1
Europe’s Asian Centuries: Material Culture and Useful Knowledge
1600-1800
Introduction
During the past ten years there has been a new foregrounding of
the role of India and China in emerging European industrialization. Their
industrial and agricultural products fed escalating consumer desires in
the West. China and India were the ‘first industrial regions’ providing
manufactured export goods on a mass scale to markets throughout the
world , as they are now doing once again. We are now living in a new
Asian Century. But we must remember a history of Europe’s earlier
Asian centuries of that period between 1600 and 1800 when Europe
discovered and traded in Asian products on a large scale, bringing
cotton textiles, ceramics and tea drinking into the fabric of everyday
lives. These centuries have been revisited by several generations of
historians who have recounted experiences of encounter and
possession, and have recast different versions of the ‘rise of the west’.
What I would like to do here is to look back to Europe’s Asian
centuries, not just as an event of linked consumer cultures, but of largescale industrial production, providing for huge domestic and global
markets. This was first of all an Indian and Chinese achievement; in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries their industries
expanded through labour intensification and reorganization to provide a
large scale export ware sector.
Above all this was a manufacturing system adept at providing the
goods that people wanted to buy. Products and quality were as
significant to this trade as were productivity growth. Theirs was the
industry which ultimately stimulated the technological transformation in
Europe. European manufacturers and inventors throughout the latter
half of the eighteenth century tested their patents, projects and products
against the great achievements of translucent Chinese porcelain and
Indian textiles in madder red and indigo dyes, in glorious prints or in the
textures of the finest muslins. This is the story which should, I want to
argue, precede our explanation of European industrialization.
B. Global History
2
This narrative and analysis of industrialization is part of a recent turning
to what we now call global history. That global history was once a history
of globalization, centred on big themes of politics and economics. But
historians have recently ranged much wider, and global history has
brought together historians from many different trajectories – colonial
and imperial history, S. Asian and East Asian and more recently South
American area studies, Ottoman and Islamic world studies, and
historians of cultural and religious encounter and engagement.
This approach to history has challenged the old national histories and
area studies as well as periodizations which have dominated our
disciplinary divisions. What is Europe in the wider space of Eurasia?
What is the early modern in a history which encompasses the YuanMing porcelain trade from Jingdezhen and Chola and Vijayanagar period
textile travels? Sanjay Subrahmanyam in a seminal essay published
nearly fifteen years ago, identified the ways in which national histories
and area studies had disconnected our histories. Historical
ethnography, moreover, had emphasised difference from the vantage
point of the observer over the observed. He asked that ‘once more, that
we not only compare from within our boxes, but spend some time and
effort to transcend them, not by comparison alone but by seeking out the
at times fragile threads that connected the globe, even as the globe
came to be defined as such.’1
And yet it has been difficult to move beyond the economic and
political frameworks of those grand narratives of domination and
resistance centred on empire building and nation states. Their big
questions are very compelling, and the source of enduring interest: they
have focussed on the sources of the great divergence between West
and East, on the historical phases of globalization, and on the rise and
decline of empires.2 3Fifteen years on from ‘Connected Histories’ we
still have a long way to go.
The great divergence which has framed so much of our recent
thinking in global history has yielded large-scale comparative studies on
differences in resource bases, capital inputs, population and wages or
institutional structures and state building among the great regions of the
world. Investigating the sources of the Great Divergence attracts us
because it challenges us to turn our sights outwards from our own
internal histories, to compare the resource base of the Yangtze Delta to
that of Northwest Europe, to compare London wage rates with those of
Beijing. Much data has been collected on these comparisons; the focus
has moved out to include comparisons with India as well as China and
Japan, and also the Ottoman and Spanish Empires.4
3
The Divergence debate revived an increasingly narrowed and
even moribund economic history. ‘Economic historians previously
locked away in the study of their particular country and period have been
forced to confront the inter-connectedness of their specialisms.’5 We
have learned much, but there is a sense in which the Divergence debate
has reinforced a series of much older questions.
First it focussed on what Europe had and Asia did not,
subsequently using this as an explanation. Geography, ecology and
environment provided an early key indicator of comparison. Pomeranz
argued that ecological imbalance in access to coal followed by the
development of technologies using coal set the course for a divergence
of Europe’s growth over Asia’s from the later eighteenth century. The
ensuing debate among a wide group of European, Asian and world
historians has only left entrenched a long-standing emphasis on the part
played by Britain’s superior coal reserves in her industrialization. 6
Another major issue arising out of the divergence debate is wages
and prices, which has coalesced into another old issue, that of wages
and the standard of living. Once again intensive, and now global effort is
focussed on demonstrating higher wages and standards of living in
Britain - indeed not even Britain – but England - than in the rest of
Europe, and now the rest of the world, with ensuing consequences for
the development of labour-saving technologies.7
The Divergence Debate originally challenged historians to think
outside their national boundaries, and to compare Europe with parts of
Asia in the period before Europe’s industrialization. But it has been
turned by economic historians back to a series of old methodologies and
debates. Where during a recent period we had at least started to think
about industrialization in a European context, it is ironic that the
Divergence Debate has driven us back to narrow considerations of
England.
Comparative static analysis of growth rates, econometric exercises
on data sets of prices, wages and productivity has led us away from
approaches that change the way we think. The stages of economic
history reveal a resurgence of the same questions, similar approaches,
and much the same data. During the 1960s we compared European
economies, but to map out the stages of economic growth. Questions
focused on the sources of economic growth narrowed comparative
studies of the European economies. These comparative studies were
also applied by some to offer blueprints of development to the Third
4
World.8 During the 1970s, debates over the standard of living and
capital formation generated data on and analysis of wages and interest
rates in various cities and regions of England, Scotland and parts of
Europe.9 Data sets sometimes added to, but more frequently rearranged
provided for a return to old questions of growth accounting.10 How much
further on have we moved from the questions posed by Nicholas Crafts
in 1977 in his ‘Industrial revolution in Britain and France: some thoughts
on the question “why was England first”?11 Joel Mokyr’s questions ten
years later ‘Has the Industrial Revolution been crowded out? have still to
be answered:
‘…the works of Williamson and Crafts mark important advances in the
study and understanding of a critical episode in world history, one that
will require the collaboration of economists, social historians,
demographers, and others to comprehend fully. At this stage it seems
that we have run into strongly diminishing returns in analyzing the same
body of data over and over again. The highest-return strategy now is to
uncover new data and explore hitherto unused sources to fill in a few
more corners in this jigsaw puzzle in which most of the pieces will
remain missing forever.’12
It is time to shift some of our questions to more open-ended ones
over global connections: how did the transmission of material culture
and useful knowledge across regions of the world affect the economic
and cultural developments in any one of these regions? This leads us
into narratives of interaction which could take us deeper into the analysis
of imperial domination, but equally lead us into the connections that
contributed to economic development in Europe.
