British Trade with Asia: Historiography and Material Culture

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Maxine Berg

British Trade with Asia: Historiography and Material Culture

CERHIO UMR SEMINAIRE DU 23 JUIN 2011:

Les nouvelles perspectives de l’interconnectedhistory pourl’étude des relations entre l’Europe et l’océanindien

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.

The project I am now pursuing with a group of postdoctoral fellows (Dr. Felicia Gottmann, Dr. Hanna Hodacs and Dr. Chris Nierstrasz) and a PhD student (Ms. Meike Fellinger) investigates the creation of a large scale export ware sector in this Eurasian world, one which provided the products and the qualities of goods that people wanted to buy. This Asian achievement provoked a new industrial response in Europe – one in which European entrepreneurs adapted Asian design, production and industrial organization, thereby creating product innovation and invention in Britain and other parts of Europe. 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 to stimulate European manufacturers to develop their own consumer goods industries.

This is the thesis of our project – it thereby centres on the products and the qualities of goods traded from Asia to Europe. I will speak on some of the historiographical framework of British trade and the English East India Company, and follow with some points on connecting studies of trade with material culture. Two of the postdoc fellows on the project, Dr. Felicia Gottmann and Dr. Chris Nierstrasz will follow to discuss one of the sources we are using to develop a knowledge of the trade in these goods. These are the Commercial Accounts in the India Office Library.

Historiography

First, to turn to Historiography:

New approaches to the material culture of the East India Company trade arise out of several areas of historical writing. I will address the English historiography which has influenced my own approaches.

The East India Company trade was traditionally a separate area of historical enquiry carried out by specialist historians of the Company and by colonial and imperial historians. Both these groups of historians have provided us with dense and rich historical investigation. Their approaches and questions were those of earlier generations. We need to ask how we can use the work they did to address different questions. And we can ask if there are archives and museum collections we can explore in new and deeper ways.

I come to this subject as a historian of European industrial and consumer culture. I want to connect the history of trade and colonisation to Europe’s industrialization and consumer revolutions. English historians have treated all these three areas of research separately. I think new approaches from global history can draw them together.

I will speak very briefly first on the recent turnings of the history of the industrial revolution, and of consumer culture. Then I will turn in more detail to the history of trade with India and China.

Economic histories of the industrial revolution and of wider European industrialization in recent decades have been inward looking. From the later 1970s the subject narrowed to issues of economic analysis and long-term quantitative indices of demographic and output increases and of productivity change. Long-distance trade that could be measured was dismissed as a minor feature, and the origins of industrialization were rooted by this generation of historians in long-term indigenous and agrarian change. (See discussion in E.A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, 2010).

Yet separate studies of consumption, conducted mainly by social and cultural historians revealed the emergence from the mid seventeenth century of a widespread purchase of new commodities, including colonial groceries, tea and manufactured goods from Asia including textiles and porcelain. (Roche, Schuurman, McCants, Weatherill) Historians who turned to archaeological, museum-based and visual sources discovered a wider-world impact on European material cultures. (See discussion of these in Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present(2008)

During the past decade that history of the industrial revolution has moved in two directions: first historians of science and technology have emphasised the wide European framework of Europe’s industrialization. (Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy (2009). Second, global historians have addressed the issue of the ‘great divergence’ between the West and the East. Influenced by a historian of China, Ken Pomeranz, they have argued that environmental factors and energy efficiency in the eighteenth century worked to the advantage of the West, and especially of Britain in an economy increasingly based on the use of coal. Recent work by Robert Allen ironically turns a global history of divergence once more into an economic history narrowly focussed on British exceptionalism. (Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009))

That separate history of consumer culture gathers apace, however, to find evidence across Europe of wider world impacts on cultures of eating and drinking, dress and furnishings. This research has been especially influenced byJan de Vries’s recent concept of ‘industrious revolution’ (de Vries, The Industrious Revolution)which linked the worlds of work and industry to those of family behaviour and consumption. His pan-European study linked the findings on consumer behaviour of social and cultural historians to the questions of economic historians. It opened the gates of economic history to questions of consumer desire, taste and sentiment that changed households and fostered incentives to large-scale productivity change. De Vries also pointed to the stimulus provided to changing consumer cultures in Europe through encounters with wider-world material cultures.

