Between 1500 and 1800, European trading companies established more than 200 commercial outposts across maritime Asia and the Indian Ocean world. These small enclaves, some no bigger than a single building, are where some of the earliest encounters between European and Asian capitalism took place. CAPASIA: The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism, an ERC-funded project based at the EUI Department of History and led by Giorgio Riello, is the first to study them as a whole. Maarten Draper, a Research Fellow in the EUI Department of History, works on the project’s Dutch-language sources and built its comprehensive database of trading post locations. He spoke to us about what these overlooked places reveal about how the global economy began.
The standard account of early modern capitalism runs through the Atlantic. CAPASIA starts from a different premise. What is missing from that story?
Asia. That is the short answer. Two thirds of the world’s population between 1500 and 1800 lived there, particularly in China and India, and around 50% of the world's manufacturing output was located there. If global capitalism began to take shape in that period, as many historians argue, then the story as it is usually told has a very large gap in it. Trade in the Americas grew fast — that is a fact — but the Americas were first depopulated through disease and then repopulated with a clear link to Europe. Asia was something else entirely: a vast economy that already existed, with its own commercial networks, its own powerful merchants, its own rules. The question is how you write a history of early globalisation that actually takes that seriously.
CAPASIA uses European trading posts as its lens. Historical sources call these "factories", which is a confusing term for a modern reader. What were these places?
They have nothing to do with industrial production, which is what we think of when we hear the modern term. In our period, a “factory” was a place where a “factor” worked, a commercial agent representing a trading company. So, in practice, you had these small enclaves, sometimes the size of a large palazzo, sitting in or next to an Asian port city. European employees lived there, stored goods, negotiated trade with local merchants and rulers. Some of these sites are now among the biggest cities in the world. Jakarta, Mumbai, or Chennai started as trading posts. Others have barely grown since the 17th century.
What makes them interesting for us is that they are where the economic encounter between Europe and Asia actually happened. Not in some abstract sense, but in specific buildings, with specific people making deals under specific pressures. A key part of the project is understanding how these enclaves connected to the surrounding region, what historians call the hinterland. Textiles from weaving villages, spices from plantations, precious metals moving in both directions. You have to zoom in to see how it worked.
You are based in Florence, studying trading posts that stretched from East Africa to Japan. What does an ordinary research day look like?
The team is organised partly by language. I deal with the Dutch-language sources, which are enormous. The Dutch East India Company archive is probably the biggest of all the collections we use. Then we have colleagues working with Portuguese, English, French, and Persian material. So, everyone brings a different linguistic expertise to the same questions.
The big change compared to maybe ten years ago is digitisation. I can browse archives from across the world from my desk here in Florence. So, a typical task: I want to understand how Europeans tried to get into the textile market in southern India. I find this 40-page report by one Dutch official who was sent, together with local merchants, on a kind of walking survey of weaving villages around Nagapattinam. He writes about how he got deceived by intermediaries, how they got lost in a swamp. I transcribe that, translate the key parts, try to connect it with what other historians have written.
We actually went to some of those villages on a research trip to Tamil Nadu in south India. Most of them are not much bigger now than they seem to have been in 1690. It is a strange experience, linking a name on a 17th-century document to a dot on a modern map and then driving through the actual place.
These are stories from centuries ago, but they often involve real suffering. Does that affect you?
It depends. The higher-ranking Europeans who behaved terribly when they were abroad — and many of them did — I do not feel sorry for at all. But the weavers who got squeezed by different middlemen into working for almost nothing, or people who were enslaved and sold on, that is different. That stays with you. And then there is a whole category of European employees who were not powerful people either. They were poor. Going to Asia was, in a way, like going to war for them.
That raises a broader question about who held power in this world and who suffered. The picture seems more complicated than a straightforward story of European dominance.
It is, and that matters. I want to be careful here, because there is no question that European expansion caused tremendous harm. As early as 1621, the Dutch East India Company orchestrated a genocide in the Banda Islands (eastern Indonesia) to control the spice trade. But in many other places before 1800, European companies were not the strongest party. They depended on local rulers. They paid heavily just for access. A local prince could use the Europeans to get rid of a rival, or simply demand money for letting them stay. Some of the wealthiest merchants in this world were Asian, not European, and they had their own interests in global trade. At the same time, there were people at the bottom on both sides who bore the costs. Local populations pressed into producing goods at terrible pay. But also lower-ranking European employees who had no inheritance, little prospects, no real choice. Roughly half of those sent to Asia did not survive, mostly due to diseases. It was powerful companies dealing with powerful rulers, and ordinary people paying the price. I guess that pattern is not so different from parts of the world today.
