Chapter Twenty-one
For the Home and the Body: Dutch and Indian ways of Early Modern Consumption
Jos Gommans
For my part, in thirty years’ residence, I never could
find out one single luxury of the East, so much talked of here,
except sitting in an arm-chair, smoaking a hooka, drinking cool
water and wearing clean linen.1
Joseph Price (1783)
For a decade or two, early modern consumption had been back on the scholarly agenda.
In the slipstream of Werner Sombart, earlier work has been mostly theoretical and highly
Eurocentric in nature. In the mid-1990s the massive American project on ‘Culture and
Consumption in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ was a game-changer.2 As in almost
all projects on the early modern West, however, the industrial revolution looms on the horizon.
Hence as a mere pre-history of the Great Divergence, most of the attention has focused on the
experience of early modern Britain. During the past few years, Maxine Berg in particular, has
contributed significantly to a better understanding of early modern British consumption by
emphatically bringing Asian agency into the story. Berg seeks to understand the contribution of
Asia in the making of Europe on the basis of European consumption of Asian products. The
project, Europe’s Asian Centuries, aimed not only to map but also understand the changing
patterns of consumption in the context of a cross-cultural dialogue between Europe and Asia
that intensified during the early modern period.3
Apart from stressing Asian agency, the present volume goes beyond earlier
Anglocentrism by taking not Britain, but the Northwest of Europe as a category. There is much
that supports this choice, as all these regions are oriented towards the North Sea and as such
they all seem to have profited most by the booming prospects of maritime trade both in the
1
Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean economies. Indeed there is a growing awareness that rising
levels and changing patterns of consumption are not exclusively Northwest-European but a
much wider, global and, indeed, coastal phenomenon. Although it is far too early to draw firm
conclusions, it seems that what could make Northwest Europe different, is the increasing
purchasing power of its lower layers of society, which implies that consumption had a deeper
impact on more people. To grasp this particular aspect we should once again revisit the
argument of the ‘industrious revolution’ and try to situate it more specifically in time and place.
The next obvious question is: if consumption is on the rise almost everywhere, to what extent
did its changing composition really stimulate the substitution of manufacture in other parts of
the world? Finally, what is revealed about the role of the State: to what extent did political
authorities across the world subscribe to the mercantilist agenda of protection and a positive
trade balance? Obviously, these are highly complicated questions which cannot be fully tackled
in a tentative essay like this. I will, however, briefly review the rather well-studied Dutch
scenario, to enable comparison, not only with the other regions of Northwestern Europe
studied in this volume, but also with the almost completely ignored consumption patterns in
early modern India.
For the home: Dutch ways of consuming Asia
Re-evaluating the impact of Asian trade on Northwest-European consumption
automatically raises the complicated issue of the so-called seventeenth-century economic
crisis. How to square rising consumption levels of Asian goods with an economy that is
supposedly in crisis? The latter is indicated by declining prices, mostly for agricultural products,
less so for manufactures.4 For many supply-side economic historians, this deflation—be it the
result of decreasing silver imports or shrinking populations—stimulated efficiency and
innovation through heightened competition. But as consumption levels of Asian goods are
clearly on the rise, how could it have stimulated demand at the same time? Whatever the
cause, the idea of a seventeenth-century crisis never really appealed to historians of the Dutch
Golden Age. Indeed, as in most of Northwest Europe, until mid-century, the population
2
continued to grow, mainly in cities, mainly along the North Sea coast; decline set in only after
about 1660. So the Seventeenth Century was certainly a crisis for most of southern and eastern
Europe, but not for its Northwestern Dutch coast where expanding Atlantic and Asian trade
gave new urban merchant communities the bargaining power to break away from the vast
empires of the mainland. What is crucial from the point of view of demand in this Atlantic zone
is that real income did not decline as in most of Europe. When general prices were on the
increase, prices for manufactures and luxuries usually rose less than staple goods, which was to
the advantage of the purchasing power of the rich. Hence we know that the new merchant
elites of Dutch port-cities managed to emulate the courtly lifestyles of the nobility and spend
much of their purchasing power on ever cheaper luxuries from both the Atlantic (tobacco,
sugar, chocolate) and Asia (spices, textiles, porcelain, coffee and tea).5
Although this economic shift towards Europe’s northwestern port-cities may explain
why these areas consumed more than others, it is hardly sufficient to understand why people in
general were able to consume more when their purchasing power at best remained the same?
This was the conundrum tackled so well by Jan de Vries in the early 1990s, who proposed an
‘industrious revolution’ that focused on the changing behaviour of households.6 The gist of the
idea is that in the Seventeenth Century Northwest-European households started to
compulsively maximize their utility by reducing their leisure time to produce more goods for
the market, and consume more and more non-durable goods.7 So although wages per hour did
not increase during our period, more people worked for more and longer days, producing an
increase in the real consumption wages of unskilled labourers. This increased purchasing power
was not in relationship to basic foodstuffs, but related primarily to manufactured goods.
Especially under urban conditions, where markets work well and agriculture is less dominant,
the industrious revolution is most likely to occur and its effects on consumption are most
striking.
