Chapter One
Introduction
Maxine Berg
Asian goods held a special fascination in European imaginations. Exotic and luxury goods
were long associated with sensual oriental origins. Their significance went deep into social
structures and cultural mentalities. Adam Smith saw the significance of ‘exotic baubles’ in
shifting social structures and undermining the political power of the landed elites. He
argued that ‘‘The discovery of a passage to the east Indies, by the Cape of Good Hope,
which happened much about the same time, opened, perhaps, a still more extensive range
to foreign commerce than even that of America, notwithstanding the greater
distance…Europe, however, has hitherto derived much less advantage from its commerce
with the East Indies, than from that with America’.1
Jan de Vries, more recently, has found their power among the factors motivating significant
changes in the household behaviour of North Europeans, thus generating an industrious
revolution that went on to foster industrialisation. How irresistible were these goods, and
how long did this last?
The oriental curiosities that found their way into the cabinets of Europe’s early
modern and Renaissance elites became by the Eighteenth Century the products of a
systematic European and Asian trade reaching a wide consuming public. A trade conducted
by Europe’s monopoly East India Companies and myriad private traders made the
difference, and provided a whole new level of interaction. Asian-sourced consumer goods
designed for European markets were to become seamlessly embedded into European
material cultures. This book brings together leading historians and early career researchers
to offer new insight and fresh materials on the trade in Asian goods and how these affected
Europeans. Scholars who have researched colonial and Indian Ocean trade join those
working on European consumer cultures and industrialisation. Established scholars from
Jan de Vries, Om Prakash and Jos Gommans join a new generation of researchers
investigating the connections between European consumer cultures and Asian trade.
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The fascination of Europe’s monarchs, courts and elites with the fabulous wealth,
exotic flora and fauna and exquisitely crafted fine luxury goods goes back to the Bronze Age.
The opening of the sea routes to India and China from the end of the Fifteenth Century
changed the game, and by the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, Northern Europe had
established its famed East India Companies to ply a regular commerce to India, South East
Asia and China. The surprise packages that filled the cabinets of curiosities of Europe’s
elites were displaced over the course of the eighteenth century by the cargoes, auctions,
toy shops, drapers, china shops and pedlars that brought Asian export ware onto the bodies
and into the cupboards of Europe’s merchants and townspeople. We are only now
uncovering how deeply these goods penetrated European social structures, and especially
now beyond those core regions of Britain and the Netherlands.
Earlier approaches to European connections to wider world histories focussed on
issues of colonialism, empire and the slave trade. They recounted the economics of trade
flows, commodity chains and the politics of colonial domination. They gathered data and
analysed the flows of British exports to India and China, as well as to Africa and North and
South America. Historians have debated the extent to which these trade flows both
provided large external markets for Britain and Europe, and hindered industrialization in
many parts of the world.
Our histories have, however, given far less consideration to the impact especially of
Asia on European material cultures. Goods from the East benefits from recent research on
the material culture of the early modern period, from new work on the East India
Companies, and from the opportunity provided by a large project, the European Research
Council-funded ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia’ to bring these fields together.
Goods from the East investigates the trade in products: how they were made, marketed and
distributed between Asia and Europe. It addresses the impact of the first Global Age as this
affected Europe in terms of its manufacturing and consumption. The questions it raises
relate closely to issues of fine manufacturing and luxury goods in the current age of
globalization.