What contribution to these European narratives do we have from our histories of trade and colonialism? Again different groups of historians have provided these: they are drawn from area studies and from imperial, new imperial and post-colonial histories. Their histories have provided us with the histories of East India Companies and private trade, and from there of colonial and territorial dominion. They furnish dense quantitative data on trade flows; more recently they have led post-colonial insight into the struggles of subaltern peoples and new national histories of regions earlier marginalised as colonies.

These three separate historiographical groupings have led to some unfortunate effects in histories of both parts of the world.First, historians of Europe lost sight of Europe’s longstanding vital connections with Asia. Second, historians of Asia and of empire focussed on Asia’s domination by Europe and subsequent escape. They gave less attention to the extent to which Asia reconfigured the cultural and economic landscape of Europe. It is time to reinstate these themes from new perspectives.

Thus my project is about by turning to the study of the goods, of the practical organization of their trade and of the exchange of material cultures.

Now, to turn to a more detailed historiography of the East India Company, I will look at the types of approach which have been taken to the English East India Company.

First: A few basic facts on the English East India Company:

The first EIC was founded by a group of London merchants and granted a monopoly charter by the Crown in 1600. In 1687 a rival company, the New English East India Company, received a charter, but shortly after a joint board of Directors for both companies was formed and they amalgamated in 1709. The Company was dependent on government, but was also formed as a joint stock company with funds subscribed by shareholders and under the management of a Court of Directors. It became the largest of the English chartered companies trading overseas; it was managed from London and financed by the London merchant community. In 1708 over £3,000,000 was subscribed by 3,000 shareholders; a £6 million limit was set in 1744. The Company sent 20-30 ships a year to Asia and made annual sales of £1.25 to 2 million dealing via Asian merchants and brokers with a mass of small producers in India and in China in addition with a number of large producers. In 1813 a charter legalized the entry of private traders into the East Indian trade. In 1833 the Company ceased to be a trading company; instead its sole purpose running the colonial administration of India. Finally in 1858 the Company was liquidated, and the Crown took responsibility for Indian affairs. (For surveys on this see Peter Marshall, ‘British Trade in Asia: Trade to Dominion’ in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. The Eighteenth Century (1998), and H. Bowen, M. Lincoln and N. Rigby, The Worlds of the East India Company (2002).

Recent surveys on the writing on the East Indies trade have been provided by Sanjay Subrahmanyan(‘Introduction’ in Maritime India (2004),and Philip Stern (‘History and Historiography of the English East India Company’, History Compass, 7/4, 2009, pp. 1146-1180.

Stern has emphasised the contrasts between an older literature that treated the English East India Company as a distinct area of study, one that was separate from both British history and from Indian history. He has argued there was a traditional divide in historical writing between work on commerce and on the empire, and this is a divide which is now breaking down.The recent work on empire has been extensive, with much focus on issues of governance and territorial dominion, and post colonial literature on race and gender, nabob culture, subjecthood and identity.

But my own interest in trade and the goods that affected Europe has taken me back to an older literature of comparative East India Companies, of merchants and private traders, as well as the new research arising out of this.

This work on the EIC, especially as reflected in the work of Holden Furber and Charles Boxer was set in the framework of studies of European expansion.Some interest did develop in connecting the East India Company to eighteenth-century politics, notably in the work of Lucy Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (1952)and this has followed through in the work of Brenner, and most recently in the work on political economy, policy and trade of Steve Pincus.

New work in the 1960s and 1970s focussed especially on the business history of the Company. K.N. Chaudhuri’sThe Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (1978). This opened debate on how the Company operated as a joint stock company, its investment, profitability, and extensive detail on its trading history. It provided an in depth treatment of the early years of the Company, and this kind of approach has been pursued again recently for the later period in Huw Bowen’s The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756-1833 (2006).Alongside this can be set the work of Om Prakash with its focus on both the Dutch and English companies, and especially reflected in his European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India (1986) and his Bullion for Goods: European and Indian Merchants in the Indian Ocean Trade, 1500-1800 (2004). This work focussed on the Companies in the context of the history of Asia, and not just as a part of European economic history.