So despite the crises of the Seventeenth Century, and thanks to the industrious
revolution, consumption of manufactures and luxuries in the coastal cities of Northwest Europe
appear to have been on the rise, particularly in England and the Low Countries. A key issues is
3
the timing and the sequence of all this. If the industrious revolution is really crucial to
understand the rise of consumption, how and to what extent did the goods from the East
contribute to this? As by far the two most important East India Companies were launched from
Northwest-Europe, the Asian connection is highly suggestive. But what came first: the new
pattern of consumption or the goods from the East?
Focusing on the Southern Netherlands, Bruno Blondé and Wouter Ryckbosch (in this
volume) seem to confirm the overall picture that ‘colonial’ goods transformed the structure and
timing of meals and profoundly influenced patterns of sociability. The greatest impact was
through the consumption of sweetened hot drinks, which also affected material culture by the
introduction of more disposable, decorative ceramic tableware. Very much in line with the
industrious revolution theory, the new luxuries were characterized by novelty, design and
fashion rather than by ‘intrinsic value’ and reached ever wider parts of society. At the same
time, they are quite sceptical, though, in attributing to these goods a significant role in the
emergence of what they call a more modern ‘consumer mentality’ in the Eighteenth Century. In
fact, they observe, that ‘the fundamental shift in the mental attitude towards breakable
consumer goods had occurred at least two centuries earlier’. This would bring us back to the
Sixteenth Century, when not Asian imports but, for example, ‘Italian’ majolica production
techniques seem to have played a pivotal role in creating the necessary mental categories for
‘material modernity’. Hence the mentality towards accepting a breakable and more modern
consumer pattern was already paved from at least the Sixteenth Century. Blondé and
Ryckbosch’s incisive contribution strongly suggests that, at least in the main port cities of the
southern Low Countries, ‘modern’ consumption came before Asia. This begs the question,
however, what makes this consumption so ‘modern’ and how can it be linked to the industrious
revolution? For example, does it mean that we should situate the industrious revolution one
century earlier, or should the latter be seen as something that enabled the sixteenth-century
pattern to continue into the Seventeenth Century (that is, under crisis conditions)? I will take up
the issue of the modernity of consumption later, but for now, it seems safe to conclude—as
Blondé, Ryckbosch and many others do—that the consumption of luxuries in the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries reached unprecedented levels as it penetrated ever deeper and ever
4
further into the society. By the Eighteenth Century there was already a true mass consumer
market for American, Asian and their European substitution goods.8 To elaborate on this for the
Dutch Republic, let me summarize the revolutionary developments for the consumption of
chintz, hot drinks and porcelain, that is commodities that generated half of the Dutch East India
Company (VOC) sales in Amsterdam in the mid-Eighteenth Century.
The popularity of chintz in the Netherlands was a late extension of the much older intraAsian trade in Indian textiles. Although small quantities of so-called pintadoes reached the
Dutch market much earlier through the overland routes and Portuguese channels, it was only
after the mid-Seventeenth Century that it started to attract a wider demand, mainly for
clothing and interior decoration. Earlier that century, however, following French developments,
among the nobility and richest urban elites there had already grown a baroque desire for
regularité of home interiors decorated with Turkish and Persian carpets and with beautiful wallpaintings of gold-leather or silk. The arrival of relatively cheap Indian chintz in the Seventeenth
Century, made this affordable for the middling classes who started to use it for decorating
walls, windows, tables and beds. In the late Seventeenth Century, chintz became more
exclusively reserved for the private domain of the bedroom. Hence, when the use of chintz
spread to the lower layers of society, it was mainly used for blankets and other bed furnishings.
In the case of clothing, chintz followed a similar route, from elites who followed the fashion of
the French court, it trickled down to the middling classes and even to the common man.
Overall, chintz served as an affordable middle class substitution for silk – it was not for nothing
that the French silk industry became one of the fiercest protagonists of protectionism.9
To suit such new fashions, the VOC sent its own patterns to the main production centres
in India. At the same time, from about 1675, there was a growing tendency to produce cheaper,
printed calicoes at home. The earliest cotton printers in the Dutch Republic in Amersfoort and
Amsterdam mostly used white Indian cottons and built production partly on the expertise of
Turks and Armenians. From the end of the Seventeenth Century, the technology soon spread to
places like Augsburg, Eaux-Vives (near Geneva), Basel and even across the Atlantic to Boston.
We know that in 1738 at least one Company servant, Ewout van Dishoeck, the Director of the
5
VOC establishment in Bengal from 1717-1722, invested some of his Indian fortune in setting up
a cotton printing factory in Domburg. Although he acquired a patent for the province of
Zeeland, the business was closed down only two years later.10
Overall the decision of the Dutch authorities to keep the home market open
stands in sharp contrast with the other Northwest-European states which started to ward off
the home market by banning Indian imports and/or domestic production. From the last quarter
of the Eighteenth Century, British production accelerated thanks to the technological advances
of copper plates and rotary printing, and started to dominate the open Dutch market.11
Even more than chintz, coffee and tea became widespread Dutch consumer
goods during the Eighteenth Century, more or less following a pattern from coast to interior,
city to countryside, high to low. From its introduction in the early-Seventeenth Century, coffee
gradually became a morning drink of the common man, mostly consumed in public coffee
houses. During the Eighteenth Century it became the most popular common beverage among
burghers and peasants alike, replacing beer, buttermilk and whey. Tea, however, started as a
more private drink of gentlewomen, served in the afternoon surrounded by considerable ritual.
But apart from the coastal, western parts of the country, it never became a national drink. The
Dutch ethnographer Voskuil observes the following overall pattern: the further one goes
eastward into the country and downward on the social scale, the more coffee is consumed. But
the conquered territories of the so-called Generaliteitslanden in the Catholic Southeast were
the least affected and continued to drink beer into the early Twentieth Century. According to
Voskuil, the social context in which the new drinks were consumed produced a new
sociability.12 This again raises the question whether this was really a new phenomenon, caused
by new Asian consumer goods, or that it simply built on already existing notions of gezelligheid.
The new custom of drinking (sweetened) hot drinks went hand in hand with the
widespread distribution of relatively cheap home-made porcelain coffee- and tea-ware, mostly
provided by the rapidly emerging industry in Delft. As cheap chintz had substituted silk,
Delftware evoked the real China and was affordable at the same time. During the early
6
Seventeenth Century, the Dutch had been prepared for the goods thanks to the introduction of
so-called kraakporcelein which was cheap enough to reach the interiors of quite a few Dutch
burghers. When China began to produce better quality porcelain for the export market in the
1630’s, the VOC placed its first specific porcelain orders (Chine en commande) through Taiwan.
From the late 1650’s the Company started to import high-quality, many-coloured Japanese, socalled kakiemon porcelain from Kyushu. After 1680, when the Qing had pacified most of China,
it was mainly through the Chinese junk-trade with Batavia that the porcelain trade with the
Netherlands really took off. As with chintz, Dutch burghers started to emulate courtly and noble
circles by collecting and exhibiting both China and Delftware. Like chintz, there emerged a most
interesting cross-cultural exchange of shapes and themes: Chinese patterns influencing
European taste, in turn, the latter influencing Chinese and European producers. 13
Reviewing the literature on consumption patterns of Asian goods in the
Netherlands partly suggests continuity. For example, courts continued to influence fashion even
among the new burgher elites of the Dutch Republic with their exquisite canal-houses,
mansions and gardens. It also suggests that the highly urbanized character of the Low Countries
created sociability before Asian commodities could have an impact on it. This very sociability
was one of the prime conditions, though, for a new kind of consumerism, indeed engendered
by the introduction and the later substitution of Asian and other non-Western commodities.
Consumers were still looking at royalty for the latest examples of refinement and style, but the
more and less affluent numbers of them were increasingly able to emulate the courtly styles
with fairly cheap, uniform products that could be easily replicated.14 As John Nef suggested
already in the 1950s the spread of this new pattern towards the middling classes of society may
have provided a major incentive for the expansion of the production of these objects.15
India: A complicated case for comparison
In the past, global comparisons have often suffered from the employment of unequal spatial
and/or temporal categories, resulting in civilisational or religious essentialisms and random
cherry-picking. Combined with this Anglocentric telos of the industrial revolution, scholars keep
7
asking one and the same question: why the West, what went wrong with the Rest? In the
debate about the Great Divergence, Britain’s preferred sparring partner is China. Indeed, China
as a concept still makes sense as it was not superimposed on by foreign rulers. So China
provides a strong self-image, proven in history and proclaimed by a long list of Chinese officials
and scientifically confirmed by Sinologists. It is only recently that this Sinocentrism is challenged
by historians who stress, for example, the Mongol impact or China’s ignored ethnographic and
religious diversity. But, as a category, China is still highly convenient for global historians.
Thanks to the California School, we have now passed the stage where historians of the
Weberian kind could pick out from that one eternal Chinese civilization whatever was needed
for grasping its failure. What is still missing in this sophisticated debate on global economic
development is the specific role of demand and consumption. The best work on this topic by
Timothy Brook and Craig Clunas has successfully falsified claims of European or British
exceptionalism.16 Like early modern Northwest Europe, Ming China, in particular its coastal and
riverine areas, witnessed a huge increase of materiality and consumption among an ever wider
circle of administrators and merchants. However, since historians of China tend to focus on
dynasties, comparison remains difficult and we are still somewhat at a loss to understand how
Chinese consumers weathered the seventeenth-century crisis triggered by the Manchu
conquest. This suggests an ominous outcome so familiar to historians of a previous generation:
are we confronted with another very promising Chinese development nipped in the bud by
foreign conquest?
The huge impact of Indian textiles on European consumer behaviour and thus on the
industrial development of Britain, raises the question why India has figured so poorly in the
debate on the Great Divergence? First of all, one possible answer would be that India is not a
strong brand. It was made by foreign—Greek, Arab and British—hands and, before the Nehru’s
‘discovered’ it, it was never used by ‘indigenous’ dynasties. Secondly, the Indian subcontinent
lacked civilizational or imperial continuity and as such it also missed a fixed centre. As a
consequence, a dynastic sequence along the Chinese model would not work for India. Even the
regional diversity of Europe does not fit the Indian picture of constantly shifting political
boundaries. Hence global historians, looking for easy answers, often turn their backs on such an
8
extremely fluid and hybrid region where nothing seems to hold. On their part, the historians of
India are divided between (post-) colonial and pre-colonial topics, the latter group having their
own specific linguistic expertise which enriches their regional, but limits their global, view.