Europe’s Asian Centuries
To this end it is time to turn to a large-scale study of EICs and private
trade in the transfer of manufactured goods, their material culture and
useful knowledge from Asia to Europe.
A hypothesis to investigate is that Europe’s pursuit of quality
goods turned a pre-modern encounter with precious and exotic
ornament into a modern globally-organized trade in Asian export ware.
Ironically, the result was Europe’s industrialization and China’s and
India’s displacement as the world’s leading manufacturers. (It is of
course a further irony that the late twentieth and the twenty-first
centuries have seen Europe’s loss of those manufacturing catalysts of
textiles, ceramics and metal goods back to Asia; but this is another
story.)
5
It is time to look in greater depth at those Asian goods which so
fascinated Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The
porcelain and textiles collections of our great museums have been
intensively studied by museum curators and collectors. Their knowledge
is prodigious, and their exhibitions convey a history to a wider public that
has only recently reached scholarly history writing. The artefacts they
conserve and display are the visual sources of a wider-world impact on
European material cultures.13
Trading Eurasia has to be sure been the focus of the many great
studies of Europe’s East India Companies. There have been histories of
the VOC, the EIC, the French East India Companies, the Danish and
Swedish Companies, and the Ostend Company as well as of the Indies
projects of other European powers and the private merchants
interspersed among them.14 But the histories of these EICs have been
hived off into a separate history of colonialism and empire. There are
also large-scale quantitative data bases of trade, but this data has been
aggregated, and the characteristics of the goods traded expunged from
the historical record. How else can an economic historian deal with the
hundreds of varieties of cloth traded?
Yet a comment by a French East India Company servant may
better capture the realities of the Asian trade. ‘All the science of the
merchant, he wrote, is restricted to the knowledge of the different types
of these cloth’.15 . It is time that we too enquired into the characteristics
and qualities of the goods brought from Asia and how these were
integrated into European imaginations and everyday life. This is where I
think we can take global history in new directions. We can then look at
the impact of the connections in material culture and useful knowledge
on crucial economic transitions in the west. One way forward is to
investigate the way in which the companies helped to create a largescale Asian export-ware sector, one that fed Europe’s insatiable demand
for millions of pieces of textiles and thousands of tons of porcelain.
First we must remind ourselves of the size of this Asia trade to
Europe. Tea, textiles, porcelain, lacquerware , furnishings, drugs and
dyestuffs made for a systematic global trade carried in quantities which
by the later eighteenth century came to 50,000 tons a year, as estimated
by Jan de Vries. This made for just over one pound of Asian goods per
person for a European population of roughly 100 million. 16If we look to
textiles and porcelain alone, we see the prodigious amounts of these
goods reaching Europe from the 17th C. Riello’s recent estimates show
1.3 million pieces of cotton textiles reaching Europe by the late 1680s,
and 24.3 million pieces over the period1665-1799. 17 Recent
6
comparative disaggregation of this data indicates the high proportions of
plain cottons and muslins, as well as the striped and printed calicoes
that were important to the trade. By the early eighteenth century there
was a European printing industry drawing on high quality Indian cottons
as intermediate goods.
The indicators for porcelain are similar. The British alone imported
between 1 and 2 million pieces a year of Chinese porcelain by the early
18th C. The Dutch imported 43 million pieces from the beginning of the
seventeenth century to the end of the 18thCentury.18 But there was also
a differentiation in the types of porcelain imported. Individual pieces
brought into Europe as exotica and curiosities in the sixteenth century
gave way by the mid Seventeenth Century to systematic imports of large
numbers of pieces systematically produced for Western taste.
Porcelain dealers in Batavia received two million pieces a year by
the 1690s; some of these were transhipped to Europe, others entered
the intra-Asian trade. By the early eighteenth century these imports of
porcelain reached 13.3% of Asian imports by the English East India
Company, and the English Customs Accounts recorded high value
imports, valued at £150,621 in the later 1750s.19 The European
companies imported several thousand chests of porcelain in any one
year in the 1760s and 1770 on ships that even much earlier in the
eighteenth century brought in over 100,000 tea cups, 40,000 chocolate
cups with handles, and 10,000 milk jugs in a single voyage.20
Increasingly after the mid eighteenth century private trade took
more of this trade. Officers and seamen on East India Company vessels
could carry 80 tons of private trade of all types of oriental decorative
wares, furnishings and especially porcelain. The VOC after 1756
declared that its official imports from China were to include only ‘current
ware,’ that is dinner plates, tea and coffee cups and saucers, and wares
bringing in a fixed profit. The English East India Company did likewise in
the 1770s, restricting official imports from China to tea and standard
lines of silks and chinaware. Privilege or private trade was the route
through which specialty goods were imported.21
The Commercial Ledgers of the English East India Company;
similarly the VOC provide an immensely rich detailed account of the
products sought from China and India, as well as commentary on those
provided. Recent work I have been conducting with postdocs on my
project can be conveyed through a few examples from the 1719/1720
and 1730. The list of goods ordered from Canton for the Ship
7
Mountague in 1719 included 218,000 pieces of porcelain, finely
described as for example:
‘Boats – of different sizes, variety of paints & sprigs or running
work instead of blue sprigs in the border with a pretty deal of scarlet –
10,000; Coloured – 5,000, ditto blue – 5,000. [E/3/100 1720]
…If any Japan Junks be at Canton while you are there which have
Japan earthen ware you may buy some…buy none that are large
pieces…
If you find any new sort or fashion of china ware which is useful &
you think may be acceptable in England buy some of it.’
In 1720 394,000 pieces of textiles in 72 different types were
ordered on ships going to Bengal [Chaudhuri – has 462,875 actually
imported from Bengal in that year]
Comments on the Sannoes brought back on the first ships were
that they were of too deep a blue. ‘They must be of a lighter blue.
Some yellow and some red…all sorts to be glazed.’
