Colours in Abundance and Bundles - the Sale of Chinese Silk Textiles at the Auctions Of

Colours in abundance and bundles - the sale of Chinese silk textiles at the auctions of the Scandinavian East India Companies

References to add:

David Michell in Journal of Textile History 2010

Pippa the Hangzhoy Silk Museum http://ebwg.sunbo.net/index.php?xname=OVRD401

Slide 1.

The paper I about to give here is based on research I am currently doing as part of a project on East India Trade together with Meike Fellinger, Felicia Gottmann, Chris Nierstrazs.

·  The name of the project is “Europe’s Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia 1600-1830” and it is headed by Maxine Berg.

As it happens I also work on another post doc project in Sweden.

·  It is on the legacy of Carolous Linnaeus and the late 18th century natural history links between London and Uppsala.

·  I mention it here because, the work with this paper I have given me reasons to look at aspect to do with botany and entomology.

The different East India Companies of early modern Europe are our main focus of attention in the Warwick project.

·  I work on the Scandinavian East India Companies, the Danish and the Swedish Companies:

o  “Asiatiska kompaniet”

o  Svenska Ost Indiska Kompaniet.

The two companies were on the one hand quite different.

·  The Danish Company, established already in 1616, traded with China as well as India, where the company had a chain of trading stations.

·  The Swedish company on the other hand was a much slimmer operation, established in 1731 it almost exclusively traded with China.

However, although different in terms of organisation and history, the Scandinavian companies had a lot in common too.

·  As companies based in small neutral countries they were well placed to compete with the bigger companies during periods of European conflicts.

·  Their ships were also frequently used to bring home the fortunes of particularly the English East India Companies’ employees in Asia, as part of the so called remittance trade.

Moreover, and particularly important here, the goods the Scandinavian East India Companies brought to Gothenburg and Copenhagen were to a large extent re-exported.

·  This was the case for between 70% and 90% of the goods.

·  The main reason for this was that the Scandinavian populations was too poor to consume the luxuries from the east.

Moreover, the high duties on tea in Britain made smuggling a lucrative business.

·  In fact the trade with tea from China provided the main drive for the Scandinavian East India ventures.

However, tea was not the only goods brought over from the East.

Indian textiles and Chinese porcelain and silk were other goods that were shipped over and sold at auctions in Copenhagen and Gothenburg.

·  Again goods that to a large extent was re-exported.

It is in order to understand first of all the role of Copenhagen and Gothenburg as peripheral emporiums for East India goods:

·  including the transnational European trade with Asian goods

·  That I have developed an interest in colours and particularly the colours of silk textiles brought over from China.

Although in terms of bulk or Cargo, the quantity of Chinese Silk was not very significant, it was how ever a very valuable commodity.

I will get back to some of my future plans, and how a study of colours might illuminate the consumption of Chinese Silk in Europe towards the end of the paper:

·  Hoping that feedback from you might help develop some of my plans.

For the first and longest section of this paper I am going to focus on the names of the colours of the silk and the relationship between colours and price.

·  However I will start with the source l have been working with first

Slide 2

My first example is from a catalogue listing the goods for sale in Gothenburgh in August 1748.

·  This stuff had been brought from China by the two ships Calmar and Kronprinsen which set out in 1746, and it lists tea, porcelain and silk material for sale.

·  What makes this sales catalogue particularly interesting is the fact that the prices the stuff was sold for is listed, together with the name of the purchaser.

The section covering the silk starts with a little introduction saying that:

·  Prior to the auction, the textile had been on display in the house of Joh. Freid Bruun, who lived by the Great Harbour (this is before the Swedish East India Company invest in their own magazines).

·  The Catalogue also statues that since any purchaser had had the chance to examine the pieces beforehand they had no right to refuse a lot which they bought:

o  but for the exception if it was shorter than stated, and that had to be with more than a Swedish aln, which is about 60 centimetre.

Slide 3

All in all 9857 Pieces were for sale in 395 lots. There were 5 general qualities but only 3 in any substantial quantities:

4996 Damask pieces:

Damask is a fabric with a none raised pattern in the same colour as the background fabric.

The Damasks for sale in Gothenburg are described as either “Meuble” or “Poises” (i.e. a flower bouquet).

·  Only 400 out of nearly 5000 Damask pieces were described with the help of a pattern number. About 10 pattern numbers

3250 Taffeta pieces:

·  Is a smooth plain woven fabric, can either be pieced dyed or yarn dyed.

·  The Taffeta for sale in Gothenburg is distinguished as 4, 6, or 8 threads

1040 Paduasoy:

·  originally a French terms a strong corded or grosgrain silk textile

Others qualities:

·  There are also some pieces named “Gorgoroner” and Satin for sale

·  But the Damask, Taffeta and Paduasoy made up the main bulk of the textiles for sale, about 90%.

Specifications:

·  Next to name the lengths and the width is specified. There were standard three lengths with some small variations:

·  13.8-14.1m;

·  16.2-16.65m;

·  22.8-23.7,

·  Width when specified was 1.25 m.

Colour:

These were not the only way in which the textile were described or defined, added to the above parameters was the one of colour

Slide 4

In fact, colour seems to matter a great deal, maybe not surprisingly since silk is a textile fibre that absorbs dyes easily.

·  All in all there are 26 colours mentioned in the sale catalogue.