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A key problem for European economies of the early modern period was how to turn
the human desire for superfluous things, for fashion, for exotica into something that could
civilize and improve national economies rather than lead them into moral decline and
corruption. The whole imperative of the long-distance seaborne trade of Europeans from
the age of exploration was to acquire the goods of the exotic East – the silks and porcelains
of China, the spices of the spice islands and India and India’s textiles. The encounter of early
empires with precious and exotic decorative arts was turned into an intensive and
systematically-organized trade in high-quality export ware sourced in Asia. This was
conducted and lubricated via the East India Companies and associated private trade. This
trade in turn, fostered new industries and consumer practices in Europe, and economic
policy commentators and enlightened writers were well aware of this. The Abbé Raynal
wrote in 1777:
‘If Saxony and other countries of Europe make up fine China’, if Valencia
manufactures Pekins superior to those of China; if Switzerland imitates the muslins and
worked calicoes of Bengal; if England and France print linens with great elegance; if so many
stuffs, formerly unknown in our climates, now employ our best artists, are we not indebted
to India for all these advantages?’2
Yet the connection of European markets with the consumption of Asian luxuries and
other commodities was not a given and automatic response to trade. Those markets were
built, the impact of the goods was diverse across Europe, and the conditions of trade
entailed an integrated European and Asian commerce. Scholars working on several
different European countries as well as on India and China give us insight into the
differences in the structure and impact of Asian goods as well as into the complexities of
interactions among Europeans and Asians engaged in the trade. Recent research on East
India Companies has provided a greater depth of understanding of commercial interaction.
But even more significantly research on individual merchants, on private trade and on the
personal and commercial networks formed among traders have drawn us closer to
understanding the practicalities of acquiring and distributing distinctive quality-defined
goods in the period.3
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Goods from the East engages with new historical approaches arising from global
history; it develops subject areas grounded in skills and processes of production as well as
material culture, and it demonstrates the new depth of research into diverse markets,
quality differences and the development of taste. That depth of research is also frequently
at a local level: local sites of production, key events of reception and adaptation. Recent
historians have gained access to these through microhistorical perspectives on individuals
and families, as well as the local worlds that contemporary travellers and writers recounted
and left behind.
Global history brought into the historical mainstream large scale comparative
histories of China, India and Europe. Debates on the ‘great divergence’ made China, then
India the focus of comparison, challenging assumptions of European dynamism and static
Asiatic economies bound in traditional cultures. Ken Pomeranz and others gathered
argument and data to demonstrate that Europe’s divergence was based on environmental
factors, notably a new energy efficiency gained in the use of coal. Trade, in this debate,
played no part in ‘divergence’. Europe was compared, but not connected to the rest of Asia.
Accounts of trade and colonialism, for their part assembled the data of commodity flows
and recounted histories of imperial domination. But there has been little sense of the
products that were traded, how they were made, then marketed and distributed in Asia, en
route from Asia, and in Europe.
In the recent decade these objects have been the new focal point in the galleries and
exhibitions of the world’s museums, and are the subjects of a new attention among
historians to material culture, including the skills, design and materials of objects as well as
their use, display and symbolism. Recent books convey this new direction: Robert Finlay’s,
The Pilgrim Art: Porcelain in World History, Kris Lane’s The Colour of Paradise. Emeralds in
the Age of Gunpowder Empires , and John Styles’ The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion
in Eighteenth-Century England.4 A new sensitivity to the diversities and qualities of things,
and cultural issues over their reception, negotiation or refusal are now important to our
wider histories. Cross-cultural production and use of objects form an equally important
aspect of ‘global connections’. A real strength of this volume is the degree to which many of
its chapters engage in the diversity of goods and their qualities. The choice of goods and the
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development of the taste to display and use them were fundamental to the success of this
Asian trade.
Objects, furthermore, provide a method of global history. They provide the
opportunity of a different perspective, a different point of view. Detailed accounts using
those approaches of method and scale arising from microhistory help us to analyse objects
perceived as ‘strange’ or brought from a distance, and thus to raise new questions for the
‘local’ and the ‘global’. Many of the contributors to the volume have the experience of
working with museum objects and they have drawn on the distinctive methods and
knowledge of objects of museum curators as well as wider histories.
The book commences with an extended chapter by Jan de Vries on the scale and
significance of Europe’s Asian trade, and concludes with another extended chapter by Jos
Gommans on Dutch and Indian consumers. Between these two long chapters, there are
twenty-three short chapters divided between four sections. Each section has a short
introduction to the subject area and summaries of the four to six contributions.