The taffetas ordered from Canton in 1730 came with the
instructions:
‘….one half must be of all sorts of Cloth colours and the other half
of lively reds, blues, greens, yellows, and some white, according to the
patterns which Mr. Torriano carrys with him, the most variety among the
cloth colours the better, bring very few Crimsons, and fewer still of the
dark dirty greens…’
On flowered taffetas …’for variety, we should have one thousand
pieces more or less, in hopes you may get them better fancy’d and
perform’d of various stripes, sprigs and flowers, for many pieces of one
pattern will never do.’ [E/3/105 1730]
These East India Companies were selling to merchants who knew
their markets. These were goods which reached surprisingly far down
the social classes. 30-50% of English inventories from various parts of
the country contained chinaware.22 The Irish were also enthusiastic
customers. Porcelain was widely smuggled in, and many anticipated the
arrival of East Indiamen and auctions of their contents in Cork, Dublin
and inland towns.23 More than 50% of recently-studied Dutch and
Southern Netherlandish probate inventories left porcelain by the 1740s.24
Other recent studies of the textiles in the inventories of the Amsterdam
8
Orphanage in the 1740s to 1780s show both rich and poor buying
Asiatic textiles for different purposes.25
Another important point to remember about the material culture of
these goods is their longevity. Chinaware was bequeathed and
recycled, distributed through poorer groups in a second-hand trade,
sometimes in damaged or chipped form. Likewise clothing and textile
furnishings were bequeathed, passed on, or stolen. They were cut down
and refashioned from mistresses to servants, from mothers to children,
from wealthy households to pedlars remaking and selling on stolen
goods. Asian imported commodities and others made to imitate them
had a much wider use and cultural impact than indicated in trade data
alone.26
The impact of these Asian imports was to stimulate a new
industrial response in Europe – one in which European entrepreneurs
adapted Asian design, production and industrial organization. I have
argued elsewhere that this imitation of Asian consumer goods generated
product innovation and invention in Britain and other parts of Europe.
Responding to demand from the East India Companies, Asian
manufacturers developed an export-ware sector which would first enable
the Companies to extend their markets in Europe, and then stimulate
European manufacturers to develop their own consumer goods
industries.
But how can we study this? Historians in the past debated the
extent to which the early stages of Europe’s industrialization were
processes of import substitution. The concept of import substitution
itself derives from models applied by development economists to less
developed economies after the Second World War; these were advised
to promote with high tariff walls industries which would produce goods
similar to those formerly imported.
There were parallel theories of export promotion to describe
developments in parts of Asia, especially S. Korea and Taiwan in the
1980s, where specific industries competed with western counterparts.
The limitations of these policies have been retold many times since the
1980s. 27 But these concepts are too narrow to help us to understand
Europe’s remarkable response to Asia’s manufacturing leadership in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Historians applying these twentieth century models failed to
connect trade with consumer markets or technologies. They did not
identify the ways that imports from outside a region changed consumer
horizons and family behaviour, in short, what Jan de Vries has called an
9
‘industrious revolution’. Their discussions of export promotion have
been part of the older framework of industry and empire. Most
fundamentally, they have left unexplored the stimulation of learning and
knowledge offered by global interconnections; the learning of new skills
and understanding materials offered in the response to imports.
A better model entails two developments. First, there was the
accessing of diverse quality consumer goods from Asia. Cultivation of
an export ware sector by the East India Companies entailed industrial
development in Asia and marketing there and onwards to Europe which
focussed on variety, quality and quantity.
Second, there was a process of imitative invention in Europe to
create a consumer goods sector. This was based in product innovation,
new technologies and organization. The widespread import of Asian
goods into Europe from the seventeenth century onwards came with
dense information networks which fostered markets, but also spurred
those involved to envisage changing materials, adapting designs and
introducing new techniques that would break through traditional
processes.
Physical contact with imported objects was vital; European
manufacturers came to the East India Company auctions to touch the
cloth, count the threads, and assess the quality. Europe’s early porcelain
manufacturers borrowed princely Chinese porcelain collections to a
similar purpose. Armed with this information, they dissected,
experimented and adapted skills honed to other purposes.28 Asian
goods and their technologies provided new challenges, perceived at the
time to be quite distinct from those posed by earlier European imports.
It is also vital to see that Lancashire’s incipient and rapidly growing
cotton industry in the early 18thC. was focussed on developing its export
markets as well as meeting domestic demand. The Calico Acts banned
imports of printed cottons in 1701; in 1721 this extended to all cottons,
but not if they were printed in England and subsequently re-exported.
This export ware focus was thus transmitted into the early
developing printing and cotton industry in Britain itself. Britain’s own
export markets were built rapidly in the American and Caribbean
colonies, and her cotton manufacturers tried at the outset to compete
with EIC merchants in the Africa trade.
Eighteenth-century political economists and manufacturers
understood this. They saw that the impact of Asia was both one of both
material culture and useful knowledge. What Europeans appreciated
10
was the scale and diversity of those Asian imports. The Asian
technologies were based on imitative principles: modularity,
standardization, mechanical replication. Craft skill combined with mass
production to produce diverse and distinctive products. In eighteenthcentury terms, exotic ornament was being turned into ‘modern luxuries’.
The remainder of my paper will investigate these connections
between East India Company trade and the learning entailed in
gathering ‘useful knowledge.’ This entails connecting eighteenth-century
commerce with what has come to be termed the ‘industrial
enlightenment’.
Global Connections: Material Culture and Useful Knowledge
My focus on imports and an Asian export-ware sector leads to a new
interrogation of connections – connections both in material culture - in
the making of commodities – and in the knowledge of production. This
leads us into issues of what Joel Mokyr has called the ‘industrial
enlightenment’. Mokyr made a case that the West developed a very
specific ‘useful knowledge’. This ‘useful knowledge’ was knowledge of
natural phenomena that might be manipulated by human endeavour: it
encompassed practical and informal knowledge as well as theory and
codified formal knowledge; it included the work of those who collected
observations and who compiled dictionaries and encyclopedias of arts
and manufactures with their descriptions of industrial skills and crafts.29
Mokyr took a firm line that the real divergence between the West and the
rest of the world did not arise from differences in resource endowments,
but from a ‘knowledge revolution’ that took place in the West and not
elsewhere’. Mokyr, and indeed his critics, Epstein and Allen, all believed
that this knowledge revolution was Europe’s ‘miracle’ over the rest of the
world.30 ‘Useful knowledge was developed with an aggressiveness and
single mindedness no society had experienced before’.31
Mokyr provocatively declared: ‘Many societies we associate with
technological stasis were full of highly skilled artisans, not least of all
Southern and Eastern Asia.’ This contrasts with ‘a society where the
world of artisans is constantly shocked with infusions of new knowledge
from outsiders.’32
Indeed, Kuznets’ claim back in 1965 that ‘useful knowledge’ was
the source of modern economic growth did not open the comparative
global history that started with the ‘divergence’ debate. Kenneth
Pomeranz who coined the ‘great divergence’ and has led the new global
11
Historians of science have now taken up Asia’s alternative
knowledge systems, and have developed concepts of ‘cosmopolitan
science’. But what I want to argue here is that trade was not just in
commodities, but in the knowledge of manufactures in other parts of the
world.
