1 Osterley and Its East India Company Context This brief guide provides an overview of the global trading world with which Osterley Park was connected in the Georgian era, through the Child family’s financial and consumer activities. The material legacies of Osterley’s longstanding links to the East India Company, which date from the early eighteenth century, are still visible today in the exotic, ‘Oriental’ furnishings of this English stately home. By situating Osterley within the wider context of Europe’s fascination with Asian luxury goods in the age of empire, we can understand the ways in which global commerce, parliamentary politics, family life and domestic design combined to shape the country houses and villas of Britain’s governing classes in the past. The East India Companies: The European East India Companies were state monopolies established by governments eager to capitalise on European consumers’ seemingly insatiable desire for Asian luxury goods—most notably pepper and spices, cotton and silk textiles, ceramics and tea. Since at least medieval times, luxuries such as these had entered Europe in limited quantities by the overland Silk Road and Mediterranean ports. But fifteenth‐ and sixteenth‐century navigation from Europe to the Indian Ocean opened up the possibility of trade with ‘the East’ on an unprecedented scale and whetted European elites’ appetite for Asian luxuries that were ultimately to become integral components of governing‐class, middling and plebeian domestic interiors alike. Plate Jingdezhen, 1580‐1610 Porcelain C.588‐1922 Victoria & Albert Museum, London The Portuguese navigator Vasco Da Gama (c. 1460s‐1524) obtained blue and white porcelain produced in China’s famed Jingdezhen manufactories in 1499, bestowing this novel, exotic luxury object upon the King of Portugal on his return to Europe. By 1520, blue and white ‘China’ had emerged as a desirable luxury good in European markets, and Portuguese merchants were sending requests for new porcelain designs to be executed by Chinese craftsmen at Jingdezhen. European demand for Asian ceramics burgeoned in royal courts and aristocratic circles in the sixteenth century. The translucency of Chinese wares caused wonder in Europe: the image above gives an indication of the beauty of the blue and white Jingdezhen porcelain produced in this period. Like porcelain, cotton and silk textiles from the Orient also became increasingly desirable items of furnishing among the wealthiest classes, while tea and novel Eastern spices featured with new prominence in elite European diets. 2 Map of India showing Surat and Bombay on the western coast and Madras and Calcutta on the eastern coast. London merchants eager to participate in this profitable trade petitioned successfully for the establishment of the English East India Company (EIC) in 1600. Established by royal charter by Elizabeth I, the EIC was a joint stock company that enjoyed an exclusive monopoly over English trade in Asia. In the following decades, the EIC established a succession of ‘factories’ or trading depots on the Indian subcontinent, first at Surat and later at sites that included Calcutta (present‐
day Kolkata), Madras (present‐day Chennai) and Bombay (present‐day Mumbai). In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the English EIC faced substantial competition from rival companies established by other European states. The Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, or United East India Company), established in 1602, dominated Europe’s Asian spice trade. It emerged as the major European importer of Chinese porcelain from Jingdezhen via Canton and also established a trading station at Dejima, off Nagasaki, that gave European merchants direct access for the first time to Japanese luxury wares—including porcelain and silk textiles. The French established a Compagnie de Chine in 1660; incorporated with the French Compagnie d’Orient and Compagnie de Madagascar in the Compagnie des Indes in 1719, French merchants competed directly with the English EIC on the Indian subcontinent, where Danish and Swedish companies also sought to establish commercial and territorial footholds. The English EIC’s fortunes in the seventeenth century were closely allied with the Stuart monarchy. In the Restoration period, the Company secured the perpetuation of its monopoly over English trade in Asia by making judicious gifts and loans to the Stuart monarchs. In these years, the EIC was closely aligned with Tory politics. Although the Whig revolution of 1688 witnessed growing antagonism to the 3 Company’s monopoly, renegotiation of its charter in 1698, when the ‘old’ EIC gave way to a ‘new’ EIC, left its merchants with their powers essentially intact. In the eighteenth century the EIC’s power increased dramatically, but also began to shift increasingly from trade to politics. Robert Clive’s victory over the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 allowed the EIC to assume a key role in administering the lucrative tax revenues of Bengal. Commercial, military and political engagement with Indian rulers rose significantly, and the EIC’s territorial ambitions grew by leaps and bounds. The demise of the Dutch VOC in 1800 eliminated the EIC’s chief European competitor, and the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 dealt a final blow to French ambitions for an Indian empire. Political rule, however, now gradually supplanted trade as the key purpose of the EIC. In 1813 Parliament stripped the Company of its monopoly over British trade in India; in 1833 the Company lost its monopoly over trade in China. By the time of its dissolution in 1858, in the aftermath of the Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857‐58, the EIC was predominantly a governing, rather than a commercial, arm of the British state. Company Men and Women: A monopoly jealously controlled by its shareholders, the English EIC was managed by a Court of Directors, physically located in the City of London and closely entwined with the City’s wider financial elite of bankers and merchants. Substantial shareholders—both male and female—were entitled to vote in annual elections for the Company’s 24 Directors, men whose more considerable holding of Company stock rendered them eligible to govern its affairs. Directors not only exerted their power by voting on policies for expansion in Asia, they also controlled appointment to the highly competitive (and highly lucrative) positions within the Company’s Asian territories and trading posts. As Directors, they each enjoyed the annual right to nominate a given number of ‘servants’ to the Company’s employ: ‘writers’ (men who served as merchants and administrators), military cadets in the Company armies, surgeons, chaplains, warehousemen and the like. Some Directors enriched themselves further through illicit private investment in Asia and insider trading. Fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts and godparents avidly pursued connections with the Company’s Directors as they sought to establish young relations in the EIC’s profitable employments. The Child family of Osterley Park was typical of the London dynasties that invested in—and benefited from—East India Company commerce. Sir Francis Child the elder (1641/2‐1713), who purchased Osterley in 1713, was a successful goldsmith and banker who became a freeman of the City of London in 1665. His lucrative retail and wholesale trade in jewellery included the importation of Indian diamonds, and Child was, unsurprisingly, a major stock‐holder in the EIC. Indian profits helped to underpin Child’s political ambitions, which in turn were designed to protect the Company’s monopoly on Asian trade. Like many of the most prominent EIC stock‐holders, Child served for many years as a Member of Parliament. His fourth son, Sir Francis Child the younger (c. 1684‐1740) followed his father’s footsteps into banking and overseas investment. The younger Sir Francis was a Director of the EIC in 1718‐19, 1721‐25, 1726‐30 and 1731‐35, gaining privileged access to Company patronage, markets and luxury goods. He inherited Osterley Park from his brother Robert Child in 1721. Dying unmarried and without issue, Sir Francis left his considerable fortune (including substantial EIC stock) to a web of relations and charitable beneficiaries that included the East India Company Hospital at Poplar. 4 Luxury Goods and Company Trade: ‘Messrs Harding, Howell & Co.’ c.1810 John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford Historians identify the period from c. 1650‐1850 as the era in which Britain emerged as a ‘modern’ consumer culture. Trade with Asia, mediated by the European East India Companies, provided a key catalyst for this consumer transformation. Initially, luxury goods imported from Asia were confined to the homes (and the persons) of elites—royal courts, aristocratic circles and the wealthiest members of the mercantile classes. The inability of European craftsmen in this period to match—
much less to improve upon—the skilled manufacturing techniques practiced by Chinese, Indian and Japanese producers made Asian imports scarce, expensive and desirable luxuries affordable only to the very few. But by the later eighteenth century, British and continental craftsmen had begun to emulate and compete with Asian producers, substituting for their exotic luxury items cheaper, and eventually mass‐produced consumer goods that reached a domestic market that stretched from the apex of society through the middling ranks to the working classes. Asian porcelain and textiles—
luxury goods associated with the EIC that are especially conspicuous in Osterley Park’s interiors—
