European and Asian merchants? How militarized were they? By taking up these and other questions, CAPASIA seeks to articulate a multi-level typology of the factories over three centuries.
Working with collaborators from across the globe, CAPASIA will produce an extensive body of scholarship and host a variety of events dedicated to its research agenda. The project’s overarching ambition is to construct a website that integrates the archives of the European East India companies with various Asian archival repositories. To that end, the site will serve as the basis for the ‘decolonization’ of the history of capitalism.