Hence making meaningful global comparisons and connections sadly remained, for a long time,
the prerogative of the historian who worked with colonial materials. Although this brief survey
on early modern consumption can only but elaborate on that work, it is also informed by a
fascinating new tendency of the pre-modernists to explore the various Indian vernaculars to
find alternative interpretations of universal phenomena from monetization to self-fashioning.17
When trying to make a comparison between the Dutch Republic and India, we should
first ask ourselves: which India should we talk about? Interestingly, unlike most of Europe, the
Middle East and China, the Netherlands and Mughal India experienced no seventeenth-century
crisis whatsoever as both flourished under their own Golden Age. Despite this strange parallel,
it would be wrong to compare the small coastal republic of the Netherlands with the huge
continental empire of the Mughals. For a suitable comparison, it seems more appropriate to
look for maritime regions, since they profited most from the upsurge of maritime trade which
characterized the early-modern global economy at large. The two most obvious maritime hubs
that compare quite well with the Netherlands are Gujarat and Bengal as all three possessed
easy access to a well-populated hinterland, in the first case Germany and Central Europe, in the
latter cases Hindustan. For this reason, the coastal areas of South India may be less conducive
to fruitful comparison as their hinterlands are either much smaller, as in the case of Malabar, or
less populated and more fluid as in the case of the Coromandel Coast. Bengal provides a
particularly interesting comparison, since, like the Netherlands and its polders, much of it
consisted of new land that had been recently reclaimed. Nevertheless, the differences are also
striking, as Bengal, despite its huge population and commercial resources, retained
predominantly rural, or at best rurban features. Far from strengthening the cities of an ever
shifting delta, land reclamation had stimulated the further gentrification of the countryside.
From this point of view, due do its many fixed towns which stood quite apart from the
surrounding countryside, it seems that Gujarat comes much closer to the urban landscape of
the Netherlands. As we all know, though, a crucial difference between the cities of Gujarat and
9
the Netherlands is of a political nature. In Gujarat, being part of a mighty empire based in the
interior, there was hardly room for the growth of city autonomy. Whereas the Dutch cities
combined their forces and managed to divorce from the Empire, the Gujarati towns either
served as imperial headquarters or were controlled by the imperial forces from a citadel inside
or a military camp outside the city walls. Let us compare for a moment the history of the two
imperial citadels of Utrecht and Surat. The first, called Vredeburg, was demolished in 1577 on
the initiative of the (predominantly female) citizens, something to be repeated in that same
decade in other Dutch cities like Gent and Antwerp. By contrast, the Surat Castle managed to
continue its hold over the city and eventually even staged the change of regime to the English
East India Company in 1757.18 The story illustrates the enhanced bargaining power of the
mostly mercantile Dutch citizens against the empire.
For both Gujarat and Bengal, the consequences of being part of a continental empire
were both positive and negative. From the purely economic point of view, the advantages of
Empire are comparable to present-day international trade-agreements like the European
Union.19 To have easy access to a rich and politically unified hinterland with many important
centres of consumption was a huge asset. Although we know from various revisionist studies
that the Mughal Empire was far less unified than imagined by the imperial chronicles, during
the Seventeenth Century, and along the main trading arteries, trade worked relatively well as
merchants could deal with at least one stable currency and with at least one imperial court. All
this contributed to great economic gains that compare quite well with the Low Countries, giving
rise to an extremely rich and powerful merchant community, in particular in the foremost hub
of Indian Ocean trade, Surat. Since the Netherlands were not part of a wider continental empire
and its elites could more efficiently operate within local politics, it is highly plausible that a large
part of the commercial profits ended up in the pockets of regional merchants, many of whom
became part of the urban magistrate. In the case of Gujarat, more so than in Bengal and
Coromandel, most merchants remained merchants and hardly ever shifted into the political
administration. Hence the concept of the portfolio-capitalist, that is merchants building political
careers and politicians building commercial businesses, seems to be more apposite for the
Bengali, Coromandel and indeed Dutch cases than for Gujarat. Although the clearly demarcated
10
division of tasks gives the latter the most modern impression, it was in particular in the Dutch
Republic that the mercantile urban elites were able to combine the advantages of small scale—
that is, an efficient contract between citizens and city-state—with the economies of large scale
–that is, the organisation of a political entity of about two million people covering an area much
larger than that of a single city-state.20 The case of Bengal comes closest to that of coastal
France and many other littorals that continued to be part of continental empires, where
merchants remained a subordinate force and towns were quick to move their accumulated
capital to the safe havens of venal office, noble titles, and landownership.21 Despite the various
differences, in the Eighteenth Century, both Gujarat and the Dutch Republic suffered from
closing hinterlands, in the first case, due to geopolitical shifts and imperial decline, in the
second case, due to rising protectionism.
Various economic historians, especially those close to the New Institutional Economics,
have stressed that although capital may have been there in huge amounts, it was incapable of
perpetuating itself as merchant operations lacked continuity over the generations.22 Indeed,
the sheer fluidity of Indian capital seems to neatly fit the idea of a society that is constantly on
the move—a feature that seems to hold for the entire range of society from peasants, weavers,
merchants, state officials, up towards the emperor himself. To link this argument to our topic of
consumption, it is quite obvious that all these peripatetic groups hardly had time to consume
beyond their immediate needs.23 In the same spirit, many scholars have noted that the longterm history of the subcontinent is characterized by ever-shifting, ‘disposable’ villages and
cities. Islamic cities and towns proliferated, and sometimes mushroomed, but even though they
were the nodal points of conquest, political power, and of commercial life, they never grew into
autonomous legal entities and the inhabitants of cities and towns enjoyed no special
privileges.24
Obviously, revisionist historians have raised considerable doubts about what could be
seen as just another orientalist stereotype to explain India’s ‘failure’. Focusing on the
Eighteenth Century, they have stressed instead that new regional states invested in urban
development and that a large amount of ‘industrial’ production took place within a domestic
sphere that appears village-based, but actually forms part of an ‘invisible city’ of extended
11
urban-based exchange matrices in which a hierarchy of towns served as distribution nodes.25 So
despite a growing consensus about a highly affluent and dynamic early modern Indian society,
there is much less agreement on the agency of merchants and the way they were able to
perpetuate capital in and beyond the domain of the city. It seems plausible that not so much
the city, but the court continued to attract huge amounts of mercantile capital that was lavishly
spent—be it through market-towns, temples or other religious endowments—on services
connected to patronage, warfare and agricultural expansion.26
Considering the relatively weak political position of Indian cities and the ongoing
centrality of Indian courts it seems appropriate to draw an admittedly somewhat artificial
distinction between urban Dutch and courtly Indian ways of consumption. Although Dutch
cities and Indian courts alike were increasingly influenced by mercantile interests and
mentalities, it showed in markedly different ways. Following the developments in the Italian
city-states, the Netherlands gradually developed a highly positive, republican attitude towards
material wealth.27 The vita active of collecting goods provided not only a tasteful and virtuous
liefhebberij of the individual but it also contributed ‘naturally’ to the public good of the
Republic.28 Hence it was the outlook of the merchant that inspired the emergence of liberal
economic thinking about the homo economicus, naturally seeking the maximization of his
needs, all to the benefit of society as a whole. The more consumption was perceived as
‘natural’ behaviour affecting ‘national’ interests, the more it could become a hedonistic and
‘economic’ end in itself.
For the body: Indian ways of consuming
Turning towards the changing consumption patterns in India, we should first of all stress that,
despite the emergence of coastal towns in Gujarat and Bengal, the main fashion centres
remained situated in the moving camps and shifting capitals of the interior. Taking the court as
a point of departure, the most adequate regional division that seems to present itself, is that
between a predominantly Islamic Mughal North and a predominantly Hindu Nayaka South. Of
course, there is much in between, but we simply do not know enough about the topic to make
12
further regional distinctions. Looking at the ever changing styles at the Indian courts, we can
simply dismiss Fernand Braudel’s stunning conclusion that Asia lacked fashion.29 For example,
we know quite well how Akbar consciously fashioned both himself and his court in the early
Seventeenth Century. From the Delhi sultanate period onwards, we can follow in detail how,
together with Indo-Persian good manners (adab), courtly dress, art and architecture spread
from the Islamic North to an increasingly Islamicate Deccan and Carnatic in the South. At the
same time, Brahmin intellectuals, Rajput warriors and many other non-Muslims influenced an
extremely hybrid Mughal style. So, far from lacking fashion, the Indian courts changed as
rapidly in taste and style as their European counterparts. It seems not too farfetched to
propose some kind of Eurasian courtly continuum as the eclectic styles of the Indo-Islamic
courts connected quite well to the Mannerist, Baroque and Rococo styles of the European
courts. By contrast, from the early Seventeenth Century onward, Dutch burghers started to turn
their back on the grotesque Neo-Platonist forms of the Counter Reformation and the Catholic
courts and instead increasingly preferred a more down to earth, more ‘authentic’ naturalism
naer het leven.30
What was most important about courtly consumption was ritual display. This was
quite universal. From a more specific Hindu perspective, the role of the king as chief gift-giver
and receiver was a reflection of his ancient status as sacrifice-in-chief and preserver of the
order of castes.31 As such, consumption reflected a conscious ritualisation of everyday life. For
Hindu and Muslim kings alike, expenditure was an expression of legitimate rule. What was
really new at the Nayaka courts of the South, was that kings combined their traditional dharmic
components of consumption—endowments, public works and charities—with an obsession
with their own bodies through the enjoyment of food and sex. Interestingly, like the Dutch,
Nayaka consumption was increasingly focused on the physical self, although the latter never
developed in the naturalistic, hedonistic direction of the first, as the body remained an
instrument to achieve spiritual growth and transcendence.32
More generally speaking, it appears that all Indian kings were keen to demonstrate
excessive magnanimity to ever more followers; they bestowed less, as in the past, in landed
13
wealth, and ever more so in movable wealth connected to the body such as clothes, jewellery,
cosmetics, weaponry, and in particular, foodstuffs. It would be worthwhile to study the trade
and spread of such digestible commodities from common addictives like areca, tobacco, drugs,
wines and spirits, to specific dishes and their ingredients like vegetables, fruits, spices and
sugar. We should also know more about the social (private or public, for example at temples,