illustrate the complex processes by which these imports were incorporated into Georgian interiors. Porcelain bowl shard Jingdezhen, China, 1368‐1644 Porcelain, decorated in underglaze cobalt blue LOAN: INDIA.25 Government of India Collection Currently on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London 5 Centuries before Europeans mastered porcelain manufacture, Chinese craftsmen in the southern ceramics centre of Jingdezhen had created a global site of production that serviced both local and international markets. Imperial kilns provided wares for the royal courts of the Ming (1368‐1644) and Qing (1644‐1911) dynasties, while private kilns serviced export markets that brought Jingdezhen’s famed blue and white porcelain to European and American markets. Developed at Jingdezhen from the thirteenth century onward, the distinctive cobalt blue designs that came to characterise Chinese pottery in the Ming period proved desirable to wealthy consumers around the world (see the image above for an example of Ming period porcelain). The willingness and ability of Chinese craftsmen to respond to commissions from Company merchants for bespoke items such as armorial porcelain dinner services—decorated with exotic images that combined European and Asian motifs—enhanced the European market for these material objects. When political turmoil in China reduced Europeans’ access to its porcelain export market, Japanese porcelain (accessed through the VOC’s trading station at Dejima) helped to meet demand. The establishment of the European East India Companies allowed Western merchants to orchestrate trade in these luxuries on an unprecedented scale: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, over 70 million pieces of Chinese porcelain alone were imported by European merchants. Gown England, ca. 1800 Muslin embroidered with cotton thread (made in India) T.785&A‐1913 Victoria & Albert Museum, London Cotton textiles manufactured in India vied with Chinese porcelain for pride of place among domestic furnishings imported from Asia to Europe in these years, and trickled downwards on the social scale more rapidly than ceramic ware from the East. Already exporting cotton goods with intricate designs to distant markets by the fifteenth century, the merchants who traded in textiles produced on the Indian subcontinent made India the dominant cotton‐manufacturing centre in the world, a status it retained until the early nineteenth century. Different regions typically specialised in particular types of fabric or design: Gujarat was famed for its printed textiles, the Coromandel Coast for its painted cloths and Bengal for its fine muslins (as seen in the image above) and fabrics of mixed silk and cotton. Chintzes, calicos and muslins were available in myriad colours, designs and qualities (the muslin in the image above, for example, is embroidered with small flowers). 6 Bed hanging India, c.1710‐1730 Silk and embroidery thread National Trust Collection – Osterley Park and House Thousands of varieties of cloth were produced by Indian craftsmen in the era of the European East India Companies, a range that reflected both the diversity of domestic consumer tastes in India and the extraordinary spectrum of export markets globally in which Indian textiles were sold. For instance eighteenth‐century British consumers would have perceived the embroidered silk purchased by Sir Francis Child the Younger to make bed hangings and valences for his bedroom at Osterley (illustrated above) as occupying the top end of a wide range of Indian textiles. In dialogue with the merchants of the European East India Companies, Indian weavers adjusted the dimensions, design and ornamentation of their textiles to reflect the new uses to which these goods were put by European consumers (see for example the Regency style gown illustrated on the previous page). Monteith Staffordshire or Yorkshire, ca. 1770 Cream‐coloured earthenware with lead glaze 1995.8 Chipstone Foundation Collection By the time that the Child family began to furnish Osterley Park in the early eighteenth century, luxury goods imported from Asia by Company merchants had begun to be supplemented by goods of European manufacture designed to improve upon Eastern models. Product substitution, the process by which European goods gradually displaced the very Oriental wares that had inspired their manufacture, gathered pace throughout the eighteenth century. Potters in the Meissen manufactory near Dresden discovered a mode of manufacturing porcelain in 1708, at long last ending the Chinese and Japanese monopoly that had fuelled the European East India Companies’ trade. The establishment in 1759 of Josiah Wedgwood’s manufactory at Burslem and the success of his ‘creamware’ range (seen in the image above), placed English manufacture at the heart of Georgian processes of product substitution, making ‘china’ an Oriental luxury that could be produced and acquired at home in Britain by an increasingly wide social range of consumers. Cotton manufacture similarly shifted increasingly from India to Britain, and machine‐made textiles produced in factories supplanted the hand‐crafted textiles that had been imported from the subcontinent. 