·  With the exception of a handful of fabrics that are described as stripy the colour of every piece is specified.

·  With this information I have created this circle diagram. I have tried to match the colour of the segment with the actual colour referred to.

·  So the biggest segment, the blue one, represent the number of pieces which are described as “Sky blue” in the catalogue.

·  Needless to say I have sometimes guessed what colour or shade is referred to with certain names.

On the hand out is a list of the names and my translation of them. The order in which the colours are listed reflects how common they were, so sky blue was the most common colour.

------Slide 6:

Before we look closer at the list of names of colour – there are a few things to say about the concept of colour in the 18th century.

The 18th century was a very dynamic period when it comes to developing theories or systems for how to categorise colours, including nomenclatures and descriptions of them.

Like Sara Lowengard has discussed The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe this was an area where science and trade merged.

·  She makes the point that in order to understand the role and development of colours in the 18th century we need to keep the perspective broad.

·  Lowengard identifies three different strands:

One is rooted in physics and Newton’s descriptions of colours

They were based on observations of a colour spectrums produced by illuminating a prism.

·  These are the same colours you can detect in a rainbow.

·  Newton identified 7 colours sometimes called principle colours;

o  red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

The second strand of discussion of colours was one to which trades men and manufacturer largely contributed.

Here there are different ways to think about colours stemming from manufacturing processes.

Basic colours were the colours different groups of tradesmen worked with.

·  Dyers were traditionally separated into different groups of pending on if they worked with red, yellow, blue, black etc.

·  Basic colours in ceramics and enamelling were black, white, yellow, green, blue and purple colours, again different trades men tended to specialize in one colour.

Dyers and manufacturers also worked with the notion of primary colours, i.e. blue, red and yellow.

·  This colours were of course important, because of the wide range of secondary colours you can produce by mixing them.

·  Similar, black and white, not colours in the physical sense of the word (indicating the absence of colour or the presence of all colour) were important.

o  Because the ability of shading any paint by adding black or white to the mix.

Next to basic colours, primary and secondary colours was the notion of a simple colour which was a colour produced only by one ingredient.

The influence of manufacturing on the nomenclature of colours is also possible to trace in names where the production of these colours originated from.

·  Hence we talk about Saxon green, or Prussian Blue (first manufactured 1707). See also Cologne earth, or Cassel earth, (both brown).

Now, this is not to say that nomenclature of colours were necessarily stable among tradesmen and manufacturer.

·  While the production of colour contributed to the variation in naming and understanding of colour and colour production.

·  Fashion could disturb the order.

·  Old colours were re-launched with new names, enabling sellers of e.g. textiles to recycle goods and dies.

The third strand in the discussion of colours in the 18th century emanates from natural history.

·  In fact 18th natural history contributed to the discussion of colours in two ways.

The first was overlapping with the discussion taking place among those focused on manufacturing.

·  Natural history was here a tool with which help the natural world could be explored so as to find the sources for new dies.

·  In fact, the objective, to find new sources for colours in the natural world is a very dominating theme in the natural history discussion of the time.

Secondly, the 18th century saw the development of a more exact language for describing nature, a development to which the Swedish naturalists Carolus Linnaeus was central.

·  Linnaeus was careful of using colours to identify for example plants, since he recognised that the colour of a flower changed depending on where it grew.

Nonetheless naturalists needed to take into account colours and in response to a growing need to develop a more precise language of colours like:

·  the Danish Johan Christian Schäffer or

·  the German Abraham Gottlob Werner

They created taxonomic colour systems with which help they tried to encourage more exact descriptions of nature.

·  While often rejecting names for colours that evolved within the context of fashion, e.g. Prussian blue>

·  Their attempts to creates systems and names for how to mix different colours contributed to the discussion of colours in the 18th century.

Slide 7

And with this in mind I would like to go back to the list of names in the Swedish Auction catalogue. First of all, the names used here are part of European, and maybe particularly French dominated nomenclature for referring to colour.

·  Poneceau (French for Poppy)

·  Couleur de Rose

·  Couleur de Chair

·  Paille

·  Blomerant from French Bleu mourant

·  Turqvin blue probably from Turquin marble

·  Mazarin blue, dark blue, named “in honour of “ Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu’s predecessor

This pay witness to the influence of French fashion, French silk was high fashion in 18th century Sweden.

In order to explore this further I searched Svenska akademiens ordbok, SAOB, the equivalent of Oxford English Dictionary' outlining the etymology of words used in the Swedish language from 1521.

Searching the terms listed on the handout the proximity natural history, chemistry and fashion, as discourses, contributing to the nomenclature of colours becomes very clear.

·  In many cases, the colour names on my list have their first recorded usage within a natural history context,

o  sky blue for example is first used in 1538, to describe the colour of the lily Iris germanica.

o  Jonquil, similarly, is cross referenced with the plant Narcissus jonquilla.

§  The other references to Jonquil is to the flora Swedish Lichens by Westring, (1805) on here it says it is a colour of a dye that could be extracted from Bloodspot lichen ("blodplättlav)

·  A further observation is that when clothes are mentioned, they are in many cases referring to silk clothes specifically,

o  there are for example many references to sky blue silk dresses, pearl grey stockings etc.

·  This is not surprising since of course silk textile where the most colourful of the textiles available to early modern European consumers before Indian cotton fabrics became available on a broad scale.