One of your contributions to the project is the first comprehensive database and map of all these trading posts. What did building it reveal?
Well, it took us several years, for one thing. The task sounds simple. Place each post on a modern map, connect it to a modern name, work out when it existed. But for more than 150 different places across that kind of geography, it is really not straightforward at all. What came out of it is a picture of this enormous system that nobody had mapped as a whole before. Individual posts, yes. National groups, yes. But not all of them together.
And then you start noticing things. Some places grew into megacities — Jakarta, Calcutta, Mumbai — because they became administrative capitals for European empires in the 19th century. Others just came to a halt. The economic patterns changed, production moved, and these places became irrelevant. What is interesting is that in the quiet places, you actually find more physical remains. The cities that boomed destroyed whatever was there. The ones where nothing much happened after the 18th century, those preserved it.
Before CAPASIA, your PhD here at the EUI was about Italian merchants in 17th-century Amsterdam. That sounds like a different world, but is it?
It is the same world, just seen from a different angle. The idea came from an internship in Genoa during my master’s, where I worked with Italian family archives. A lot of that material relates to trade with the Netherlands, so you need someone who can read both Italian and Dutch. I thought, well, let me try to look at the so-called “Dutch economic miracle” from the outside. These Italian merchants who came from what had been the most advanced economy in Europe, what did they see when they arrived in Amsterdam?
The standard story is that Amsterdam was the first modern economy: anonymous markets, institutions that did not care who you were or where you came from. What I found was more complicated than that. The Italians dealt mostly with other Italians, across Europe. Locally, yes, they used modern Dutch institutions. But internationally, trade still ran along older lines — religious, ethnic, family. You could have both systems operating at the same time.
Doing the PhD here made a difference. My supervisor was German, specialised in Spanish America, so she did not have a stake in the Dutch national debate about how special Amsterdam was. History can be very nationally constrained, even when the topic is supposedly international. Here I was outside that. More eclectic, maybe, but I think the work was better for it.
Is there a story from the archives that has stayed with you?
There is one I particularly like because it connects both my projects. A Calvinist merchant from Lucca ends up in Amsterdam. He tries to set up a textile printing business. Fails completely. Goes into business with a German, racks up debts, gets hit with a lawsuit. Not a successful man, to put it mildly.
But he had married well. His wife’s uncle was the mayor of Haarlem, and the uncle gets him a position with the Dutch East India Company in Bengal. So off he goes. Before leaving, he writes these letters to relatives in Switzerland saying, look, maybe we can trade between Switzerland and Bengal — gold thread, which was a Swiss speciality. And then he sets sail. We have no idea if the trade ever happened. That kind of private commerce was semi-legal and nobody documented it properly. A few years later, he seems to have died of illness in Bengal. He never came back.
I find that story moving. Not because he is a sympathetic character, exactly. But because it shows you how precarious all of this was. The letters survive by accident. The trade, if it happened, left no trace. And this man sailed halfway around the world for it and never came home.
CAPASIA is now in its final phase. What does the project leave behind?
I think the most important thing is that it establishes these trading posts as a subject in their own right. There is a lot of implicit knowledge among specialists about individual sites, but nobody had really written it out, tried to present it all together. So, our contribution is partly to say: These places matter for understanding the origins of capitalism, and even if you think you know them, you probably do not fully. The broader point is that capitalism was not a Western invention that got exported outwards. It was Eurasian from the start. Products came from everywhere, markets were connected, people moved.
The website matters too. Journals in this field are often behind paywalls, so you have to be at a rich institution just to read the research. Everything we publish is open access. Our most frequent visitors are from India. We also held a conference in Chennai rather than Florence, specifically so that scholars from the region did not have to make the long trip. A very senior professor came from Delhi who probably would never have come to Europe. That kind of thing matters. These are histories that belong to a lot of people, not just European academics, and we have tried to keep that in mind.
Maarten Draper is a Research Fellow in the EUI Department of History. He works on CAPASIA (Capitalism in Asia, 1500–1800), an ERC-funded project led by Giorgio Riello, EUI History Professor. The project examines European trading posts across Asia and the Indian Ocean world. Maarten’s PhD at the EUI focused on Italian merchants in 17th-century Amsterdam.
Picture: European ships off the coast of Socotra, a strategic island in the Indian Ocean that was among the earliest sites of Portuguese commercial and military presence in Asia. Watercolour by D. João de Castro, 1541. Universidade de Coimbra. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.