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The EUI Library is pleased to showcase a selection of resources related to the CAPASIA project: ‘The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism’.
Visit the book display at the entrance of the Library’s Stockholm meeting room (when not in use) to explore related resources. Read the blog post below for more information about the related exhibition and the CAPASIA project.
Commodities and Environments: Florence and the Indo-Atlantic World, 1500-1800
The exhibition opened on 19 November 2024 and will run until 10 January 2025.
Presentation of the exhibition
This exhibition explores the knowledge that Europeans gained from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries about different environments, and the flora and fauna of the Indo Atlantic world. From pearls to porcelain, from cod to coffee, passing though sugar and shells, this exhibition is a journey around the world through commodities and their environments. It reflects on how their production, cultivation, and extraction shaped different environments, as well as the tastes and material expectations of their consumers. Many of the stories presented here reflect on the increasing knowledge and understanding of the large land and oceanic expanses of the Indo Atlantic world.
Yet, they are also unhappy reminders of processes of colonisation and exploitation of these environments that accompanied the setting up of the European maritime empires in this period.
Twenty-five books and manuscripts part of the extensive collection of the Riccardiana Library in the city of Florence were selected to illustrate themes such as animals, spices, the marine world, stimulants, crops and materials and productions. Of course, the exhibition could not be comprehensive: fruits such as tomatoes, spices such as nutmeg, dyes such as cochineal, or animals such as turkeys were left on the cutting room floor.
While the Riccardiana’s collection demonstrates the wealth of the knowledge present in Florence from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, we also note the gender bias in the authorship of the works included in this exhibition. Many of the novel and important commodities presented here affected the lives of women as much as those of men. Yet, the codification of knowledge was inexorably in the hands of male scientists, travellers, collectors, botanists, and artisans. Aware of this limitation, we invite the viewers to reflect on the role that women played as readers, users, and indeed knowledge makers in the early modern period.
All in all, this exhibition tells a different story of early modern and modern Florence. Not that of the Renaissance, humanism and art, but that of a flourishing, interconnected city open to the wider world. We invite visitors to discover how Florence, a city at the centre of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries thanks to its banking and trading networks, had many links with two other regions engineering capitalism and modernity, namely the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.
The exhibition explores these issues through six display cases/six themes which the visitor can see in one of the main rooms of the Riccardiana Library: animals, spices, marine worlds, stimulants, crops and materials.
Two booklets, one in Italian and one in English, are available for visitors and explain in detail the images, books and artefacts presented.
Presentation of the Riccardiana Library
The Riccardiana Library is an Italian national library located via dei Ginori in the centre of Florence. The Riccardi, one of the wealthiest and most powerful Florentine families of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, reached their moment of greatest social prestige when, in 1659, they purchased the historic Medici palace in Via Larga. The palace, built by the architect Michelozzo for Cosimo the Elder between 1444 and 1459, underwent extensive renovation before becoming the town residence of the Riccardi. The nearby houses in Via Larga and, at the back, in Via Ginori were soon purchased to allow for significant extensions. The Gallery, now called the Gallery of Mirrors, was built adjacent to the similarly shaped Library. The best artisans of the time furnished and built the shelves for this splendid Library. The two monumental rooms, connected by communicating doors, were frescoed by Luca Giordano, with his proverbial skill and speed. Not of noble origins, the Riccardi managed to gain prominence thanks to the wealth they had acquired through trade and banking. Yet they combined their entrepreneurial skills with a love for studiesand a bibliophile passion. Riccardo Romolo (1558-1612), who had been a pupil of the humanist Pietro Vettori, acquired manuscripts and incunabula. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, Francesco Riccardi considerably increased the original collection through purchases and thanks to the dowry of his wife Cassandra, who inherited a collection from her father, Vincenzio Capponi. Finally, the subdeacon Gabriello (1705-1798), a passionate collector, added his formidable private collection to the family library.
Presentation of the ERC CAPASIA project
“The Origins of Global Capitalism: European Factories in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800”
CAPASIA is a five-year project funded by the European Research Council between 2022 and 2027. Directed by Giorgio Riello, Professor of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute (EUI), the project is hosted by the Department of History of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. The project has a core research team of five historians, a digital advisor, and an administrative assistant.
The project investigates the genesis, evolution, activities, and connections of over 150 European trading posts (factories) operating in the Indian Ocean between 1500-1800. A survey of the activities of these factories – their economic organisation, their connections to the hinterland, their function as a meeting point between Europeans and Asians – will serve as the foundation of a new polycentric history of early modern capitalism, with the European trading posts of maritime Asia as its focal point. CAPASIA positions the factories as points of convergence in Asia between the commodities and peoples of the coastal littoral and the broader hinterland, and as nodes of interaction in systems of long-distance trade connecting Europe and Asia. Working with collaborators from across the globe, over its five-year duration CAPASIA will produce an extensive body of scholarship and host a variety of events and exhibitions dedicated to its research agenda.
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