Report from Copenhagen
I arrived on Sunday the 22nd of January and late on Thursday the 26th. The main objective was to visit
the Rigsarkivet and the archive after the Danish East India Company.
Building on my previous work on the Swedish company and their auctions, I was particularly
interested to look at a sequence of auction catalogues from the 1750s. They turned out to be
annotated, indicating prices paid for goods, as well as buyers. One of the catalogues was complete,
the one for the year 1756, containing material brought to Copenhagen with the ship Dronning
Juliana from Canton.
Using this expedition as my starting point I ordered up a wide range of material which could
illuminate the preparation of the expedition, instructions to supercargoes, protocols from the
negotiations with the Hong Merchants, account books from Canton, and diaries for the executive
around the date the ship arrived home and the date of the sale.
I took pictures of this material. I will use it to start off with to further my discussion of the prices of
different bundles of silk fabrics with different combination of colours.