EMPIRELAB: Subaltern Workers, Labour Relations and Empire Building in the Portuguese Estado da Índia (1510-1663)
How and to what extent did mostly unfree Asian and African labour contributed to build and sustain the Portuguese Asian empire during the 16th and 17th centuries? This is the main question addressed by EMPIRELAB. The project explores case study of the Estado da Índia, the Portuguese early modern empire in Asia, between 1510 and 1663. It aims to understand whether this early modern empire was able to develop and sustain itself (even in times of decline) due to a highly intensive extraction and allocation of non-European labour, especially when compared with other European counterparts in the Indian Ocean, namely the Dutch and the English.
This project dialogues with a wider trend in the literature that analyses the importance of the populations under European imperial dominion for empire building and economic development, especially in what concerns non-European capital, natural resources, and labour. The allocation of labour in colonial settings was noticeable in many dimensions of everyday life. This project will focus on three intertwined loci of observation: the military, the urban and the rural labour markets. By gathering evidence from European and Asian archives, building and testing a dataset on occupational structures and labour relations in the Portuguese early modern empire, EMPIRELAB will offer a first insight in labour dynamics in Portuguese Asia.
The findings of EMPIRELAB will provide historians of the European and non-European empires with comparative data and an innovative perspective to feed larger debates both in academic and non-academic contexts regarding the impact of colonialism in our societies. It will raise awareness about labour and migration from a historical perspective, thus helping to overcome established preconceptions about the relevance of labour for imperial history. Moreover, it will contribute to an improved assessment of the origins and maintenance of inequalities in the early modern colonial period. As such, EMPIRELAB contributes to three of the four research clusters developed at the IISH, namely ‘Global Labour Relations’, ‘Commodities, Environment, and Labour’, and ‘Social and Economic Inequality’.
Project Information
- PI: Hélder Carvalhal.
- Duration: August 2025- August 2027.
- Grant: HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF.
- Funding Amount: €203,000.
Keywords
Global History; Eurasian Early Modern Empires; Occupational Structures; Labour Relations; Indian Ocean.