sufi-hospices, mosques, bathhouses) and material (for example, clay pipes, water pipes, betel
boxes) context in which these were consumed beyond the court environment.33
In the mid-Eighteenth Century, the French commander in Bengal, Jean Law de Lauriston,
drew a telling comparison between the European and the Indian sense of luxury. First of all, he
stressed that Muslims and Hindus alike loved pomp and circumstance for outward, public
occasions. But at home and in their private lives, they were much more modest than their
European counterparts. Lacking any embarrassment of riches, they had a predilection for
sumptuous parades, dinners and other public parties with huge numbers of musicians, dancers
and attendants. In contrast, their private homes were quite sober, with little furniture or other
decorative objects like tableware, vases or statues. As they had their own gold and silverwares,
they had no liking at all for European manufacturers.34
Law de Lauriston’s description seems to be confirmed by many other, perhaps slightly
less explicit eighteenth-century travel accounts, and even more or so by the ‘mirror’
descriptions of contemporary Indian visitors to Europe.35 Drawing a sharp contrast with his own
country, the Indian visitor Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin felt ashamed about the behavior of his
Indian countrymen. Indeed, for Englishmen wealth was necessary ‘to make life pleasant and
easy’, but:
Worldly riches ought not to be squandered on luxurious living, on fine clothes,
choice cuisine and drinks, and on collecting a bevy of singing and dancing women with
whom to spend endless days and nights, as the wealthy noblemen of India are wont to
do. These Indians shut themselves up with their women in the zenana and become
effeminate in their ways, flirting as if they were women. They wear churidar trousers
and churidar turbans, bright kurtas that end in a flared skirt such as women wear, apply
14
perfume to the breast, antinomy on their eyes, henna on their palms, stain their teeth
with missee and keep long hair, which they groom with scented oils and tie into a knot.
And yet, when they go out they make great pomp and display, with many horses and
carriages, a numerous retinue, and such loud fanfare that people might take them for
heroes returning from battle. There is a mighty roll of drums, rockets go off, standards
flutter in the breeze, nukeebs [ushers] proclaim their masters’ grandiloquent titles in
stentorian tones, shobdars [mace-bearers] and attendants of all sorts order common
subjects out of the way and loudly recite their prayers for the long life and prosperity of
their masters.36
This citation virtually repeats the comments made by Law de Lauriston in exactly that
same timeframe of the mid-eighteenth century. Of course, part of this may be part of a nascent
orientalist discourse on effeminate decadence, but it should also be stressed that the
Frenchman insisted that his view on Indian luxury was actually meant to counter some
misguided European stereotypes. Interestingly, just a few decades later, another Indian visitor
to Britain, Mirza Abu Talib, is really amazed about a phenomenon that he had never
experienced before:
I can scarcely describe the pleasure I felt, upon my first arrival in Europe, in
being able to walk out unattended, to make my own bargains in the shops, and to talk to
whom I pleased; so different from our customs.37
This kind of unattended shopping may have been unusual for the elites, for the common
Indian any kind of shopping was probably much beyond his/her means. According to
Christopher Bayly, writing about northern India, the importance of consumption by the elites
was enhanced by the low level of demand from the mass of the population. This was only partly
the result of poverty and climate, and mainly due to cultural models of patterns of
consumption. Apart from royal pomp, the priestly, merchant and even peasant styles shunned
display and actually emphasised frugality.38 Not surprisingly, after the decline of the Mughal
court-system, it took a while before the wealthy new conquest groups shook off their ascetic
15
patterns of consumption. Bayly provides one revealing example of a former Mughal official who
in the 1760s noted that the houses of the Poona Maratha and Brahmin elites were ‘as poor as
those of mahajans [great merchants], having neither gardens nor stables’.39 It was only at the
end of the Eighteenth Century that something of the old spirit of ostentation re-established
itself in the new successor states of northern India. The elaborate eclectic patterns of
consumption that emerged in these sub-Mughal courts proved to be an excellent medium
through which European cloth and clothes could become valued articles. Like the new Persian
styles that followed the mid-eighteenth century conquests of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah
Durrani, at the end of that century, English fabrics and English clothing styles gained a foothold
in the Indian market as tokens of superior European power.40
For all contemporary observers, the place par excellence of Indian luxury was and
remained the court, where fashions changed. At the same time, due to the increasing
availability of cash, courtly generosity took more fluid forms and as such stimulated
consumption both by the kings themselves as well as by the growing numbers office-holders,
officials and other recipients. All this happened in the context of ever more sophisticated
bureaucracies and an increasingly dynamic economy which had developed numerous forms of
proto-capitalism.41 From the point of view of consumption, it is quite remarkable that these
characteristics were not matched by a parallel development in consumer behaviour, be it
among or beyond the courtly circles. For example, perceptions of pollution and auspiciousness,
as much as the spirit of the gift, continued to adhere to products that were circulated within a
fully developed market system. For example, cloth was not just a commodity: different fabrics,
weaves and colours could change the moral and physical substance of the individual. There
were also many persistent taboos. Encouraged by the sayings of the Prophet many Muslims
abjured the wearing of silk as it inhibited proper submission to God. Many Hindus, though,
considered silk purer than cotton and abhorred the stitched cloth worn by Muslims. Hence for
many Hindus, the tailor remained an outcast. Indeed, textiles reflected the wearer as much as
the manufacturer: coarse cotton weavers taking the lowest position, silk weavers the highest
position in the social hierarchy of Hindus and Muslims alike. As the Indian consumer market
remained extremely segmented, there could only be a partial commodification of textiles.