The early focus on business, commerce and empire from the perspective of the European metropole opened other questions in the later 1970s which have also been at the centre of writing during the past decade. This has been a focus on an Indian Ocean world. In the wake of FernandBraudel’sLa Mediterranée, Chaudhuri’s much weaker Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean(1985) led into the very detailed locally based work of a wider group of South Asian historians – SinnappahArasaratnam’sMerchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1650-1740 (1986) and Ashin Das Gupta’s recently collected essays in The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, 1500-1800: Selected Essays of Ashin Das Gupta (New Delhi, 2004). Other historians, including Kenneth McPherson in hisThe Indian Ocean: a History of People and the Sea (1993) and M.N. Pearson in his recent The Indian Ocean (2003) have brought a more Asia-centred focus to research. This also provides a strong background to research related to the new field of ‘histories of Oceans’. There have been those focussed on Atlantic world history, on histories of the Pacific and on Indian Ocean studies. See Markus P.M. Vink, ‘Indian Ocean Studies and “new thalassalogy”’ Journal of Global History (2007), pp. 41-62 and D. Lambert, L. Martins and M. Ogborn, ‘Curents, visions and voyages: historical geographies of the sea’, Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006), pp. 479-493.

What we see in this recent work is an attempt to move away from the separate national histories of the East India Companies and trade in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea, and a move to the kind of more ‘connected history’ espoused by Subrahmanyam in a powerful plea over fifteen years ago:

He identified the ways in which national histories and area studies had disconnected our histories. Historical ethnography, moreover, had emphasised difference from the vantage point of the observer over the observed. He asked that ‘once more, that we not only compare from within our boxes, but spend some time and effort to transcend them, not by comparison alone but by seeking out the at times fragile threads that connected the globe, even as the globe came to be defined as such.’[i](Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31 (1997), pp. 735-762, 761-2)

This emphasis on ‘connected histories’ has taken us to much deeper interest in private and privilege trade, in merchant communities and networks among merchants, and in the local intermediation of trade. That intermediation was also part of the information networks discussed by Chris Bayly that were crucial to the extension of British power in India. (C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (1996). Information and intermediation are subjects that underpin a much wider turn to connecting the local settings of trade and knowledge to European and global networks. Kapil Raj and Simon Schaffer have developed this in recent work in the history of science, as shown in their edited volume, The Brokered World (2009). These interactions also created adaptations in both Asian and European societies as discussed in the histories of those collectors discussed by Maya Jasanoff in Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East 1750-1850 (2005).

It is this recent focus that is of much greater significance for the project I am pursuing on ‘Trading Eurasia’.

Many earlier historians of trade with India drew attention to the role of private traders, notably Peter Marshall and Om Prakash. Early work on private trade focussed on relations between private traders and the East India Company, and on their part in the shift of the East India Company from trade to dominion. New work now focuses on these traders’ expertise and the ways in which they worked in the rhythms of Indian Ocean trade, as well as on their networks with merchants in London. (S. Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London 1660-1740 (2005). In particular they played a key role in trading specialist goods between Asia and Europe as well as within Asia.

Huw Bowen’s article, ‘Privilege and Profit: Commanders of East Indiamen as Private Traders, Entrepreneurs and Smugglers, 1760-1813’, International Journal of Maritime History, XIX/2 (2007), pp. 43-88 examines freight-free private trade between Britain and Asia. He shows that in 1788 the ‘privilege’ outward was 80 tons and 20 cubic feet of goods in each vessel over 755 tons; a return voyage could carry 62 tons in the case of the China trade, and 50 tons for all other trade. This privilege trade was the key way in which most of the luxury goods reaching Europe from Asia in the eighteenth century was brought in. The whole system relied on the expertise of commanders and supercargoes who might gain an average on this trade of £4,000-£5,000 a voyage.

Alongside this ‘privilege’ trade within EIC voyages and conducted by EIC employees, there was another world of private traders and merchants who both provided for the intra-Asian trade and functioned as intermediaries along with Asian merchants for providing the privilege trade. The private papers of many merchants are now yielding up family histories and wider business dealing of this group. Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh(2007) recounts how James Crisp tried to function as an independent merchant competing with the Company to access quality cloth from weavers near Dhaka during the 1760s. Emma Rothschild’s The Inner Life of Empire (2011) and Margot Finn’s recent articles recount the private dealings as well as Company lives of Anglo-Indian families. More than trade and Company employment these family lives of Anglo-Indians brought an orientalism to British culture and fostered the acquisition of luxury goods and collections in British families.