MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS OF THE EAST INDIA TRADE 1600-1850
Workshop at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford
Friday 1st & Saturday 2nd July 2011
organised by the ‘Trading Eurasia – Europe’s Asian Centuries’ project, Department of
History, University of Warwick
RATIONALE
The European trade with Asia laid the foundations for a new consumer market in Europe. The goods
sold to this market have largely been studied along traditional lines. Historians have focussed their
attention on the East India Companies and their imports from Asia. In museums there is a tendency
to specialise in the different products brought from Asia. What happens if we think about them as
part of a joined up history of material culture and trade?
This workshop is an attempt to bridge the boundaries between the two different perspectives on the
topic of material Encounters with Asia, by bringing together historians, curators and dealers.
Historians can bridge this existing gap by not only studying the quantity, but also the quality of goods
brought to Europe from Asia. How are these qualitative aspects expressed in the archives?
Object specialists can help historians understand how Europe influenced the quality of the goods
and how changes in demand altered the trade. How were the varieties in design and quality of
porcelain, cotton fabrics, silk and lacquer achieved? How exactly was information transmitted and
quality controlled across vast distances and relating to the sheer bulk of goods supplied? Did the
methods of selling, for example via auctions, influence product specifications?
Short papers by specialists in different fields of material culture, brought together in interdisciplinary
sessions, will be discussed in the light of preliminary quantitative and qualitative results from
ongoing research from the project ‘Trading Eurasia – Europe’s Asian’s Centuries’.
We want to ask questions to reveal broader themes that underpin how the goods were made, how
design and production information was transmitted and controlled, and what were the crucial
similarities and differences between the way the companies and private trade operated?
Each contributor is invited to give a 15 minute illustrated presentation, leaving maximum time for
round table discussion and debate.
PROGRAMME OVERVIEW
DAY 1 (1st of July):
10.30-11.00
Register & Coffee
11.00-11.05
Welcome - Maxine Berg (University of Warwick, Project Leader)
11.05-11.20
Some preliminary findings from the ‘Trading Eurasia – Europe’s Asian Centuries’
Project
Session 1: Collecting the Companies: The material and quantitative evidence
What material evidence do we have concerning the East India Companies trade, what do existing
collections represent? How do they relate to changing trends in scholarship and collecting? Are
there sources as yet not studied that can help us understand the connection between trade and
material culture? The histories of the companies have largely been told as national ones. However
the companies did not operate in national frameworks: they competed and collaborated and
borrowed from one another. They sold their goods to overlapping markets in Europe, and trade was
conducted by merchants belonging to transnational networks.
11.20-12.30
11.25-11.40
11.40-11.55
11.55-12.10
12.10-12.25
12.25 - 1.00
Chair: Chris Nierstrasz, (University of Warwick)
Anna Jackson (Keeper, Asian Department,Victoria and Albert Museum, London),
‘Encounters: exhibiting the material culture of trade and exchange’.
Lars Olof Loof (City Museum, Gothenburg), ‘Remains and Collections from the
Swedish East India Compnay in the Gothenburg City Museum’.
Berit Eldvik (Nordiske Museet, Stockholm), ‘Tracing the history of the English East
India Company through fabric in the Nordiske Museum’.
Martine Gosselink (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
Questions
1.00 - 2.00
Buffet Lunch
Session 2: Part 1: The East - West Dialogue: Shaping Manufacture
How were design and production of objects managed; were there differences between the supply of
large bulk orders and one off orders? How was information transmitted? How did ordering systems
and quality control/rejection work?
2.00 - 3.15
2.05 -2.20
2.20-35
Chair: Felicia Gottmann, (University of Warwick)
Brigitte Nicolas (Head Curator, Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Lorient)
‘The secret world of East-India-Company imported Indian textiles'
Kirsten Toftegaard (Danish Museum of Art & Design, Copenhagen)
‘Encounters in patterns between East and West’
2.35-2.50
2.50-3.15
Sonia Ashmore (Research Fellow, Victoria and Albert Museum, London),
‘How the muslin trade embodied relations between Britain and India’
Questions
Object Handling Sessions
3.15 - 5.00
Clare Pollard – Lacquer
Dinah Reynolds - Chinese Export Porcelain
Shelagh Vainker & Ruth Barnes - Textiles
5.00 -5.30
Coffee Break
Session 2: Part 2: The East - West Dialogue: Shaping Manufacture
5.30
5.30-5.45
5.45-6.00
6.00 -6.30
Chair: Helen Clifford (University of Warwick)
Jessica Harrison-Hall (Curator, Department of Asia, British Museum, London),
‘Distinctions in design transfer’
Luisa Mengoni (Victoria and Albert Museum, London),
‘Special orders and transmission of designs from Europe to China’
Questions
7.30 Workshop Dinner
DAY 2 (2nd of July)
Session 3: The Private Trade
How did the private trade differ from that of Company trade? How do we judge the impact of one
off and custom made pieces on manufacture and consumption?
