Commodities and Environments in Early Modern Global Asia 1400-1800

• Department of History

Conference in the framework of the ERC-funded research project 'CAPASIA'.

The international conference ‘Commodities and Environments in Early Modern Global Asia, 1400–1800’ is organised under the auspices of the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant Project CAPASIA ‘The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism’, hosted at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. The conference explores the relationship between environments and commodities in early modern Global Asia between 1400 and 1800. It investigates the environmental consequences in these regions of the extraction, production and trade in commodities.

This conference aims to integrate multiple historiographies which have sometimes operated in mutual isolation: (i) the literature on material culture and commodities in global history; (ii) the growing field of environmental history; and (iii) studies in the history of science which have examined how the natural sciences and ethnography served Europe’s quest for trade, profit, and colonial domination.

This project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation programme under the ERC grant agreement No 101054345.

Image credits: Jean-Joseph Patu de Rosemont, La culture du café à l'île Bourbon, Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac