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Europe’s Asian Centuries: Material Culture and Useful Knowledge 1600-1800
Introduction
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. These centuries have been revisited by several generations of historians who have recounted experiences of encounter and possession, and have recast different versions of the ‘rise of the west’.
What I would like to do here is to look back to Europe’s Asian centuries, not just as an event of linked consumer cultures, but of large-scale industrial production, providing for huge domestic and global markets. This was first of all an Indian and Chinese achievement; in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries their industries expanded through labour intensification and reorganization to provide a large scale export ware sector.
Above all this was a manufacturing system adept at providing the goods that people wanted to buy. Products and quality were as significant to this trade as were productivity growth. Theirs was the industry which ultimately stimulated the technological transformation in Europe. European manufacturers and inventors throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century tested their patents, projects and products against the great achievements of translucent Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles in madder red and indigo dyes, in glorious prints or in the textures of the finest muslins. This is the story which should, I want to argue, precede our explanation of European industrialization.
B. Global History
This narrative and analysis of industrialization is part of a recent turning to what we now call global history. That global history was once a history of globalization, centred on big themes of politics and economics. But historians have recently ranged much wider, and global history has brought together historians from many different trajectories – colonial and imperial history, S. Asian and East Asian and more recently South American area studies, Ottoman and Islamic world studies, and historians of cultural and religious encounter and engagement.
This approach to history has challenged the old national histories and area studies as well as periodizations which have dominated our disciplinary divisions. What is Europe in the wider space of Eurasia? What is the early modern in a history which encompasses the Yuan-Ming porcelain trade from Jingdezhen and Chola and Vijayanagar period textile travels? Sanjay Subrahmanyam in a seminal essay published nearly fifteen years ago, 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.’[1]
And yet it has been difficult to move beyond the economic and political frameworks of those grand narratives of domination and resistance centred on empire building and nation states. Their big questions are very compelling, and the source of enduring interest: they have focussed on the sources of the great divergence between West and East, on the historical phases of globalization, and on the rise and decline of empires.[2] [3]Fifteen years on from ‘Connected Histories’ we still have a long way to go.
The great divergence which has framed so much of our recent thinking in global history has yielded large-scale comparative studies on differences in resource bases, capital inputs, population and wages or institutional structures and state building among the great regions of the world. Investigating the sources of the Great Divergence attracts us because it challenges us to turn our sights outwards from our own internal histories, to compare the resource base of the Yangtze Delta to that of Northwest Europe, to compare London wage rates with those of Beijing. Much data has been collected on these comparisons; the focus has moved out to include comparisons with India as well as China and Japan, and also the Ottoman and Spanish Empires.[4]
The Divergence debate revived an increasingly narrowed and even moribund economic history. ‘Economic historians previously locked away in the study of their particular country and period have been forced to confront the inter-connectedness of their specialisms.’[5] We have learned much, but there is a sense in which the Divergence debate has reinforced a series of much older questions.
First it focussed on what Europe had and Asia did not, subsequently using this as an explanation. Geography, ecology and environment provided an early key indicator of comparison. Pomeranz argued that ecological imbalance in access to coal followed by the development of technologies using coal set the course for a divergence of Europe’s growth over Asia’s from the later eighteenth century. The ensuing debate among a wide group of European, Asian and world historians has only left entrenched a long-standing emphasis on the part played by Britain’s superior coal reserves in her industrialization. [6]
Another major issue arising out of the divergence debate is wages and prices, which has coalesced into another old issue, that of wages and the standard of living. Once again intensive, and now global effort is focussed on demonstrating higher wages and standards of living in Britain - indeed not even Britain – but England - than in the rest of Europe, and now the rest of the world, with ensuing consequences for the development of labour-saving technologies.[7]
The Divergence Debate originally challenged historians to think outside their national boundaries, and to compare Europe with parts of Asia in the period before Europe’s industrialization. But it has been turned by economic historians back to a series of old methodologies and debates. Where during a recent period we had at least started to think about industrialization in a European context, it is ironic that the Divergence Debate has driven us back to narrow considerations of England.
Comparative static analysis of growth rates, econometric exercises on data sets of prices, wages and productivity has led us away from approaches that change the way we think. The stages of economic history reveal a resurgence of the same questions, similar approaches, and much the same data. During the 1960s we compared European economies, but to mapout the stages of economic growth. Questions focused on the sources of economic growth narrowed comparative studies of the European economies. These comparative studies were also applied by some to offer blueprints of development to the Third World.[8]During the 1970s, debates over the standard of living and capital formation generated data on and analysis of wages and interest rates in various cities and regions of England, Scotland and parts of Europe.[9] Data sets sometimes added to, but more frequently rearranged provided for a return to old questions of growth accounting.[10]How much further on have we moved from the questions posed by Nicholas Crafts in 1977 in his ‘Industrial revolution in Britain and France: some thoughts on the question “why was England first”?[11] Joel Mokyr’s questions ten years later ‘Has the Industrial Revolution been crowded out? have still to be answered:
‘…the works of Williamson and Crafts mark important advances in the study and understanding of a critical episode in world history, one that will require the collaboration of economists, social historians, demographers, and others to comprehend fully. At this stage it seems that we have run into strongly diminishing returns in analyzing the same body of data over and over again. The highest-return strategy now is to uncover new data and explore hitherto unused sources to fill in a few more corners in this jigsaw puzzle in which most of the pieces will remain missing forever.’[12]
It is time to shift some of our questions to more open-ended ones over global connections: how did the transmission of material culture and useful knowledge across regions of the world affect the economic and cultural developments in any one of these regions? This leads us into narratives of interaction which could take us deeper into the analysis of imperial domination, but equally lead us into the connections that contributed to economic development in Europe.
Europe’s Asian Centuries
To this end it is time to turn to a large-scale study of EICs and private trade in the transfer of manufactured goods, their material culture and useful knowledge from Asia to Europe.
A hypothesis to investigate is that Europe’s pursuit of quality goods turned a pre-modern encounter with precious and exotic ornament into a modern globally-organized trade in Asian export ware. Ironically, the result was Europe’s industrialization and China’s and India’s displacement as the world’s leading manufacturers. (It is of course a further irony that the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have seen Europe’s loss of those manufacturing catalysts of textiles, ceramics and metal goods back to Asia; but this is another story.)
It is time to look in greater depth at those Asian goods which so fascinated Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The porcelain and textiles collections of our great museums have been intensively studied by museum curators and collectors. Their knowledge is prodigious, and their exhibitions convey a history to a wider public that has only recently reached scholarly history writing. The artefacts they conserve and display are the visual sources of a wider-world impact on European material cultures.[13]
Trading Eurasia has to be sure been the focus of the many great studies of Europe’s East India Companies. There have been histories of the VOC, the EIC, the French East India Companies, the Danish and Swedish Companies, and the Ostend Company as well as of the Indies projects of other European powers and the private merchants interspersed among them.[14] But the histories of these EICs have been hived off into a separate history of colonialism and empire. There are also large-scale quantitative data bases of trade, but this data has been aggregated, and the characteristics of the goods traded expunged from the historical record. How else can an economic historian deal with the hundreds of varieties of cloth traded?
Yet a comment by a French East India Company servant may better capture the realities of the Asian trade. ‘All the science of the merchant, he wrote, is restricted to the knowledge of the different types of these cloth’.[15]. It is time that we too enquired into the characteristics and qualities of the goods brought from Asia and how these were integrated into European imaginations and everyday life. This is where I think we can take global history in new directions. We can then look at the impact of the connections in material culture and useful knowledge on crucial economic transitions in the west. One way forward is to investigate the way in which the companies helped to create a large-scale Asian export-ware sector, one that fed Europe’s insatiable demand for millions of pieces of textiles and thousands of tons of porcelain.
First we must remind ourselves of the size of this Asia trade to Europe. Tea, textiles, porcelain, lacquerware , furnishings, drugs and dyestuffs made for a systematic global trade carried in quantities which by the later eighteenth century came to 50,000 tons a year, as estimated by Jan de Vries. This made for just over one pound of Asian goods per person for a European population of roughly 100 million. [16]If we look to textiles and porcelain alone, we see the prodigious amounts of these goods reaching Europe from the 17th C. Riello’s recent estimates show 1.3 million pieces of cotton textiles reaching Europe by the late 1680s, and 24.3 million pieces over the period1665-1799. [17]Recent comparative disaggregation of this data indicates the high proportions of plain cottons and muslins, as well as the striped and printed calicoes that were important to the trade. By the early eighteenth century there was a European printing industry drawing on high quality Indian cottons as intermediate goods.
The indicators for porcelain are similar. The British alone imported between 1 and 2 million pieces a year of Chinese porcelain by the early 18th C. The Dutch imported 43 million pieces from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the 18thCentury.[18] But there was also a differentiation in the types of porcelain imported. Individual pieces brought into Europe as exotica and curiosities in the sixteenth century gave way by the mid Seventeenth Century to systematic imports of large numbers of pieces systematically produced for Western taste.
Porcelain dealers in Batavia received two million pieces a year by the 1690s; some of these were transhipped to Europe, others entered the intra-Asian trade. By the early eighteenth century these imports of porcelain reached 13.3% of Asian imports by the English East India Company, and the English Customs Accounts recorded high value imports, valued at £150,621 in the later 1750s.[19] The European companies imported several thousand chests of porcelain in any one year in the 1760s and 1770 on ships that even much earlier in the eighteenth century brought in over 100,000 tea cups, 40,000 chocolate cups with handles, and 10,000 milk jugs in a single voyage.[20]
Increasingly after the mid eighteenth century private trade took more of this trade. Officers and seamen on East India Company vessels could carry 80 tons of private trade of all types of oriental decorative wares, furnishings and especially porcelain. The VOC after 1756 declared that its official imports from China were to include only ‘current ware,’ that is dinner plates, tea and coffee cups and saucers, and wares bringing in a fixed profit. The English East India Company did likewise in the 1770s, restricting official imports from China to tea and standard lines of silks and chinaware. Privilege or private trade was the route through which specialty goods were imported.[21]
The Commercial Ledgers of the English East India Company; similarly the VOC provide an immensely rich detailed account of the products sought from China and India, as well as commentary on those provided. Recent work I have been conducting with postdocs on my project can be conveyed through a few examples from the 1719/1720 and 1730. The list of goods ordered from Canton for the Ship Mountague in 1719 included 218,000 pieces of porcelain, finely described as for example:
‘Boats – of different sizes, variety of paints & sprigs or running work instead of blue sprigs in the border with a pretty deal of scarlet – 10,000; Coloured – 5,000, ditto blue – 5,000. [E/3/100 1720]
…If any Japan Junks be at Canton while you are there which have Japan earthen ware you may buy some…buy none that are large pieces…
If you find any new sort or fashion of china ware which is useful & you think may be acceptable in England buy some of it.’
In 1720 394,000 pieces of textiles in 72 different types were ordered on ships going to Bengal [Chaudhuri – has 462,875 actually imported from Bengal in that year]
Comments on the Sannoes brought back on the first ships were that they were of too deep a blue. ‘They must be of a lighter blue. Some yellow and some red…all sorts to be glazed.’
The taffetas ordered from Canton in 1730 came with the instructions:
‘….one half must be of all sorts of Cloth colours and the other half of lively reds, blues, greens, yellows, and some white, according to the patterns which Mr. Torrianocarrys with him, the most variety among the cloth colours the better, bring very few Crimsons, and fewer still of the dark dirty greens…’
On flowered taffetas …’for variety, we should have one thousand pieces more or less, in hopes you may get them better fancy’d and perform’d of various stripes, sprigs and flowers, for many pieces of one pattern will never do.’ [E/3/105 1730]
These East India Companies were selling to merchants who knew their markets. These were goods which reached surprisingly far down the social classes. 30-50% of English inventories from various parts of the country contained chinaware.[22] The Irish were also enthusiastic customers. Porcelain was widely smuggled in, and many anticipated the arrival of East Indiamen and auctions of their contents in Cork, Dublin and inland towns.[23] More than 50% of recently-studied Dutch and Southern Netherlandish probate inventories left porcelain by the 1740s.[24] Other recent studies of the textiles in the inventories of the Amsterdam Orphanage in the 1740s to 1780s show both rich and poor buying Asiatic textiles for different purposes.[25]