Cheap and Cheerful:Chinese Silks in Eighteenth-Century Scandinavia

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Cheap and Cheerful:Chinese Silks in Eighteenth-Century Scandinavia

by Hanna Hodacs () work in progress, please do not cite

To those concerned with coloursand consumption in the eighteenth century,the “Packing book” of the Swedish East India Company (SEIC) ship Calmareis a good start; it lists the deliveries of more than 4,000 pieces of Chinese silk to the Swedish factory in Canton in the autumn of 1742. A table, stretching over three densely written pages, with the heading “Recapitulation of the different colour of each assortment of wrought silk,” summarizes the colours of silk cargo. Altogether 40 colours and colour combinations are listed;the most common are sky blue, junquille, crimson, and white, but there are also numerous pieces in scarlet, cherry, mazareen blue, straw, and citron. Only a few pieces were multi-coloured but the descriptions of them are particularly evocative; combinations such as “Crimson and Light Green,”“Dark Green and White,” or Turquine and Sea green” stand out.[1]

This colourful silk cargo fitted into 65 chests; the chest identity numbers are also indicated in the table. Cherry coloured poisee damask, for example, were packed in chests numbers 5, 29, and 36.[2] Theft and fraud were common, and one reason for monitoring the packing was to deflect opportunists. More importantly, though, noting down the chest numbers set the stage for the next phase of trade. The ship Carlmare arrived in Gothenburg, the headquarters of the SEIC, on the west coast of Sweden early June 1743. In late August the cargo was auctioned off. Prospective buyers had by then been able to inspect the silks in the house of Mess. Thornton, in the Main Harbour, but here the content of the 65 chests had been turned into more than 200 multi-coloured auction lots. As Illustration 1 shows, the first silk lots (of poisee damask pieces of identical dimensions) put up for sale at the auction each contained 30 pieces in fourteenth different shades. Information on numbers of pieces, types and colour assortment, andexact location (chest number), were of course essential to those assembling thousands of silk pieces into hundreds of lots in Gothenburg.

Taking colours as the cue, this article will explore the Swedish and Danish eighteenth-century trade with Chinese silks and what it can tell us about the connection between long distance trade and European fashion, andabout more long-termchanges in consumption and production. This is largely an uncharted history, firstly because it deals with eighteenth-century East India trade in Chinese silks and not Indian cottons, and secondly because it is concerned with Scandinavian consumptionwhich has so far attracted limited international attention. Before we return to silk and colours,the European consumption of Asian textiles and the Scandinavian East India companies’ trade with Chinaneedshort introductions.

Asian colourful textiles and historical change

Those studying the European trade in colourful Asian textiles and its long-term effects both in Europe and globally have largely focused on the import of Indian cotton to the Atlantic world.[3] Historians have pointed to several reasons for the success of Indian textiles, including their colours. Early-modern European consumers were quick to appreciate the quality of the dyes used by Indian manufacturers, decorating their piece goods with printed or painted designs. Indian tradesmen used techniques and components not available to European manufactures, including resist-dyeing and mordant,distributing and fixing pigments to textiles. The end result was colourful textiles that were largely resistant to the fading effects of sun and washing. Intertwined with the history of Indian dying is the history of cotton as a fibre. Pigments used in the early modern period, typically based on plants, insects, or minerals, work differently depending on which fibre they are applied to. While the cotton fibre was not fully new to Europeans,they wereunfamiliar with the use of madderto generate a red colour on cotton, known in Europe as Turkish Red.[4]European weavers also had no knowledge of how to produce pure cotton textiles. Indian tradesmen used cotton in both the warp and weft, a technique European tradesmen did not master in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Instead Europeans typically used different mixes of cotton, and/or wool and silk, thereby producing fabrics heavier than their Indian rivals. One favourite Asian textile was muslin, a very light, white cotton fabric. Dhaka, in today’s Bangladesh, produced the finest muslins; they were famously so thin that pieces goods, one yard wide and twenty yards long, could be passed through a finger ring.[5]

From the late seventeenth century onward, the Eurasian cotton trade boomed. Annual cotton imports from Asia in the last three decades of the century involved 1.3 million pieces per year. The English East India Company (EIC) was the leading importer to Europe,and the Atlantic world. The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie(VOC) also traded in vast quantities, but a larger share of the Dutch trade supplied the intra-Asian market, including the Chinese, with Indian cloths.[6]Other companies, especially the Danish and the French, imported Indian cottons too. The Danish trade blossomed in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, particularly during periods when other European powers were at war.[7]When the French textile trade with Asia was at its peak in the 1730s, the French East India Company imported over 400,000 pieces of Asian textiles on average; 95 per cent of the French traded goods between 1687 and 1761 was cotton from India.[8]

In Europe the import of Indian cotton textiles caused controversy.European textile manufactures whose production was threatened by Asian cotton were generally successful generating bans on domestic consumption.[9] Prohibitions did not stop people from using cotton textiles, though. In France, the smuggling in of printed cotton made in India, theOttoman Empire, andother European countries, was so significant that it influenced debates on political economy. The implication of large numbers of people in illegal activities spurred philosophers and debaters to develop new liberal notions of how the market ought to work.[10] In Britain import substitutions, replacing the imported Indian textiles with home-made versions, were central in pushing technological progress, thereby promoting a process we traditionally label the Industrial Revolution.In short, pure and colourful cottons came to stay in Europe. Cotton suited European consumers hungry for change, and,withtime, European producers, who started to churn out an ever-growing amount of patterned textiles for markets at home and overseas. In this respect cotton textiles have become a central concern to historians investigating the formation of the European consumer society and its global implication in the early modern period as well as those aiming to explain the economic diversions between Asia and Europe in modern history.[11]

It is no surprise, then, that the history of Chinese wrought silk in the history of the Eurasian maritime trade is somewhat lost amidst all this change. The eighteenth century import of wrought silk from China was of course,relatively speaking, much smaller than the import of Indian cottonpieces. For example, all in all the Dutch Company auctioned away only 184,000 pieces of Chinese silkbetween 1729 and 1795.[12] We don’t know what London received, but EIC headquartersorderedits supercargoes to bring home 499,000 pieces from China between 1707 and 1750.[13] The French silk imports from Asia were somewhat smaller: around 94,000 silk pieces arrived to France from the East between 1687 and 1779, but this also included a limited number of silk pieces from India.[14]Althoughincomplete,these numbers suggest that the totalDutch, British, and French import of Chinese silk in the long eighteenth century probably did not extend much beyond one million silk pieces, a figure equalling the annual import of cotton textiles during much of the same period.

Moreover, silk,in contrast to (pure) cotton textiles,was not a novelty to early modern Europeans. While the name “the Silk Road” was invented in the nineteenth century,Chinese silk had travelled west overland long before the globallystretching maritime trade connections were formed. We can find consumption of Chinese- as well as Byzantine-producedsilk goods in the Roman Empire, a development reflecting not only an early European taste for Asian goods but also the movement of sericulture westward from China.[15] As the maritime trade expanded in the sixteenth century,Chinese silk, raw and wrought, moved across the Pacific too, from Manilla to Acapulco and Spanish America. In this cross-pacific trade, Chinese wrought silk was more important than Indian cotton.[16]Raw silk was important too. By the early eighteenth century, between 200 and 700 metric tons crossed the Pacific annually, suppling the silk manufacturing industries of New Spain, employing 14,000 people in Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca.[17]Recent research suggests that Chinese silk became an everyday good to ordinary peopleacross early modern Spanish America.[18]

The northern European East India companies outmanoeuvred the Portuguese in the seventeenth-century trade with Asia, a trade in which silk did play a central role.[19] Within thiscontext India,however,was a more important supplier than China, providing Europe with wrought and raw silk. The EIC brought Bengal silk goods to the London market; by the turn of the century,for example,only two per cent of the EIC-traded silk came from China.[20]Of course, by then, the direct maritime trade between England and China had just started. Small Chinese and Japanesesilks impacted European designs,most notably and visibly in the"bizarre style" patterns popular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, before the rococo style took hold of Europe.[21]The wrought Chinese silk, which started arrive directly to northern Europe on the East India ships from the end of the seventeenth century,entered a market where European silk manufactures “lead fashion”; it was with embellished silk textiles that new trends were generated across the continent.[22] Leading designers of woven patterns and embroidery worked with silk manufactures in Lyon and London, but their innovations were copied across Europe, a processes which helped spin the wheel of fashion.[23]

Like Asian cotton, Asian silkwas banned or severely restricted in France and Britain.[24]While Indian cottontextiles seem to have been unstoppable in spite of the bans, there have been few studies of how Chinese wrought silk faired more generally on the European market, at least outside the context of elite consumption.[25] With the exception of silk handkerchiefs we know little of the plebeian silk consumption in early modern Europe.[26]Raw material costs matterhere of course, and raw silk, whether produced in India, China, or Europe, was no doubt a more expensive material than the versatile cotton, which could even be made to look like glossy silk if processed right. Whatever the origin of the raw material, early modern silk and cotton do in this respect fit into the general story of how, as European consumerism evolved,old luxurieswere replaced by new luxuries.Producing the former, the main cost were associated with the price of raw material,while the costs for craft skills formed the main outlay producing the latter.[27]

It is this history—the association ofeighteenth-century cotton with the development of European consumerism, mass markets, and technological developments leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and of silkwith notions of old elite consumption—that analysis of the colourful Chinese cargo on the Scandinavian ships can help, if not alter,at least modify and develop.

