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Europe’s Asian Centuries: Material Culture and Useful Knowledge 1600-1830
Maxine Berg
Keynote Address
The Third European Congress on World and Global History
London School of Economics 14-17 April, 2011
1. From Industrialization to Global History
A. Industrialization
My entry to global history came through a long career in studying aspects of the
Industrial Revolution in Europe. That industrial revolution for me has turned upon
factors connecting production and consumption. I investigated the role of exotic
consumables and luxury goods that impacted on the consuming and working
practices of ordinary households, especially in N. &W. Europe and the Atlantic world.
Caribbean and American sugar and tobacco connected with Asia’s spices, coffee
and tea; colonial groceries were consumed alongside Asia’s manufactured goods,
porcelain, silks and cotton textiles. Consuming exotic commodities from the wider
world became an obsession reaching right through Europe’s social classes.
A wide trading world opened out to bring together those commodities which
by the later eighteenth century were the civilized props of the everyday household in
most parts of Europe. This was a trading world bound together by Indian textiles and
Japanese then Spanish American silver; and Indian textiles in turn provided the
currency for the Africa trade, including the slave trade. This global integration of
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consumer markets and producers predated the classic British technological and
industrial achievements focussed on coal mines, iron foundries and cotton factories.
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 industrial production on a mass
scale, 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
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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
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 Yuan-Ming porcelain trade and Chola and Vijayanagar period
textile travels?
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. The great divergence which has framed so much of
our recent thinking in global history has yielded large-scale comparative studies on
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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. We have learned much. But I think it is time to
shift some of the questions. I would like us to turn to more open-ended questions
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 created economic development in Europe.
Europe’s Asian Centuries – the Project
To this end I am now embarking on a new project on trading Eurasia. This a largescale study of EICs and private trade in the transfer of manufactured goods, their
material culture and useful knowledge from Asia to Europe. The hypothesis behind
the project 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
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those manufacturing catalysts of textiles, ceramics and metal goods back to Asia;
but this is another story.)
I want 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. 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. 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’. (cited in Riello, Part
2, chap. 4, p. 18). 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
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and useful knowledge on crucial economic transitions in the west. I am now
focussing together with some postdoctoral fellows and PhD students on the way in
which the companies helped to create a large-scale 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. If 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. 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
18thC.
These were goods which reached surprisingly far down the social classes.
30-50% of English inventories from various parts of the country contained chinaware;
more than 50% of recently-studied Dutch and Southern Netherlandish probate
inventories left porcelain by the 1740s. Other recent studies of the textiles in the
inventories of the Amsterdam Orphanage in the 1740s to 1780s show both rich and
poor buying Asiatic textiles; the clothes marking babies brought to the London
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Foundling hospital in the mid 18thC. included only a few samples of Indian sourced
printed calicoes, but many examples of cruder imitative prints following closely on
Indian designs.
Another important point to remember about the material culture of these
goods is their longevity. They were bequeathed and recycled, distributed through
poorer groups in a second-hand trade, sometimes in damaged or chipped form, so
that they had a wider use and cultural impact than indicated in trade data alone.
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. The result was a process whereby a relatively limited
trade in oriental luxuries was transformed into a much larger trade in Asian exportware of high-quality consumer products. 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. But these
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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 such models taken from the twentieth century failed to
make any connection with markets or technologies. They described mercantilist
policies and processes by which a domestic market came to be supplied from within
rather than from the international marketplace. They did not write about the more
positive part played by imports in stimulating a dynamic development of domestic
consumption; that is, the way that imports from outside a region changed consumer
horizons and family behaviour, in short, what Jan de Vries has called an ‘industrious
revolution’. Applying simple models of export promotion has not taken us a great
deal further. Historians who have pursued this line of analysis have simply revived
histories of the Industrial Revolution as imperial domination. 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 E. 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
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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. Asian goods and their
technologies provided new challenges, perceived at the time to be quite distinct from
those posed by earlier European imports.
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 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 eighteenth-century terms, exotic
ornament was being turned into ‘modern luxuries’.
A. 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
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compiled dictionaries and encyclopedias of arts and manufactures with their
descriptions of industrial skills and crafts.
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’. That
knowledge revolution was a culture of science, of practice and belief in material
progress. It was pan-European, conveyed by travel and translation, and bridges
were built between intellectuals and producers, between savants and fabricants.
Mokyr, and indeed his critics, Epstein and Allen, all believed that this knowledge
revolution was Europe’s ‘miracle’ over the rest of the world. But in fact, they did not
go far enough – we need to understand that the industrial enlightenment was also
about meeting the challenge of Asia.
The challenge to global historians is to investigate the connections between
knowledge and wealth not just in Europe but between Europe and Asia. How much
was the’ improving culture’ claimed by Mokyr a result of European Enlightenment, or
can we find parallel and alternative knowledge systems in China and India? I
cannot take up this latter question, but what I can do in the remainder of this paper is
to investigate European endeavours to collect not just the commodities, but the
knowledge of manufactures from around to the world. These can be recovered in
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?’
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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. The intellectual framework for this was established by the
analytical political economists of the early and mid eighteenth century. David Hume
put the case with characteristic acuteness. Foreign trade, he argued, preceded the
improvement of home manufactures. Through foreign commerce men become
acquainted with the pleasures of luxury. After this, imitation stimulated domestic
manufactures, which ‘emulate the foreign in their improvements…Their own steel
and iron, in such laborious hands, become equal to the gold and rubies of the
Indies.’ The process, as Hume rendered it, was effectively one of import
substitution, multiplied by imitation.