This knowledge can be recovered in political economy, travellers’
accounts, the surveys of natural historians, and the investigations made
by merchants and agents of Europe’s East India Companies. Those
accounts provide us with some access to that knowledge of ‘outsiders’,
and perceptions at the time of transfers of skills and knowledge.
Through these we can approach the question: ‘how much did Europe
learn from Asia?’
If we turn first to contemporary economic writing, what we find is a
political economy addressed to products, their characteristics and their
qualities, to innovation based in artisan skill, and to learning from China
and India. We can look to David Hume’s point ‘our own steel and iron, in
such laborious hands, become equal to the gold and rubies of the
Indies.’
At a less abstract level, the political economy of products took the
form of an extensive print culture of dictionaries and encyclopedias, itself
closely linked to a network of Societies of Improvement.
One example - Postlethwayt set out the purpose of the new edition
of his Universal Dictionary in 1774 to look at the dependence of the
prosperity and trade of this nation on the mechanical and manufactured
12
arts. Government and the legislature needed to support these so
‘their industrious ingenuity’ may not be surpassed by any rival nation
especially France. His Dictionary would also address ‘the commerce of
the Chinese, and the East Indies, in general; by what means they are
carried on. - Of the excessive cheapness of their arts, manufactures, and
produce; whereby all European nations are attracted to trade with them,
and resort to them for their productions and manufacture. With pertinent
observations to carry on their commerce both in a private and public way,
and best to the advantage of Europe’ .33
The extended entry on Porcelain – 9 folio pages in a two-volume
work – was based on Pere d’Entrecolle’s accounts of 1712. It provided
detailed accounts of the division of labour and the kilns, and high praise
for the quality and price of the ceramics: 'What render the Oriental
porcelain so universally estimable is, not only its general delicacy, but its
general greater cheapness compared to that of Dresden, or any other
nation: [We] will [never] vend so large a quantity as is done by the
Asiatics in general.'34
The projects of the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
which advertised premiums for priority inventions and new products.
The Premium List for 1763 included an offer of £100 for ‘the greatest
Improvement in dying Cotton to answer the Purposes of the Turkey or
India Red…’
This political economy of Asian arts in Europe also connected with
wider European endeavours to collect the knowledge of manufactures
from around the world. It was difficult to access that knowledge of
manufactures in China and Japan. India seemed more accessible. This
13
was the period when India was not yet de-industrialised, and Britain was
still in the process of industrialization.
During a key period of 1780s and 1790s India’s cotton industry
was producing far and away the greatest part of the world’s textiles, but
Britain’s industry was mechanizing and growing rapidly; Britain’s iron
industry, transformed by coal-fired smelting met all challengers apart
from the Swedes; her fine metal manufactures were the wonder of the
rest of Europe. But at this stage nothing was certain – manufacturers,
industrial spies and technological investigators travelled, collected and
translated processes they found across Europe. The Swede, R.R.
Angerstein’s diary of 1753-55 with its detailed accounts and drawings is
but one example. They also did so in that Asian powerhouse of
manufacture, India, which they could access through the East India
Companies and through Catholic and Protestant missions.
The paper will now investigate two examples of the collecting the
knowledge of manufactures. The first who I will not discuss whom I
have no time to discuss today is Anton Hove, a Polish plant collector
sent by Joseph Banks under the subterfuge of gathering plants for Kew,
but in reality as an industrial spy sent to gather the best cotton plants of
the Gujarat, but also to discover the methods and tools of fine spinning
and cotton weaving.
These issues of procurement and of quality of both raw cotton and
cotton fabrics which lay behind these intensely detailed enquiries into
local conditions of the textile manufacture were also vital in attempts to
gather ‘useful knowledge’ in an emerging cotton textile industry 4,500
miles from Surat and Bombay.
[The mechanisation of the British cotton textile industry was proceeding
through the 1780s and 1790s drawing on lessons of quality and also
those of division of labour derived from the Indian products with which
they competed. British manufacturers faced the fierce competition of
hand-painted Indian textiles, hand-made muslins; they realized the
advantage of these Indian fabrics lay in quality and price. In a highlycharged atmosphere of competition and high demand workshops then
factories in Lancashire and Mulhouse now produced quality goods, rapid
design change, and prices afforded by the middling then labouring
classes. Samuel Oldknow in Stockport started a muslin manufacture in
Stockport in 1782; he used what was then called the Muslin wheel,
Crompton’s mule, first invented in 1779. His markets were in London’s
14
fashion trade, and his products competed directly with those of India,
facing a’ severe burst of competition’ whenever East India Company
vessels unloaded cargoes of textiles.’35
The demanding London merchants he tried to please prepared a history
of the rise and progress of the British muslin and calico manufacture for
the Lords of the Council for Trade in 1786. They claimed ‘the object
they [the inventors] grasped was great indeed – to establish a
Manufacture in Britain that should rival in some measure the Fabrics of
Bengall’. The challenge was great ‘there are more India Goods coming
into the Market than has been known of these many years in so short a
time.’ 36
A Committee convened in 1812 on Crompton’s petition claimed ‘in the
invention of the mule may be found one of the chief causes of the
transference of the seat of an industry to the Western from the Eastern
world, where it had been situated from time immemorial.’37
This very close entanglement of Indian textile manufacture and the
technological development of the emerging British industry are subjects
explored in Prasannan Parthasarathi’s new book, Why Europe Grew
Rich and Asia Did Not.
Anton Hove’s close analysis of cotton plants and cultivation, but also of
spinning and weaving processes and technologies at precisely this time
of the later 1780s takes us to the heart of both the product and market
development of material culture, and the collection of useful knowledge
from Asia.]