10.10-11.30
10.15-10.30
10.30-10.45
10.45-11.00
11.00-11.30
Chair: Hanna Hodacs, (University of Warwick)
Menno Fitski (Curator of East Asian Art, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam),
Kakiemon and the trade in Japanese porcelain’
Roger Smith (Independent Historian, London),
’The Emperor’s Clocks - presents, tribute or trade?’
Patrick Conner (Martyn Gregory, London), ‘Odd Fancys hit well' - Chinese export
painting in the 18th century’
Questions
11.30-12.00
Coffee Break
Session 4: East India Trade Objects and the Interior
This final session of the workshop looks at the impact East India objects made in the home, using
inventories as evidence. This arena connects to a forthcoming 3-year project of Warwick University's
History department, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and beginning in September 2011. 'The East
India Company at Home, 1757-1857', a project lead by Margot Finn, aims to trace and assess the
impact and significance of the flow of ‘Oriental’ commodities into British Georgian and Victorian
country houses. It does so by combining the efforts of amateur and professional historians: a key
component of the project is the integration of research (often empirically rich but incompletely
contextualised) conducted by family and local historians with research framed by key questions
about aesthetic change, identity formation, cultural geographies, patronage and power.
How did Asian luxuries shape and challenge British and sub-national identities of gender, self, family
and place? Were Scottish, Welsh, English and British Oriental aesthetics, as manifested in the home,
distinctive markers of global families’ regional affiliations? Did material practices associated with
furnishing the country house strengthen or contradict stereotypes of the Orient that dominated
print-based sources? Over time, how did the definition of what constituted ‘Asian’, ‘British’ and
‘European’ luxuries change, and what role did East India Company families play in that
transformation?
By integrating our research findings into a web-portal to which local and family historians will also
contribute, we hope to generate and harness new research findings from archives across the UK and
abroad to address these domestic questions about 18th- and 19th-century global commerce.
12.00-1.30
12.05-12.20
12.20-12.35
12.35-1.00
1.00-1.30
Chair: Margot Finn (University of Warwick)
Kevin Rogers (Architectural historian and Associate Director, Peter Inskip Associates,
London),
‘Fabrics connected with the East India Company in London merchant inventories’
Kévin Le Doudic (CERHIO CNRS, European University of Brittany, University of South
Brittany, Lorient, France),
‘From Artefact to Daily Life Environment: The ‘East India Company Style’, in the
Eighteenth Century Pondicherry Trading Post’
Questions
Concluding Discussion & Summary - Maxine Berg
1.30-2.30 Buffet Lunch at Ashmolean
SYNOPSES
Anna Jackson, Keeper, Asian Department, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
‘Encounters: exhibiting the material culture of trade and exchange'
In 2004 the V&A staged an exhibition 'Encounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800'
which examined the dynamic period of commercial, cultural and technological exchange that
followed Vasco da Gama's sea voyage to India. This paper will look back at the exhibition,
examining the ideas that informed it, the challenges that accompanied it, and the objects through
which we constructed the narrative.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1196_encounters/index.html
Lars Olof Loof, City Museum, Gothenburg
‘Remains and Collections from the Swedish East Inda Compnay in the Gothenburg City
Museum’.
I would like to introduce our collections, and how we have looked upon this eastern influenced
heritage during the last 200 years. The big collections have focused very much upon porcelain
(china!), but we could also look upon ivory, silk, cotton, furniture and wall-paper. I still believe
that some of these categories are too much forgotten. Connections with the European continent
and the British Isles - from a northerna point of view.
Berit Eldvik, Nordiske Museet, Stockholm
‘Tracing the history of the English East India Company through fabric in the Nordiske
Museum’.
I will talk about some Indian hand painted textiles, so called Palampores. They have been in the
Nordiska museum since long time without any documentation and without any knowledges of the
origin from my predecessors. I will try to give you the history behind them and their connection to
the English East India Company through their first believed owners. They are, at least most of
them, pieces in the great puzzle of re-exportation and private trade with the Asian goods.
Martine Gosselink, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
‘Comparing the Competitors: the Portuguese and the Dutch 1500-1700’
Why, where and how the Dutch East India Company (VOC) took over the position of the
Portuguese, and how different attitudes towards religion, diplomacy and trade
influenced merchandise and luxury items.
During the 16th and 17th centuries Portugal and the Netherlands established huge empires.
Whereas the Portuguese developed theirs as early as 1500, the Dutch had their kick off around
1600. By that time the two powers bumped into each other in Sri Lanka, Japan, Brazil, Ghana,
Indonesia and various other places. During the decades to follow, the Netherlands managed to
take over the Portuguese position in many of these regions.
The Rijksmuseum is preparing an exhibition, which envisages dealing with this take over. By showing
trade products and luxury items from settlements controlled by the Portuguese and subsequently
the Dutch, the ‘Rijks’ will try to reveal differences and similarities between the governing methods of
the two colonial powers. By comparing these objects from different periods, we plan to show the
differences in social-political structures, the impact for the local inhabitants and the changes in the
trading market.
Brigitte Nicolas, Head Curator, Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Lorient,
‘The secret world of East-India-Company imported Indian textiles'
From 1660 onwards, with the aid of the East India Companies, the European import of Indian textiles
began to expand rapidly.
Historians do not yet study this hugely important commercial development in great detail, whilst the
general public remains unaware that cotton textiles formed the largest part of the Companies’ trade.
The analysis of travel accounts and the East India Company Archives enables us slowly to unveil the
secret world of Indian textiles. In the course of the eighteenth century these spread throughout
France, both legally and through channels of smuggling and illicit trade. The Museum of the East
India Companies in Lorient has set itself the task of their identification and classification in order to
incorporate into its collections the evidence of a phenomenon whose repercussions in the
eighteenth century, be it on fashion, on the economy, or on the textile industry, were considerable.
Kirsten Toftegaard, Danish Museum of Art & Design, Copenhagen,
‘Encounters in patterns between East and West’
This paper will try to explore some features in patterns for the printed textile made in India in the
seventeenth and eighteenth century for export especially to Europe. By looking in pattern books and
illustrations of plants and flowers from the period the paper tries to analyze some of the
recognizable features in the way the plants are drawn. The paper is based on an ongoing research
for a coming exhibition at Designmuseum Danmark in spring 2012 and as such must be considered
as work in progress.
Jessica Harrison-Hall, Curator, Department of Asia, British Museum, London,
‘Distinctions in design transfer’
This short paper distinguishes between and discusses three quite different types of design transfer.
Firstly there are those designs from 1520 to 1850 which are commissioned, produced and supplied
to a particular identifiable individual customer or regional market. Secondly there are those designs
which are ordered for a particular market or consumer but are perhaps considered exotic/attractive
by other clients and sold to overlapping markets, often stimulating the rapid production of local
copies. Thirdly there are those transfers of design which occur with a time lag of up to one hundred
years. The British Museum, V&A Museum and National Museum of China are collaborating to
produce an exhibition for the summer of 2012 in Beijing. This show will present ceramics produced
for the elite of geographically diverse markets for a general audience that rarely has an opportunity
to see such material within China.
Luisa Mengoni, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
‘Special orders and transmission of designs from Europe to China’
A large number of 'private orders' commissioned in China included porcelain with patterns and
shapes taken from or inspired by European sources, such as prints, drawings and designs. This topic
has generally been discussed as an aspect of the China trade, but less in connection with the
production of similarly decorated ceramics made at factories in the Netherlands, England, France,
Germany and Italy.
This contribution aims to locate the commission and export of Chinese porcelain with European
designs in the context of a wider phenomenon of consumption and changing production patterns
that also affected European ceramic factories during the end of the seventeenth century and the
first half of the eighteenth century. It will explore to what extent new fashion trends and market
demands across Europe, combined with the circulation and availability of printed illustrated material
and new economies of design work, affected and shaped the nature of 'special orders' made in China
and their desirability as commodities to be ordered and sold in the European market.
Menno Fitski, Curator of East Asian Art, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam,
‘Kakiemon and the trade in Japanese porcelain’
Kakiemon was a luxurious commodity that occupied a special place within the trade, and the
presentation will explore how trade was interlinked with the reception and role of Kakiemon in
Europe.
Roger Smith, independent historian, London,
‘The Emperor’s Clocks’ - presents, tribute or trade?
My paper will examine myth and reality in the export of elaborate clocks to the East Indies (China
and India) in the 18th century.
Patrick Conner, Martyn Gregory, London,
‘Odd Fancys hit well' - Chinese export painting in the 18th Century’
The development of Cantonese painting for Western customers, in various genres: natural history
subjects, portraits, port views, scenes of tea and porcelain production; changes in technique and in
clientele.
Kevin Rogers, architectural historian and Associate Director, Peter Inskip Associates, London.
‘Patterns of furnishing, durable novelty?’
In researching the trade in East India Company textiles, 1665-1730, which involves finished goods
as well as unmade and related materials, I am addressing two central questions: 1) Does the
consumption of East India needlework and printed cottons follow a broader pattern of the value
and desire for luxury domestic furnishing textiles? 2) Is there a relationship between the decline of
the Levant Company and the increase in the supply of East India raw materials in the textile trade?
Kévin Le Doudic, CERHIO CNRS, European University of Brittany, University of South Brittany,
Lorient, France.
‘From Artefact to Daily Life Environment: The East India Company Style’, in the
Eighteenth Century Pondicherry Trading Post’
Western and Eastern private collections and museums own several instances of pieces of furniture
and various artefacts, today identified as the “East India Company Style”. The existing pieces,
which testify of the European presence in the Indian Ocean at the Modern Period, are easily
recognizable thanks to the mix of very normative Western styles with Asian species of wood or
ivory and coral inlays.
The probate inventories of the French who died in the Pondicherry Trading Post, provide reliable
information and make possible the study of the artefacts as objets d’art or museum pieces, as well
as the wider study of their material and daily life environment. Indeed, the latter is essential to
understanding the real function they play in the culture of the French in India, shared between
preservation of European references, and opening interest in Asian culture. Therefore, the notion
of exoticism is to be re-defined.