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. Among many dictionaries of trade, commerce
and industry was Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and
Commerce (1749-1788). Among Europe’s improvement societies we may look for
example at the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce started in 1753.
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 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,
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in general; by what means they are carried on. - Of the excessive cheapness of their
arts, mfrs, and produce; whereby all European nations are attracted to trade with them,
and resort to them for their productions and mfrs. With pertinent observations to carry
on their commerce both in a private and public way, and best to the advantage of
Europe’ (p. v).
The entry on the ‘Mechanical Arts’ focussed on Bengal as a ‘centre for the
mechanic arts and sciences equal to most countries.’ 'The artizans here have
wonderful skill and dexterity: they excel particularly in making linen cloth, which is of
such fineness, that very long and broad pieces of it may easily be drawn through a
small ring…-on the whole, in whatever mechanical or manufactured arts other
nations may excel Great Britain, our artists should be upon the watch, not only to
imitate, but surpass, if possible. Those which are imported, and which they can see,
handle, and minutely examine, they are the most like to imitate or excel…As we
have arrived at a great perfection in the China ware, why may we not in divers other
eastern arts and manufactures?’
Entries on ‘Callicoe’ described a ‘kind of linen manufacture, made of cotton,
chiefly in the East Indies’. It was a great trade in Bengal, and was transported in
‘prodigious quantities in Persia, Turkey, Arabia, Muscovey, and all over
Europe…some of them are painted with flowers of various colours…those made at
Seconge ‘grow the fairer, the more you wash them…’
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The extended entry on Porcelain – 9 folio pages in a two-volume work based
on Pere d’Entrecolle’s accounts of 1712 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.'
Beside accounts like these there were the projects of the Society of Arts,
Manufactures and Commerce which advertised premiums for priority inventions and
new products. It had sections on Colonies and Trade, on Manufactures as well as
on Chemistry, Dyeing and Mineralogy, quite apart from other sections on Agriculture,
Mechanics, and the Polite Arts. 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…’ That in 1767 offered 20 guineas for ‘the best Specimen of useful
China or Porcelain, consisting of not less than twelve Pieces, made of British
Materials…’ (Society of Arts, Premium List, 1763, p. 27; Premium List, 1767, p. 17)
This political economy of Asian arts in Europe also connected with wider
European endeavours to collect the knowledge of manufactures from around to the
world. Historians of science have demonstrated the great interest at the time in the
crops and plants of the wider world, and they have compiled large histories of the
botanical collectors of the eighteenth century. But what of Asia’s industries – the
resources, technologies, work and skill that produced those oriental luxuries as well
as more quotidian iron and steel, soda and saltpetre?
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It was difficult to access that knowledge of manufactures in China and Japan.
India seemed more accessible. This was the period when India was not yet deindustrialised, 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 small 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. 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.
One such example of a local site of knowledge exchange is the Coromandel
coast, and especially the small community of Tharangampadi, then known as
Tranquebar. A number of EIC agents and physicians integrated with the natural
historians who came with missions ; Jesuit and Catholic missionaries in the French
factories, then Pietist, Baptist, and Moravian missionaries at the Danish colonies of
Serampore in Bengal and of Tranquebar 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 wellknown. Father Coeurdoux after questioned a number of calico painters, and hoped
his account would assist in perfecting the art of dyeing in Europe. (P&P. 114 MB )
Jean Rhyner, the Basle chemist drew on these and other French accounts in 1766,
but concluded ‘even granted all things equaled we could never adopt their methods,
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for we lack skilled craftsmen and could not keep the maintenance costs so low.’( see
P&P piece – p. 115).
Another to be fascinated with Indian technologies and industries was
Benjamin Heyne,a German chemist and mineralogist from the Moravian mission in
Tranquebar and later the EIC pepper plantation at Samulcotah. 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 steel or wootz [? Explain], and 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
[including Sujit Sivasundaram, Niklas Jensen and Pratik Chakrabarti]. The Moravian
mission there 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 Heyne’s time there, and his mentor.
There were close networks among the physicians and natural historians
centred around the botanical gardens – 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.’ (Letter to Roxburgh,
Sept. 29, 1789)
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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 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).
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…’(Tracts, p. 248)
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Secrecy
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.’ (Board of Control F/4/1, p. 135)
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, but 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. (MsEur.D809 – Report of an Excursion to the Diamond Mines at
Mallavilly and Iron Works at Ramanakapellah near Ellore, p. 11; Tracts, 101)
Heyne went on to another of India’s recognized industries, its iron manufacture. He
found groups of poor iron smelterers of the Northern Circars, as well as works in
several other areas. 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.’(Tracts, p. 218). He likewise praised India’s fine steel
or wootz, long used in weapons manufacture.
Science
Heyne attempted where possible to connect his formal scientific knowledge to the
processes he witnessed. He discussed Boyle’s theories on gems (Eur809, Report on
Diamond Mines of Mallavilly… p. 18), and assayed ores. (Heynes, Cursory
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Observations made on a Tour from the Banks of the Kistna to Timmericatah,Ms.Eur
D809)
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 hence the cast iron then leading the
British iron industry. Indian steel, soon to be much investigated by the Royal Society,
was however, was 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’. (Tracts, p. 364)
This artisanal smelting declined with entry of Br. & Swedish iron into India in the
19thC. Larger scale works including EIC backed ironworks such as Porto Novo in
the early nineteenth century were not cost effective, and India’s iron industry went
the way of so many other industries.
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
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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 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 new-invented 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 that mercantile trade to
China and India underpinned the development of industrious and industrial
revolutions in Europe.
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