My second example, which I do want to dwell on arises out of the
knowledge exchange in Protestant and Catholic missions on the
Coromandel coast. Both took place at a similar time, and both entailed
careful investigations of tacit knowledge with a view to codifying and
transmitting aspects of an Indian knowledge of manufactures back to
Europe. A local site of knowledge exchange is the Coromandel coast,
and especially the small community of Tharangampadi, then known as
Tranquebar. A number of East India Company agents and physicians
integrated with the natural historians who came with the missions ;
Jesuit and Catholic missionaries in the French factories, then
Pietist, and Moravian missionaries at the Danish colony of Tranquebar;
similar processes occurred among the Baptists who settled with the
15
Danes at Serampore in Bengal. These missionaries learned languages
– Sanskrit and Persian, but also vernacular languages: in South India –
Tamil, Telegu, Telinga, Malayan. The French accounts of calico printing
on the Coromandel coast are now well-known. Father Coeurdoux
questioned a number of calico painters, and hoped his account would
assist in perfecting the art of dyeing in Europe. Jean Rhyner, the Basle
chemist drew on these and other French accounts in 1766, and
concluded ‘even granted all things equaled we could never adopt their
methods, for we lack skilled craftsmen and could not keep the
maintenance costs so low.’38
Another to be fascinated with Indian technologies and industries
was Benjamin Heyne,a German chemist and mineralogist from the
Moravian mission in Tranquebar who later worked for the English East
India Company as Acting Botanist at the pepper plantation at
Samulcotah, After the plantation was closed in 1800, Heyne was
appointed to find a site in Mysore for a new botanical garden, and chose
former royal garden of Tipu Sultan at Bangalore. He was appointed
Botanist and Naturalist at Madras in 1802 and superintendant of a newly
established Natural History Museum there. In 1804 he was appointed to
the Company’s garden at Bangalore, and in the years following was
assigned to assist Buchanan in the Mysore Survey.39
In the 1780s and 1790s Heyne displayed an intense curiosity in
dyeing techniques, in the extraction processes of the fabled diamond
mines of South India, in the skilled labour that produced fine Indian iron
and its even finer steel or wootz, as well as a range of other useful
industries from copper to saltpetre, soda and glass manufacture. Heyne
was one of a remarkable group of missionaries and natural historians at
the Danish factory in Tranquebar, a group now of great interest to
historians of science and medicine.40
The Pietist Halle mission of the Franke Foundation of the early
eighteenth century brought a number of physicians with a strong
background and interest not just in medicine, but in broader natural
history, and especially botany. German missionaries also came to the
Danish factory in a later Moravian mission.
[ This group originally sent from Herrnhut in German Lower Silesia
came to Trnaquebar at the behest of the Danish Asiatic Company
enroute to establish a mission and trading factory on the Nicobar
Islands. Though they came to Tranquebar in 1760, it soon became
apparent that they could not settle on the islands, and they stayed
16
instead in Tranquebar. The Moravians based themselves two kilometres
west of Tranquebar. They were regarded with suspicion and opposed by
the well-established Halle missionaries in the small town. The
Moravians in turn opposed the Lutherans of the Danish Halle mission
because they sought to keep a separate identity from the larger
Lutheran church. Unlike the Halle missionaries, they brought with them a
number of artisans, and they established gardens with the purpose of
seeking self-sufficiency. They engaged quickly and easily with the local
Tamil population, and also traded their collections of plant specimens
with the English East India Company and to Joseph Banks in London41 ]
]A number of their surgeons became very well-known in the wider
world of botanical and natural history collecting. These included Johann
Koenig who had arrived in 1768 as a surgeon, and who initiated those
already there in Linnaean methodology, along with John Peter Rottler,
Johann Gottfried Klein, and Christoph John, another avid natural
historian, the leader of the mission during the later eighteenth century.
There were close networks among the physicians and natural
historians of the Moravian mission and those centred around the East
India Company botanical gardens –Christoph John kept up a close
correspondence with William Roxburgh and James Anderson. He traded
books and seeds for the delightful printed calicoes he and his wife
craved; ‘Mrs. John and I are most anxiously waiting for the kindly
promised long cloth & chintz & if we don’t get them soon, we must
return to the primitive state of Adam & Eve.’42 The herbaria sent to Halle
by the Pietists of Tranquebar were followed by the Roxburgh’s great
botanical project which culminated in his Plants of the Coast of
Coromandel 43(date)
The fascination with Indian technologies and industries continued. The
surveys of Benjamin Heyne in the 1780s and 1790s arose out of these
networks. Heyne’s accounts show an intense curiosity in dyeing
techniques, in the extraction processes of the fabled diamond mines of
South India, in the skilled labour that produced fine Indian iron and steel
or wootz, and a range of other useful industries from copper to saltpetre
and soda manufacture.
How should we approach his surveys? One approach is to wrap them
up in those later enterprises of colonial science in India – the Survey of
India – not established until 1878 – or the topographical surveys of
Francis Buchanan and Colin McKenzie which started with Buchanan’s A
17
Journey from Madras Through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and
Malabar (London, W. Bulmer & Co., 1807).
We can treat him and other 18thC. technological investigators as
agents of empire in their enterprises of practical and economic botany
following through Sir Joseph Banks’ search for dyes, drugs, and
foodstuffs, and investigating their acclimatization to different parts of the
empire.44 We can look for the underlying orientalist assumptions of the
surveys, and the political economy of empire framing their financing and
their output. But above all it is important to look at the texts, and the
efforts of those at far remove from their European frameworks to
describe, codify and analyse the industrial processes of India.
Heyne’s accounts of his industrial journeys were sent to Christoph
John at the Tranquebar mission as he wrote them, then circulated
onward to William Roxburgh in the early to mid 1790s. A number of them
were revised and entered into Reports to the Board of Control, and
several were further revised, and finally appeared as chapters in his
Tracts, Historical and Statistical, on India45;
Heyne’s accounts suggest that there are a number of issues of
which we need to take account if we are to gauge the significance of this
form of global ‘useful knowledge’
1. Difficulties of travel
2. Secrecy and access to knowledge
3. Descriptions of labour and craft, especially in diamond
mines, textile dyeing processes, iron manufacture and
saltpetre production.
4. Scientific theory and industrial processes
5. Prospects of development
Difficulties of Travel:
He described journeys where ‘my suite consisted of near forty persons:
twelve palankeen boys for myself, a flambeau bearer); carriers for
baggage, books and provisions, servants, a draughtsman and two plant
collectors and a small guard of armed men is…necessary as a
protection from robbers and tigers…People in England have no
conception of the labour and expense which it costs to obtain a box of
insects or plants…’46
Secrecy
18
He encountered hostility and efforts to block his investigations in the
copper mines, at areas of soda and saltpetre production, and in the
diamond mines; he admired ‘ the extraordinary skill of the People in the
discovery of Diamond mines’…the knowledge of which, they have
always been very tenacious in keeping to themselves as much as
possible.’47
At some points this secrecy was about the power of the local zemindars
and fears and hostility over Europeans. In the relatively wealthy country
of the zamindar, Nasareddy he found the ‘bazaar is large and well
Labour and Crafts
Heyne visited diamond mines and iron works, textile centres and
areas manufacturing saltpetre and soda. The fabled diamond mines of
Golconda had long declined by 1790; the focus of Europe’s trade in
diamond had shifted after the mid eighteenth-century to producers in
Brazil, but the mines in surrounding areas continued on a smaller scale,
Heyne explored those of Mellavilly, south west of Ellore. He provided
detailed accounts of the diamond beds, how they were worked, and the
division of labour..