16
Finally, compared to the Dutch situation with relatively high silver wages, it seems that
consumption by the lower layers of the Indian society was in all its regions negatively affected
by low earnings. It seems that manufactures in particular remained relatively expensive for the
bulk of Indian consumers.42 Anyway, except for the court and its higher service elites, it is likely
that the lower and middling classes simply lacked any interest in purchasing manufactures that
could not be properly stored or displayed. It remains to be seen to what extent the low silver
wages could be compensated for by an Indian industrious revolution. However the segmented
market conditions and the real estate did not stimulate common households to reallocate time
from household to market production. But, here again, more research is needed before we can
draw any conclusions.
By way of conclusion
Both the Netherlands and India experienced rising levels of consumption during the
early modern era. In both cases, it followed booming global commerce and mounting incomes
for the most mercantile sections of society. In both cases, there was a growing public and
personal sense of luxury: more people were seeking more and more refined goods with which
they consciously fashioned themselves. In both cases, individuals felt more comfortable about
their ostentatious behaviour as they became increasingly aware that it contributed to the
immanent and the transcendent good of the self and the society at large. Apart from these
more general commonalities which indeed indicate something of an increasingly self-conscious
early modern consumer, there are also various important quantitative and qualitative
differences. Although in both cases, fashions were determined by the courts, it was only in the
Dutch Republic that it penetrated deeply into the increasingly rich urban community of
burghers. Trickling down the society, the courtly way of consumption was gradually
transformed into something that was less about rarity and social differentiation and more
about easy replication and social integration. In India, the courts continued to hold sway over
people’s consumer behaviour which far from being static was increasingly expressed in
17
movable goods, ever more refined manners, and, in the case of the Nayakas, focused more and
more on the physical body. This is a far cry indeed from the Dutch cities where luxuries were
directed more towards the home than towards the body and were directed more to comfort
than refinement.43 But if ‘modern’ consumption is about nondurable goods, the Indian focus on
bodily consumption is clearly the more modern one.
It is also crucial to realize that although pre-colonial Indian wealth was extremely lavish,
it was also more fragile and fluid than in the Dutch Republic, as it failed to find convenient and
safe private storage space. I am well aware that here I find myself in some uncomfortable
agreement with earlier observations that have become part of the orientalist discourse on the
topic. At the same time, nobody will deny that global trade generated more income for Dutch
and Indian merchants alike who increasingly infiltrated the political institutions of their cities
and courts. Partly as a result of that, Dutch towns and Indian courts developed into sumptuous
and astonishingly creative centres of consumption. As it remained wedded to the court and
retained strong social and ritual connotations, consumption in early modern India did not
become a universal, hedonistic end in itself, which may explain why it failed to penetrate the
society as much as in the Dutch case. Thus it seems that in the wake of increasing global
interaction, both the cities of the Netherlands and the courts of India, developed new but
different ways of consumption.
1
Cited in Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Edition, 1996), p. 424.
For details and some useful criticism, see Craig Clunas, ‘Modernity and Global and Local: Consumption and the
Rise of the West’, The American Historical Review, 104 (1999), pp. 1497-1511.
3
Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4
Jan de Vries, ‘The Economic Crisis of the Seventeenth Century after Fifty Years’, Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Autumn, 2009), pp. 151-94.
5
Peter Kriedte, ‘Vom Grosshändler zum Detailliten. Der Handel mit “Kolonialwaren” im 17. Und 18. Jahrhundert’,
Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftgeschichte (1994), pp. 21-4.
6
Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present
(Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2008).
7
Jan de Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 54,
No. 2 (June 1994), pp. 249-70.
8
See for example Anne E.C. McCants, ‘Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking
about Globalization in the Early Modern World’, Journal of World History, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2007), pp. 433-62.
2
18
9
See the contributions of Frits Scholten and Mary de Jong in Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis (ed.), Sits: Oost-west relaties
in textiel (Zwolle: Waanders, 1987).
10
Heleen B. van der Weel, ‘In die kunst en wetenschap gebruyckt’: Gerrit Claeszoon Clinck (1646-1693), meester
kunstschilder van Delft en koopman in dienst van de Verenigde Indische Compagnie (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002).
11
Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis (ed.), ‘Sits en katoendruk, handel en fabricage in Nederland’, in Hartkamp-Jonxis, Sits,
pp. 31-41; Beverly Lemire & Giorgio Reillo, ‘East and West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of
Social History, Vol. 41, No. 4 (2008), pp. 890-2.