Budget silks from China to Scandinavia

While the quantities of Indian piece goods arriving to Europe outnumbered wrought Chinese silk goods, there is a marked difference between how much silk the different companies imported not reflected in the size of their home market. In the case of the Scandinavian trade it is clear that the Swedish silk business was unusually large. By the 1770s Sweden, which included today’s Sweden, Finland, and Swedish Pomerania,had a population of around 3 million. The number of inhabitants of the Danish realm living in the Baltic area, in present day Denmark, Norway, and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, are not known before by around 1800, when they equalled 2.2 million.[28]Nonetheless the known Swedish imports of Chinese silk between 1733 and 1759 were five times as big as the known Danish imports: 129,000 versus 27,000 pieces.[29]It is however worth underlining that the Swedish figures from the sales catalogue include trade conducted on the side or privately by the employees of the SEIC, while the Danish figures only include silk traded by the Danish Company, not its staff. From correspondence between merchants involved in the Scandinavian wholesale trade in Chinese goodswe learn that the silk share of trade conducted privately by members of the Danish expeditions could be huge. In 1747,for example,12,000 pieces—more than twice the size of the DAC silk import that year—arrived as part of a private trade.[30]

However, even if the Swedish figures include privately traded goods, they stand out, also compared to theDutch, British,and French imports of Chinese wrought silks.The VOC imported only 10,000 pieces more than the Swedesbetween 1733 and 1759 (139,000 pieces versus 129,000). If we match the figures from the English ordering lists for the period 1731 with 1748 (an expedition to China took approximately 18 months)with what we know arrived in Gothenburg between 1733 and 1750, the Swedish trade equalled more than half of the English. London ordered 182,000 pieces while Gothenburg received 95,000. Compared to the French imports, 32,000 pieces between 1733 and 1759, the Swedes were big traders in Chinese silks.[31]

Import, of course, didnot necessarily mean domestic consumption. The European markets for Asian goods were notoriously porous;illicit practices and smuggling undermined the monopolies granted to the East India companies over their home markets. Take for example the Scandinavian trade with another Chinese good, tea. Together the Swedish and the DanishEast India companies imported up to a third of all tea reaching Europe in the eighteenth century. However, with the possible the exception of Denmark proper, the Scandinavian market for Chinese tea was weak. The main bulk—ninety per cent or more—of the Scandinavian tea was re-exported. Most of it ended up in pots and cups furnishing British tables, in spite of the English East India Company’s monopoly over its domestic market.[32]

Textiles were smuggled across Europe too, although it is hard to quantify how much goods moved over the borders. We do know that the Dutch Republic provided the first landing point for Asian textiles reaching across Europe, including France, where consumers also were provided with illicit goods in the form ofprinted cottons from the Levant and Switzerland.[33]All foreign-made silks were banned from the British markets in the eighteenth century; however, wrought silks, particularly handkerchiefs from India sought after by the more plebeian part of the market, were frequently smuggled into the country via London.[34]While there is evidence that some Swedish imported Chinese silkswere re-exported,there are also good reasons to believe most of the SEIC imported silks stayed in Sweden. The strongest indication is the sharp drop in imports of silks after 1754, illustrated in Diagram 1and corresponding in time to the introduction of a domestic ban on the consumption of Chinese silk. Before 1754 the Swedish market was by all account hot. Dutch traders described the Gothenburg market as “bewitched” by Chinese silk; auction prices rose so high that there was no profit in re-exporting the SEIC silks to other markets in Europe.[35]

Why this Swedish obsession with Chinese silks? One likely reason is that Swedish consumers had little access to Indian cotton textiles. All in all only 6out of 61 Swedish expeditions reached the Indian peninsulabetween 1731 and 1766. The first expedition to India leaving Gothenburgled to a diplomatic crisis as the SEIC ship was attacked by staff of the French and English companies on the Coromandel Coast in 1733. The EIC objected to a new competitor which to no small extent was manned by exile Brits, several of whom had worked in the recently folded Ostend Company, a large supplier of tea destined to be smuggled into the British market.[36] While other attempts were made,little came of Swedish trade with Indian goods; instead the Swedes concentrated on the China trade. The latter was the most profitable part of the Scandinavian trade generally, andin the case of Denmark the China trade brought in seventy-five per cent of the profit of the DAC for most of the eighteenth century.[37]