‘Sixteen persons, men and women, are employed in each mine, and
each received one pagoda of wages per month. Half of them are
employed in mining and the other half in carrying on the subsequent
operations. These people are inhabitants of the neighbouring villages,
suders, who from their infancy, are brought up to this work, and with
the ideas necessary for the undertaking, they pride themselves on
their honesty to their employers.’ 48
His earlier account found people from the age of 12 working in the
mines. The men ‘dig the ground… the women and children carry in
baskets on their heads the several strata of earth to the places allotted
for each sort.’
Heyne’s present of a gold fanam to the headman made him very
communicative. He ‘pointed out a variety of small stones that were
thrown away…and assured me they always indicated the presence of
diamonds when they occur in beds at some depth underground.’49
19
At another point he gave a morose servant of the Rajah two yards of
scarlet broadcloth and he lightened up a bit. He ‘told me it was his
business to search in the river Hebe after the rains for red earth washed
down from the mountains in which earth diamonds were always found.
‘50
He wrote of labour forces that ‘are not guarded, and do not seem to be
under any control. Everything is left implicitly to their good faith; which at
all times is, perhaps the best way to ensure fidelity. ‘ 51
Heyne went on to another of India’s recognized industries, its iron
manufacture. After an earlier report on the iron works at Lechemporam
he wrote ‘my attention to this branch of science or rather Indian
Manufactures has been raised as that I could not but avail myself of the
first opportunity that offered to see works of the kind at other places’. He
had a ‘hope of becoming useful by rendering myself enabled to point out
a place , where iron works of consequence might be erected with a full
prospect of success…’52
He found the iron smelterers of the Northern Circars equally poor. A
group of 8 or 9, miners, smelters, wood cutters and labourers could
produce ‘considerable iron…’the finest in every respect for tools, razors
etc…the demand for it is great.’53 These smelting works however,
notwithstanding their diminutive scale, attract the attention of every
curious observer, on account of the simplicity of every part of the
process and the goodness of the iron obtained.’ 54
Science
Heyne attempted where possible to connect his formal scientific
knowledge to the processes he witnessed.. At the diamond mines of
Mallavilly he discussed Bergman’s dissertation on the Earth of Gems,
and debates over Boyle’s theories on gems. ‘This is a subject on which I
have made some experiments, read much and thought not a little. I may
hereafter find time to collect my inferences.’ 55 He assayed the ores in
the copper mines of Ayricondalah, heated these in a crucible with a flux,
but found the experimentation process in the field inconclusive.56 (
Prospects for Development
Heyne concluded that diamond mining and processing, though much
reduced from its former times, was still viable. He admired the quality of
iron produced by artisan smelters, but regretted the lack of coal, and
20
hence the cast iron then leading the British iron industry. Indian steel (or
wootz) soon to be much investigated by the Royal Society, was
however, another matter. Heyne thought there was much to be gained
in promoting the manufacture, for English steel ‘is worse in quality than it
was some thirty or forty years ago’… I am of opinion it would prove a
source of considerable Revenue to the country…’ 57
experiments by Stodart, and the prevailing view that ‘wootz is superior
for many purposes to any steel used in this country.’ 58
This artisanal smelting declined with entry of British and Swedish iron
into India in the Nineteenth Century. Larger scale works including EIC
backed ironworks such as Porto Novo in the early nineteenth century
traded to the Woolwich Arsenal to replace Swedish iron, but eventually
were not cost effective, and India’s iron industry went the way of so
many other industries.
Prasannan Parthasarathi in a recent seminar conveyed the continued
significance of this industrial enterprise into the early 19thC. Between
1775 and 1825 India was the second largest market for Boulton and
Watt steam engines, and by 1825 India had the knowledge to maintain
the engines, and shortly after built them in Calcutta.
Purpose of the Surveys:
Heyne’s industrial surveys were made in the 1780s and 1790s, some
probably during the period when he was at the Tranquebar mission, and
others later while he was Acting Botanist at Samulcotah. He set an
agenda coinciding with that enlightenment search for ‘useful knowledge’
connecting with what Mokyr has called the ‘industrial enlightenment.
Heyne admired resources, skills and above all quality products. His
arduous journeys and painstaking analysis of Indian products and how
they were made provided connections between European investigators
and indigenous producers, and connections in material culture and
useful knowledge between Asia and Europe.
Conclusion:
A small place in Southern Indian and a German Moravian industrial
traveller lead us back to Europe’s Asian Centuries. They reveal the
interlinking of Asia’s and Europe’s manufacturing economies where the
demands of an export ware sector fed into those of Europe’s
industrialization.
Delivering designs to meet European tastes, delivering high volumes
and responding to new fashion, the key constraint was meeting
21
demands for quality, reliability and standards. These were issues about
products that any competing European industrial system would have to
meet. They created a highly-charged competitive atmosphere of trade,
product development and invention.
While Benjamin Heyne was testing the quality of S. Indian iron and
calculating the profitability of a trade in Indian saltpetre, Robert Peel and
Samuel Oldknow were at the EIC auctions in London, as was
Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf in Lorient, testing their own newinvented European cotton products and prints against the quality and
variety of recently arrived shipments from India.
The global connection my project and wider work pursues is the ways
that mercantile trade to China and India underpinned the development of
industrious and industrial revolutions in Europe.
1
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’,
Modern Asian Studies, 31 (1997), pp. 735-762, 761-2.
2
Key books setting the framework for such studies have been Ken Pomeranz, The Great Divergence.
China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World (Princeton, 2000); A.G. Hopkins, Globalization in
World History (London: Pimlico, 2002);J. Osterhammel and N.P. Petersson, Globalization. A Short
History (Princeton, 2005);Also see B.K. Gills and William Thompson, eds., Globalization and Global
History (Rethinking Globalizations) [Paperback] (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006); John
Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires (London; Penguin, 2007). Earlier
22
comparative studies of Empire setting some of these comparative frameworks were J.H. Elliott,
Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale, 2006) and
P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires. Britain, India and America c. 1750-1783
(Oxford, 2005).
3
Ian Morris, Why the West Rules- for Now
The Divergence debate generated many studies which first appeared in the conferences of the Global
Economic History Network (Gehn) with a number published afterwards in Itinerario, The Journal of Global
History, The Economic History Review, and The Journal of Economic History.
4
5
Stephen Broadberry and Steve Hindle, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ , Special Issue. Asia in the Great Divergence, The
Economic History Review, 64 (S1), 2011, p. 7.
6
E.A.Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: the Character of the Industrial Revolution in England
(Cambridge, 1988), followed by Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge,2010). The
case is reiterated in Paul Warde, Energy Consumption in England and Wales 1560-2000 (Rome, 2007) and
Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2009).