7 Obtaining Goods: Luxury goods from Asia travelled by a multiplicity of routes from the EIC’s vessels (known as East Indiamen) into Georgian homes. Official Company cargos of spices, tea, textiles and porcelains were sold to wholesalers, retailers and consumers at public auctions held by the EIC in London. A key role played by the Company’s influential Directors was the scrutiny of annual sales figures to determine which of the Company’s imports were profitable. The Company’s servants in India received detailed instructions each year from London, based on past sales figures, dictating which goods they were to purchase for sale in Britain. Each year, the EIC employed a number of experienced merchants to sail to China or India on its behalf. Supercargoes, as the name suggests, were responsible for the buying and selling of the Company’s cargo overseas. Crucially, they managed the commercial affairs of the EIC abroad and acted as diplomats in foreign lands. In terms of rank, they were on equal footing with the commander of the ship. Supercargoes were usually well connected within Company circles and entertained business relations across Europe’s major trading ports. In Asia they acquired a range of practical skills, knowledge and trading expertise that rendered them able judges of European markets in the eyes of wholesalers and retailers alike. As part of their ‘privileges’, supercargoes also engaged in the lucrative commission trade. That is, wealthy consumers such as the Child family could order customized goods, using patterns and styles of their liking. The eighteenth‐century fashion for ‘chine de commande’ (porcelain bearing family crests), portraits on glass and other decorative items, thus opened up an almost insatiable market for the private trade of supercargoes. This image depicts the Chinese wallpaper brought back from China by Lord Macartney as a gift to Thomas Coutts. The EIC also conferred the ‘privilege’ to conduct trade on their own account upon ships’ captains, crew and other officials of the EIC. These privilege goods were sold for profit in Britain, or bestowed as gifts to powerful patrons. Among household furnishings, Chinese wallpaper was typically carried in the privilege trade. Gifts of this luxury to powerful City financiers included the Chinese wallpaper that still adorns 440 the Strand in London (see above), a gift to Thomas Coutts from Lord Macartney in the later eighteenth century. Other luxury goods were obtained by Georgian Britons from Asia through the dense networks of gift exchange that helped oil the EIC’s patronage network. Company servants were under constant pressure from family and friends at home to send fashionable textiles and other Asian goods. Many of these items were displayed in the homes and on the persons of family members in England to 8 signal their connection with the Company, but many too were given as gifts to Company patrons and Directors, to elicit further commercial favours. Indian shawls were frequent gifts in this context. But the full spectrum of gifts stretched from material objects to persons: as Governor General of India in the early nineteenth century, the first Earl Minto was given gifts that included eight Malay slaves—
one of whom, having been emancipated in Calcutta, Minto sent home to his wife in the Scottish Borders. Many goods from the Indian empire entered Britain by clandestine routes. Smuggling was endemic, not only in captains’ private trade but also among returning Company servants, who sought to bring diamonds, pearls, fine textiles and other costly articles into England without passing through Customs—availing themselves instead of opportunities to disembark their goods in boats sent off the Cornish or Kentish coast by willing friends before the Company’s East Indiamen had reached dock. Company Trade and the Domestic Interior: The East India Company shaped the interior spaces of seventeenth‐, eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐ century British houses in multiple ways. Those wealthy enough to obtain Chinese porcelains and Japanese lacquerware in the seventeenth century EIC trade added luxury, exclusivity and wonder to their houses. Nevertheless such exclusivity was short lived as most elite and genteel house interiors contained a range of Asian objects by the early eighteenth century. Those householders who waited until the eighteenth century to purchase these luxury Asian objects, saw choice expand as European manufacturers entered the marketplace producing imitation wares. In the eighteenth century Asian wares, or imitation Asian wares, were assimilated into most homes alongside rococo and neo‐