The book takes up the following themes:
•
The Scale and Significance of Asian Exports
•
Objects of Encounter and Transfers of Knowledge
•
Private Trade and Networks
•
Consuming East and West
•
A Taste for Tea
•
Luxuries and Consumers in Early Modern Dutch Cities and Indian Courts
In an opening chapter on the Scale and Significance of Asian Exports, Jan de Vries
discusses the extent to which these goods were luxuries, or goods that reached deep down
through European social hierarchies. They were among the goods that prompted the
‘industrious revolution’. The many push and pull factors of declining costs of Eurasian trade,
political economy in Asia, rising incomes and urbanisation in Europe certainly provide good
reasons for a trade boom in Asian export wares. But possibly even more significant were
the new information flows brought with the trade in goods: new knowledge of goods, new
tastes and preferences, and new commercial information.
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Objects of Encounter and Transfers of Knowledge have provided a focal point for
recent cultural historians and historians of science and technology. The six chapters of this
section follow the early uneasy relationship of trade and diplomacy into the development of
Asian technologies and resources adapted to Europe’s markets. They also follow attempts
to transfer technologies between Asia and Europe: cases range from indigo and dyes to
textiles and metal processing, porcelain enamelling and information transmitted through
models and pattern books.
Private Trade and Networks introduces us to the significant place of private trade
operating in tandem with monopoly companies in conveying not only specialist and luxury
goods, but tea, textiles and porcelain at various stages of trade and distribution. Four
chapters convey the participation of Company merchants in private trade, the trade in
specialist luxury goods, the part played by the diamond trade and comparison between the
Dutch and the English incorporation of private trade.
Consuming East and West shows us the wide European markets for Asian products.
Not just elites, but middling class consumers sought the fashion, civility and status that such
goods conveyed. New research in inventories, pauper letters and the records of foundling
hospitals and orphanages, archaeological sites, and criminal records provide a wide social
perspective to this trade. The section introduces five studies of Dutch and French
smuggling, advertising, retailing and consuming Asian goods, including the consumer
cultures of the French community in India.
A Taste for Tea provides new insight into the tea trade, one of the most pivotal parts
of East India Company trade. Paradoxically, the tea trade has hitherto been relatively
neglected by historians. Over the later Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Century, tea
imports increased steadily, amplified by smuggling. So much so that by the 1770s smuggling
dominated this trade. In 1783 the legal tea in East India Company warehouses was valued
at £5.9 million compared to the £7-8 million smuggled in. The Tea Commutation Act of
1784 reduced the duty from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent, and legal tea in the warehouses
in the course of the following year rose to £16.3 million. Three chapters tell a Northern
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story of an innovative trade led by the Ostend, Swedish and Danish Companies, the
incorporation of a culture of hot drinks into Netherlandish society, and another Northern
story of sophisticated smuggling networks that spread tea drinking through remote parts of
Scotland. A taste and trade in high quality teas were developed, and tea drinking and other
Asian goods were domesticated and neutralized within Scottish and other European
consumer cultures.
Luxuries and Consumers in Early Modern Dutch Cities and Indian courts, a
concluding chapter by Jos Gommans, compares the recent histories of consumer culture,
including the taste for Asian goods in the Dutch Republic with consumer practices in Indian
courts during the period of rapidly expanding Indian Ocean and global trade.
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1
Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations (1776), ed.
A.S. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, (Oxford, , 1976), 2 vols., Vol. 1, Book IV, chapter 1, p. 448.
2 Abbé Raynal, The Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the
Europeans in the East and West Indies (1776), vol. II, p. 288.
3 See especially Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and free trade: the English east India
Company, 1600-1757 (Princeton, 2014).
4 Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art. Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Oakland CA, 2010);
Kris Lane, The Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (New
Haven, 2010); John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-century
England (New Haven, 2007).
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