7
Robert Allen, ‘The great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World
War’, Explorations in Economic History, vol. 38, (2001), pp. 411-47; Also see S.N. Broadberry and B.Gupta, ‘The
Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Eruope and Asia, 1500-1800’,
Economic History Review, LIX (2006, pp. 2-31; Robert C. Allen, Jean-Paul Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine MollMurata and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Wages, Prices and Living Standards in China, 1738-1925: in Comparison
with Europe, Japan, and India’, Special Issue. Asia in the Great Divergence, Economic History Review ( 64 (S1),
2011, pp. 8-38; Robert C. Allen, ‘Why the Industrial Revolution was British: Commerce, Induced Invention, and
the Scientific Revolution’, Economic History Review 64 (2011), pp. 357-384.
8
Rostow
Deane,
9
François Crouzet, Capital Formation in the Industrial Revolution (London: Methuen, 1972); Stanley
Engerman, ‘Reflections on the Standard of Living Debate: New Arguments and New Evidence’ in John A. James
and Mark Thomas, eds., Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in
Honour of R.M. Hartwell (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 50-79; C.H. Feinstein, ‘Capital
Formation in Great Britain’, in P. Mathias and M.M. Postan, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe,
Vol. 7 (Cambridge: CUP), pp. 28-96;
10
Richard R. Nelson, ‘Recent Exercises in Growth Accounting: New Understanding or Dead End, ‘ American
Economic Review, Vol. 63, 1973, pp. 462-8.
11
N.F.R.Crafts, ‘Industrial revolution in Britain and France: some thoughts on the question “why was
England first” Economic History Review, Second Series, XXX, (1977), pp. 429-41.
12
Joel Moky, ‘Has the Industrial Revolution been Crowded Out? Some Reflections on Crafts and Williamson.’
Explorations in Economic History, vol. 24 (1987), pp. 293-319, pp. 318-19. Recent articles by Allen and
Broadberry and Gupta draw on data and data sets of wages and prices compiled between the 1930s and early
1980s. See Allen, ‘The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First
World War’, Explorations in Economic History, 38 (2001), pp. 411-47; S. Broadberry and B. Gupta, ‘The Early
Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500-180’,
Economic History Review, LIX (2006), pp. 2-31.
13
Key recent exhibition and curatorial volumes include: Rose Kerr, Luisa E. Mangoni, Ming Wilson, Chinese
Export Ceramics (2011);
Rosemary Crill, ed., Textiles from India: the Global Trade (London, Seagull Books, 2006).
Ruth Barnes
Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, Encounters
14
Philip J. Stern, ‘History and Historiography of the English East India Company: Past, Present, and
Future!’ History Compass 7/4 (2009), pp. 1146-1180; Huw Bowen, The Business of Empire. The East
India Company and Imperial Britain 1765-1833 (Cambridge, 2006);H.V. Bowen, Margarett Lincoln,
and Nigel Rigby, eds., The Worlds of the East India Company (Suffolk/Rochester, NY; Boydell Press,
2002); Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asiua, 1600-1834 (London,
23
British Library, 2002); Donald C. Wellington, French East India Companies : A Historical Account and
Record of Trade (Lanham: Hamilton, 2006); Philipe Haudrère, La Compagnie française des Indes
(Librarie de l’Inde, 1989) ; Martin Åberg, The Swedish East India Company 1731–66. Business
Strategy and Foreign Influence in a Perspective of Change. Scandinavian Journal of History 15 (2),
97–108, (1990); Leos,Müller, “The Swedish East India Trade and International Markets: Re-exports of
teas, 1731-1813”, Scandinavian Economic History Review , 2003; Ole Feldbæk “The Danish trading
companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, The Scandinavian Economic History
Review, 1986; Parmentier, Jan "The Private East India Ventures from Ostend: The Maritime and
Commercial Aspects, 1715-1722”, International Journal of Maritime History, 5, 1993; J.R. Bruijn and
F.S. Gaastra, eds., Ships, Sailors and Spices: East India Companies and their Shipping in the 16th,
17th and 18th Centuries
15
cited in Giorgio Riello, Global Cotton: How an Asian Fibre Changed the World Economy ,
(forthcoming CUP) Part 2, chap. 4, p. 18)
16
Jan de Vries, ‘The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World’, The Economic History Review, 63
(2010), pp. 710-733,p. 718.
17
Riello, Global Cotton, p.
18
Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: the Culture of Porcelain in World History’, The Journal of World History, vol. 9
(1998), pp. 141-188, p. 168; also Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley:
Univeristy of California Press, 2010.
19
K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, Appendix 5 Table C8; Lorna
Weatherill, ‘The Growth of the Pottery Industry in England 1660-1815. Some New Evidence and Estimates’,
PostMedieval Archaeology. Vol. 17 (1983), pp. 15-46. Table A-3, 33-35.
20
H.B. Morse, Chronicles of the East India Company Trading the China 1635-1834, Vol. 1-V (Oxford: OUP,
1929), pp. 113-114, 121-2. See Maxine Berg, ‘Britain’s Asian Century: Porcelain and Global History in the Long
Eighteenth Century’ in Laura Cruz & Joel Mokyr, The Birth of Modern Europe. Culture and Economy, 1400-1800
(Leiden, Brill, 2010), pp. 133-156, pp.143-145.
21
Chaudhuri, Trading World, . 287; Christian J.A. Jörg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade (The Hague:
Springer, 1982), ppp. 102-8; Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 59, 78, 95-104.
22
On British consumption of porcelain see my Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: OUP,
2005), pp. 220-232.
23
Toby Barnard, Making the Grand Figure. Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1640-1770 (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 125-133.
24
Anne MCants, ‘Poor Consumers as Global Consumers: the Diffusion of Tea and Coffee Drinking in the
Eighteenth Century,’ The Economic History Review, 61 (2008), pp. 172-200, p. 185; Anne McCants, ‘Exotic
Goods, Popular Consumption and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern
World,’ Journal of World History, vol. 18 (2008), pp. 433-462, 456-7; Bruno Blondé, ‘Tableware and Changing
Consumer Patterns. Dynamics of Material Culture in Antwerp, 17 th-18th Centuries’, in J. Veeckman ed., Majolica
and Glass from Italy to Antwerp and Beyond: the Transfer of Technology in the 16 th – early 17th Century
(Antwerp: Antwerpen, 2002), pp. 295-311.
25
Anne E. McCants, ‘Modest Household and Globally Traded Textiles: Evidence from Amsterdam Household
Inventories’, in Cruz and Mokyr, eds., The Birth of Modern Europe, pp. 109-131, p. 130.
26
This is a point made by McCants, ‘Exotic Goods’, p. 457. Also see Beverly Lemire, ‘Consumerism in
Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes, Journal of British Studies, 27
(1988), pp. 1-24; Beverly Lemire, Dress Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory,
1660-1800 (London, 1997)
27
H.J. Bruton, ‘A Reconsideration of Import Substitution’, Journal of Economic Literature, xxxvi (1998), esp. pp.
