Maxine Berg
Europe’s Asian Centuries:
Material Culture and Useful Knowledge
1600-1800
Global History
The Divergence Debate
Back to England
From Precious Ornament
To Asian Export Ware
From Indian Village Textiles
Kutch 2011
To European Fashion
Coromandel Coast, V&A Collections
Material Culture and
Useful Knowledge
Import Substitution
Export Promotion
Markets and Technology
Industrious Revolution
Skills, materials, design
Joel Mokyr
The Enlightened Economy (2009)
European industrial enlightenment
Useful Knowledge – tacit and codified
‘Many societies we associate with
technological stasis were full of highly
skilled artisans, not least of all
Southern and Eastern Asia.’ (Mokyr)
Manufacture and Asia in political economy and
improvement societies
David Hume ‘Of Commerce’ 1752
Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of
Trade and Commerce (1749-1788)
The Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
(1753-)
European endeavours to collect the
knowledge of manufactures from around the
world.
Historical work on botany and collecting
Who collected the knowledge of Asia’s
industries? Anton Hove; Benjamin Heyne
From the global to the local
Tranquebar 2011
Tranquebar
Johann Koenig; John Peter Rottler, Johann
Gottfried Klein; Christophe John
Benjamin Heyne
James Anderson & William Roxburgh
Benjamin Heyne – Reports in the Roxburgh
Correspondence, then in Board of Control
1814 he published Tracts, Historical and
Statistical, on India and Sumatra.
Difficulties of travel
Secrecy and access to knowledge
Descriptions of labour and craft, especially in
diamond mines, textile dyeing processes,
iron manufacture and saltpetre production.
Scientific theory and industrial processes
Prospects of development
‘but everyone…seemed anxious to keep us
ignorant of these mines’.
‘This strange conduct originated in both places
from the same cause: the mandate of the
Rajah to conceal everything, as far as
possible, from the prying eyes of an
European.’
Maxine.Berg@warwick.ac.uk
Global History and Culture Centre,
University of Warwick:
www.warwick.ac.uk/go/globalhistory
ERC Project “Europe’s Asian Centuries”
www.warwick.ac.uk/go/eac