12
J.J. Voskuil, ‘De verspreiding van koffie en thee in Nederland’, Volkskundig Bulletin, Vol. 14 (1988), pp. 68-92. For
a more recent survey, see Anne E.C. McCants, ‘Poor Consumers as Global Consumers: The Diffusion of Tea and
Coffee Drinking in the Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review, Vol. 61,No. 1 (2008), pp. 172-200.
13
Jan van Campen & Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis, Aziatische Weelde: VOC-kunst in het Rijksmuseum (Zutphen:
Walburg Pers, 2011), pp. 12-23; 69-80.
14
This builds heavily on Jan de Vries, ‘Luxury in the Dutch Golden Age in Theory and Practice’, in Maxine Berg and
Elizabeth Eger (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (New York: Palgrave,
2003), pp. 41-57.
15
John U. Nef, Cultural Foundations of Industrial Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).
16
Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University
of Hawai`I Press, 2004; first published in 1991) and Timothy Brooke, The Confusion of Pleasure: Commerce and
Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also the important work of Antonia
Finnane: Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550-1850 (Cambridge Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
and Changing Cloth in China (London: Hurst, 2007).
17
For example, Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in
Premodern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).
18
See Jos Gommans and Jitske Kuiper, ‘The Surat Castle Revolutions: Myths of Anglo-Bania Order and Dutch
Neutrality, c. 1740-1760’, The Journal of Early Modern History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2006), pp. 361-90.
19
This comparison is relative and historical. Obviously, the Mughal Empire was never able to abolish transit duties
or create uniform trade conditions as affectively as the EU.
20
Jan Luiten van Zanden and Maarten Prak, ‘Towards an Economic Interpretation of Citizenship: The Dutch
Republic between Medieval Communes and Modern Nation-States’, European Review of Economic History, Vol. 10
(2006), pp. 111–45.
21
De Vries, ‘The Economic Crisis’, p. 172 (statement of De Vries only relates to France).
22
Also based on Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s discussion, referring to the work of the 1970’s of Sinnappah
Arasaratnam, Peter Marshall, Michael Pearson and Ashin Das Gupta in the volume he edited: Merchants, Markets
and the State in Early Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990): pp. 11-2.
23
Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India
1720-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001), pp. 9-42.
24
K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘Some Reflections on the Town and Country in Mughal India’, Modern Asian Studies, 12,1 (1978),
77-96; André Wink, ‘From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean: Medieval History in Geographic Perspective’,
Comparative Studies on Society and History, Vol. 44 (2002), pp. 416-45.
25
James Heitzman, The City in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 97. See also the process described in Frank
Perlin, The Invisible City: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500-1900
(Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), mainly applicable to the late-Eighteenth Century.
26
This is not to deny that pre-colonial India knew long-term (mainly) rural property rights in the hands of specific
groups.
27
For the Italian context, see Mark Jurdjevic, ‘Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment:
Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Debate’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 62, No. 2 (2001), pp.
721-43.
19
28
Based on Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New
Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007).
29
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Volume 1: The Structures of Everyday Life: The
Limits of the Possible (London: Fontana Press, 1985), pp. 311-33.
30
Piet Emmer en Jos Gommans, Rijk aan de rand van wereld: De geschiedenis van Nederland overzee 1600-1800
(Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 2012), pp. 103-120.
31
This argument mainly builds on Chris Bayly’s contributions in his Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian
Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 57-63, 14451, and ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700-1930)’, in: C.A. Bayly, Origins of
Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1998), pp. 172-210.
32
Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in
Nayaka Period Tamilnadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 80-2; 168
33
One way to proceed is suggested by the pioneering work of Rudi Matthee on Iran: The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs
and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).
34
Jean Law de Lauriston in his Mémoire sur quelques affaires de l’Empire mogul (1763), cited in Guy Deleury, Les
Indes florissantes: Anthologie des voyageurs français (1750-1820) (Paris: Robert Laffont 1991), pp. 260-4.
35
For other European accounts on the topic, see e.g. Deleury’s fourth chapter ‘Des secrets de bonne santé’, in
Indes florissantes.
36
Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, originally in Persian of a Visit to France
and Britain in 1765, translated by Kaisar Haq (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2001), p. 125.
37
Westward Bound: Travels of Mirza Abu Talib, edited by Mushirul Hasan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005),
pp. 113-4.
38
Om Prakash, ‘The Indian Maritime Merchant, 1500-1800’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient, Vol. 47, No. 3 (2004), pp. 435-57.
39
Bayly, Rulers, p. 61. Bayly guesses that this goes back to the Khizana-i Amirah (c. 1762-3) of the chronicler Mir
Ghulam Ali Khan.
40
For a recent illustration, see Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gude (eds), India’s Fabled City: The Art of
Courtly Lucknow (Munich: DelMonico Books – Prestel Verlag, 2011).
41
For the increasing political clout of ever more professional Brahmin, Kayastha and Karanan scribal groups, see
Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook (eds), Munshis, Pandits and Record-Keepers: Scribal Communities and
Historical Change in India. Special Issue Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 47, No. 4 (2010).
42
Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic
Development in Europe and Asia, 1500-1800’, Economic History Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (2006), pp. 2-31.
43
De Vries, ‘Luxury in the Dutch Golden Age’, p. 51; I have omitted the middle section of this citation: ‘and adorned
the interior – of both home and body – more than the exterior’.
20