908-17; A.O. Hirschman, ‘The Rise and Decline of Development Economics’ in A.O. Hirshman, Essays in
Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 1-24; D. Acemoglu, S. Johnson and J.A.
Robinson, ‘The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation’, American Economic
Review, 91, pp. 1369-401; World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy
(Washington D.C. World Bank, 1993); World Bank, Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of
Reform (Washingon, D.C.: the World Bank, 2005); J.Y. Lin, ‘Development Strategy, Viability and Economic
Convergence’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 53, 2003, pp. 277-308.
28
I have pursued this discussion of quality in relation to cotton textiles in ‘
24
29
Mokyr, Joel, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton and
Oxford, 2002). Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy. An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); Joel Mokyr, ‘The Intellectual Origins of
Modern Economic Growth’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, 2005, pp. 285-351.
Berg, Maxine, ‘The Genesis of “Useful Knowledge” in Special Issue ‘Reflections on The Gifts of
Athena’ edited by Berg of History of Science, 45 (2), (2007), pp. 123-135. Epstein, S.R., ‘Craft Guilds,
Apprenticeship and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe’, Journal of Economic History, 53
(1998), pp. 684-713;Epstein, S.R., ‘Transferring Technical Knowledge and Innovating in Europe, c.
1200-1800’, Working Paper on ‘The Nature of Evidence: How Well Do Facts Travel?’ 1 May 2005,
LSE web site; Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, CUP,
2009).
30
31
Mokyr, ‘Intellectual Origins’.
Mokyr, Joel, ‘Useful Knowledge and Industrial Revolutions: a Reply’ ‘Special issue edition of History
of Science: ‘Useful Knowledge’ and Industrial Revolutions’, edited set of papers by Maxine Berg, Joel
Mokyr, Larry Stewart, Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, Kristine Bruland;45 (2007), pp. 122-196, pp. 186-196.
32
33
Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 4th edition, 2 vols. (London, 1744),
p. v.
34
Ibid., ii, ‘Porcelain’.
35
George Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1924), p. 7.
36
Ibid., p. 63.
37
Cited in George Daniels, The Early English Cotton Industry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1920),
p. 129.
38
See my account in ‘In Pursuit of Luxury’, pp. 113-5. On Father Gaston Coeurdoux see John Irwin and K.B.
Brett, Origins of Chintz (London, 1970). Also see Jean Ryhiner, Traité sur la fabrication et le commerce des
toiles peintes [1766](1865).
39
Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora, p. 41.
40
Michael T. Bravo, ‘Mission Gardens: Natural History and Global Expansion, 1720-1820’, in Schiebinger and
Swan, Colonial Botany, pp. 49-65; Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘”A Christian Benares”: Orientalism, Science and the
Serampore Mission of Bengal’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, 44 (2007), pp. 111-45; David Arnold,
‘Plant Capitalism and Company Science: The Indian Career of Nathaniel Wallich’, Modern Asian Studies, 42
(2008), pp, 899-928. For the most recent research on the scientific and medical researches of the Halle and
Moravian missions in Tranquebar see Niklas Jensen, ‘Making it in Tranquebar: Science, Medicine and the
Circulation of Knowledge in the Danish-Halle Mission, c. 1732-44’, Unpublished paper presented to theEUI
Workshop Mission, Science and Medicien in Colonial South Asia: Situating the Tranquebar Mission(s) in the
Field’, 18 March, 2011, and Pratik Chakrabarti, ‘Materials and Materia Medica in India’, chapter four of
Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century, (Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 2010). For other material on the religious and print and material culture of the
Tranquebar missions see Hanco Jürgens, ‘German Indology avant la lettre: The Experiences of the Halle
Missionaries in Southern India, 1750-1810’ in D.T. McGetchin, P.K.J. Park, D.SarDesai, Sanskrit and
‘Orientalism’. Indology and Comparative Linguistics in Germany, 1750-1958 (Manohar, 2004), pp. 41-81; Esher
Fihl and A.R. Venkatachalapathy, eds. Indo-Danish Cultural Encounters in Tranquebar: Past and Present,
Special Issue, Review of Development & Change, xiv (2009); Martin Krieger, ‘Material Culture, Knowledge, and
European Society in Colonial India around 1800: Danish Tranquebar’, in Michael North ed., Artistic and
Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400-1900 (Franham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 53-72.
41
See Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine, chap. 4 [pp. 178-180]
42
India Office Records Private Papers. Roxburgh Ms. Eur D809, British Library, Letter from John to
Roxburgh, 29 Sept. 1789. Later letters also pined for pieces of chintz. ‘The chints for my family & the
Hyderabad seeds are not yet arrived. Pray by what conveyance have you sent them? In my last
letter I had mentioned some samples of cloth & chints for Mrs. John, which the wind or another
accident had carried away…’ (John to Roxburgh, 29 June, 1791).
25
43
Ray Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora, pp. 39-80.
44
Marika Vicziany, ‘Imperialism, Botany and Statistics in Early Nineteenth-Century India: the Surveys of Francis
Buchanan (1762-1829)’, Modern Asian Studies, 20 (1986), pp. 625-660; Arnold, ‘Plant Capitalism and Company
Science’, pp. 899-928; Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and The English Enlightenment, pp. 201-8.
45
Tracts, Historical and Statistical, on India: with Journals of Several Tours through Various Parts of the
Peninsula: also an Account of Sumatra in a Series of Letters (London, Robert Baldwin, Paternoster-Row, 1814).
46
Tracts, p. 248.
47
India Office Records, British Library, Board of Control F/4/1, p. 135.
48
Tracts, p. 101.
Tracts, p. 97.
50
IOR,BL, MsEur809, p. 11
51
Tracts, p. 96.
52
IOR, BL, Eur809, p. 24.
53
Ibid., p. 218.
54
Ibid., p. 219.
55
IOR, BL, Eur809, p. 18.
56 IOR, BL, Heyne, Cursory Observations made on a Tour from the Banks of the Kistna to Timmericatah,Ms.Eur
D809, p. 18.
57
Tracts, p. 364.
58
George Pearson, ‘Experiments and Observations to Investigate The Nature of a Kind of Steel, Manufactured
at Bombay and there called Wootz’, Read before the Royal Society, June 11, 1795, p. 5). Also see David
Mushet, ‘Experiments on Wootz’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 95, 1805, pp.
163-75; J. Stodart and M. Faraday, ‘On the Alloys of Steel’, Philosophical Ransactions of the Royal Society of
London, vol. 112, 1822, pp. 253-70)
49