classical style objects. In light of the increasing ubiquity of Asian and Asian‐style objects in eighteenth century Britain, what did these objects mean to those who purchased them? The East India Company at Home, 1757‐1857 project suggests that those who had connections to or worked for the EIC often owned different Asian objects and established different relationships with those objects. Osterley Park and House offers an interesting case study through which we can consider this hypothesis. Although Osterley’s East India Company connections occur much earlier than the houses we are studying for The East India Company at Home, some of the objects that remain in the Osterley collection seem to fit with trends we are beginning to see for EIC‐connected houses in the later period. Boat 1725‐1774 Brass, Glass, Ivory 771742.1 National Trust Collections – Osterley Park and House Our early research findings show that those households with direct East India Company connections tended to include particular objects with potential connections to Company officials’ 9 involvement with India and China. For example Osterley contains a series of objects displayed in large domed glass cases, one of which is the boat (shown above), which has been delicately carved from ivory. The carved junks have been in Osterley’s collection since at least 1782, yet when they were purchased (and by whom) remains a mystery. That similar objects existed in other households linked to the EIC suggests that Sir Francis Child the Younger’s EIC connections played a role in their acquisition. We know that merchants in the EIC bought such objects back to Britain. For instance, in 1803 Richard Hall, a senior merchant in the EIC, brought a model of a boat made from carved and painted ivory back from China. Perhaps Sir Francis Child purchased his boat from an EIC merchant whom he knew through his role as a Company Director? Sir Francis Child’s commission of a Chinese porcelain dinner service (a plate from which is displayed below) decorated with the coat of arms of the Child family demonstrates that he had good connections with merchants involved in the Chinese trade. Commissioned goods were particularly popular amongst families with East India Company connections, which used them to display their access to ordering networks. These objects also allowed them to display their family identity and ideas of legacy and heritage, an advantage that may have been particularly popular among families that had only obtained recently their fortunes. Plate China, c.1720 Porcelain 771307.1 National Trust Collection – Osterley Park and House Sir Francis Sykes, for example, began life as the son of yeoman, but through his work with the EIC in India accumulated a vast fortune, which on his return to Britain he used to buy and then rebuild Basildon Park in Berkshire in 1771. Before purchasing Basildon, Sir Francis Sykes commissioned a Chinese dinner service bearing the Sykes coat of arms. In doing so he underscored the legitimacy of his family’s name. What seems to differentiate Osterley from other houses owned and rented by families with East India Company connections is that it contains no Indian furniture. It is unsurprising perhaps that a family whose members were connected to the Company—in the case of Sir Francis Child by being its Director—but who never spent time in South East Asia, should have no objects (or no objects that remain) from India. Many of the East India Company officials who lived in India for extended periods (particularly those who did so in the early eighteenth century) returned to Britain with Indian furniture. For instance, Edward Harrison, who was Governor General of Madras from 1711‐1717, returned to Balls Park in Hertfordshire with the bureau‐cabinet shown below. A similar bureau‐
cabinet was also purchased by one of Harrison’s successor’s to the post of the Governor of Madras, Richard Benyon of Englefield House in Berkshire. 10 Bureau‐cabinet Vizagapatam, India, c.1720‐1730 Ivory inlaid teak, ebony and tortoiseshell Sold by Christie’s in 2011 That the collection at Osterley Park and House lacks such a piece is unsurprising considering none of the Child’s immediate family circle spent time in India. Yet one piece in the collection does seem unusual and suggests that further research on the Child family, its East India Company connections and the objects they purchased needs to be completed. This occasional table, with inlaid ivory and mother of pearl appears distinctly Indian (or perhaps more particularly Mughal) it is materials and designs. Where did this object come from, how and why? These are the questions we want to ask of the Osterley Park and House collection. Occasional table Unknown date Ivory, Mother‐of‐Pearl, Pewter, Wood 7717842.1 National Trust Collection – Osterley Park and House 11 Sources and Further Reading: The East India Companies: An excellent introduction to the world of the East India Companies, rich in visual resources, is provided by the exhibition on ‘Global Jingdezhen’ created by Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, available at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/research/globalporcelain/ . The English East India Company is the focus of the National Maritime Museum’s galleries on ‘Traders: The East India Company & Asia’, for which see: http://www.rmg.co.uk/visit/exhibitions/traders/ . Of course visiting the National Maritime Museum’s exhibition itself is an enjoyable way to engage with this topic. C.A. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World 1780‐1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Blackwell, 2003) is sensitive to the importance of material culture and alive to the global reach of the European companies. Peter Marshall’s Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India 1740‐1828 (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Huw Bowen’s The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756‐1833 (Cambridge University Press, 2006) provide more detailed assessments of the EIC’s history. Company Men and Women: Huw Bowen’s The Business of Empire (noted above) and Peter Marshall’s East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Clarendon Press, 1976) offer comprehensive overviews of the English Company’s personnel. The pivotal role played by family structures in Company affairs is underlined by Margot Finn in for example ‘The Barlow Bastards: Romance Comes Home from the Empire’, in Margot Finn, Michael Lobban and Jenny Bourne Taylor (eds), Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Eighteenth‐Century Law, Literature and History (Palgrave, 2010), 25‐47, and ‘Family Formations: Anglo India and the Familial Proto‐State’, in David Feldman and Jon Lawrence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 100‐117. A prominent Scottish Company family of the eighteenth century forms the subject of Emma Rothschild’s The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth‐Century History (Princeton University Press, 2011). Members of the Child family with entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography include Sir Francis Child the elder, Sir Francis Child the younger and Sarah Sophia Child‐Villiers, née Child. Further information about the Child family is also available in Eileen Harris, Osterley Park, Middlesex (The National Trust, 1994). Luxury Goods and Company Trade: Maxine Berg’s Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth‐Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2005) provides an excellent introduction to this topic, including attention to the impact on British consumers of luxury goods from the East (see esp. chap. 2), the emergence of new British luxury manufactures in the eighteenth century (esp. chap. 5) and the emergence of middle‐class ‘luxury’ consumers (esp. chap. 6). Wider European contexts are explored in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford’s edited collection of essays, Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650‐1850 (Manchester University Press 1999). 12 For Chinese and Japanese porcelain trade with Europe, see the online exhibition compiled by Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/research/globalporcelain/exhibition/ Further details on this topic can be found in Gerritsen’s ‘Fragments of a Global Past: Ceramics Manufacture in Song‐Yuan‐Ming Jingdezhen’ (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 52, 2009, 117‐152) and her ‘Ceramics for Local and Global Markets: Jingdezhen’s Agora of Technologies’, in Dagmar Schäfer, (ed.), Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History (Brill, 2012), 162‐184. For a comprehensive introduction to cotton textiles in global trade, see especially Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi’s collection of essays, The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200‐1850 (Oxford University Press, 2011). Obtaining Luxury Goods: Bowen’s Business of Empire (noted above) provides a broad survey of official Company trade in the eighteenth century. Bowen has also illuminated the private and illicit activities associated with the Company’s servants, for example in ‘Privilege and Profit: Commanders of East Indiamen as Private Traders, Entrepreneurs and Smugglers, 1760‐1813’, International Journal of Maritime History, 19 (2007), 43‐88. Chinese wallpaper is discussed by Gill Saunders in Wallpaper and Interior Decoration (V&A, 2002). The central role of gift exchanges in the Company’s operation is discussed by Margot Finn, ‘Colonial Gifts: Family Politics and the Exchange of Goods in British India, c. 1780‐1820’, Modern Asian Studies, 40 (2006), 203‐232; Lord Minto’s gift of Malay slaves is discussed by Finn in ‘Slaves out of Context: Domestic Slavery and the Anglo‐Indian Family, c. 1780‐1830’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 19 (2009), 181‐203. Company Trade and the Domestic Interior: For further suggestions for secondary reading on the Georgian interior visit the Interiors and Interior Decoration Bibliography on The East India Company at Home, c.1757‐1857 project website. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/research/eicah/resources/bibliographies/