Hanna’s report BL 4-5 of April 2011

This report wanders a bit; hope you can extract some useful information anyway.

Orders

To add to Chris report, I had a look at the orders from London too (“Outwards Correspondence with the East”). I think the there are complete records of this correspondence for the period 1639 to 1756). Yes there is a lot there in terms of specification of goods ordered from London. This include very detailed orders about what size, colour and qualities to buy, and discussion of previous years orders including factors influencing the reception of goods in London.

My impression is that this material is rich and should be possible to use get an idea about not only what sold but also changing trends on the European market. I would like to look more closely at this material on our visit end of May. I am planning to gather orders/letters (maybe 1 in every 10 years) to get more of an idea of how the material can be used. Hopefully this could help us address questions we want to have further discussed at the workshop in Oxford.

Chinamen, Auctions and Auctioneers

I also tried to look closer at the China trade, particularly to do with the auctions of porcelain. I read Godden’s Oriental export market porcelain and its influence on European waresquite carefully and had identified a number of names of Chinamen in London that bought and sold Chinese export ware.

They are:

  • The Elers Brothers
  • John Lygo
  • Henry Tombes
  • Robert Fogg (149)
  • Turner, Abbot & Newbury of 82 Fleet Street, a London firm of chinamen
  • Thomas Williams
  • Miles Mason “leading ‘chinaman’ in London and then after 1791
  • Philip Margas, “very important London ‘chinamean’, being a large purchaser at the East India Company’s sales of Oriental porcelain.” Also: “The Company’s records include numerous references to Charles and William Margas in the 1740s and 1750s.”

From Weathergill:

  • William Eamson of Cheapside and Shewell, Andrews and Company.

Note there are some more references that I have not checked out yet, e.g.

  • Aubrey Toppin, The China Trade and some London Chinamen', English Ceramic Circle Transactions,. 3 (1935), 42. 22
  • R.G. Haggar, "Miles Mason”, English Ceramic Circle Transactions, Vol.8, 1972,
  • B. Hillier, "Two Centuries of China Selling", English Ceramic Circle Transaction, VOl. 7, 1968,
  • J.E. Nightingale, Contributions Towards the History of the Early English Porcelain, (Salisbury 1881) reprinted E.P. Publishing, 1973)

My interest in the Chinamen of London stems from thoughts I had reading Mui & Mui book on tea trade, I was wondering if the wholesale market for china ware was similar to that of the tea whole sale,with its relatively few number of buyers, and if this produced similar relations between the company and its buyers (e.g. more immediate gains were not pursued, rather the EIC preferred more long lasting and durable relationships with the actors on the market)?

If so I was thinking it should be possible to find material relating to these men in the archive of EIC. Here however I scored nil;I found no interesting material relating to the persons listed above. I might however try to pursue it further by looking a bit into the history of the Glass Seller Company to which the Chinamen belonged (see below for some titles). Note I did also try to contact Kate Smith on this, but had no reply. Maybe I have the wrong email address ()?
  • S Young, The history of The Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers of London, 1913
  • J Moore, The Glass sellers company: Compiled from the ancient charter, the original byelaws and the minute books of the company, by the master, 1899

Godden also discusses some institutions within the company relating to the China trade, e.g. the “Committee of Warehouses”, the “Warehouse for private trade” (established in 1707) also soon after that a “Surveyor of Private Trade”. The first of these bodies seems to have produced “Reports of the Committee of Warehouses”. These I did not find in at British Library. But I have not given up on them, I will ask Margaret Makepeace more about this next time I visit the library.

One general issue that I am interested in here has to do with the extent to which these bodies and persons listed above discussed the organisation and frequency of auctions. Godden mentions decisions about auctions being discussed in the “Court minutes”. You can search the indexes for these and it should be possible to identify discussions on Auctions. I decided to try this at a later time since it would take a considerable time doing it methodically (the index only group words that starts with the same letter together but there is internal alphabetical order to guide you further, i.e. you have read all the A words).

Godden also gives some general indication on the availability of sales catalogues. Reading him I got the impression that such material is available from the late 17th century and the early 18th century, after 1722 there is very little however, maybe with the exception from the period 1766-85.

Another possible source to Auction (and this I think Meike might be interested in) isthe records after the auctions organised by Christies. According to Godden they are still held by the present directors of Christie, Manson & Woods Ltd.

See also Cynthia Wall, “The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantling”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 31, Number 1, Fall 1997, pp. 1-25

One final thought on how to trace the history of the auctions is to look closer at the auctioneers. Since I thought this was a somewhat less promising approach I only had a brief look at what material was available. There is A Brief Guide to Biographical Sources, which suggests that information on “home staff appointments can be found in:

  • The court minutes IOR: B
  • Minutes and correspondence of the Finance and Home Committee 1834 to 59 IOR: L/F/1-
  • Appointments to the auditor’s Department appear in the Auditor’s References 1740-1835 IOR D/147-252
  • On “bonds and agreements for the home establishment 1788-1860 IOR 0/1/197-206 index IOR Z/0/1/6
    Occasional lists of home staff c 1660 1717 appear in Court Minutes IOR: B,
  • IOR H/67 list staff at various dates 1710-93.
  • IOR H/362records home staff in 1785 with a statement of salaries and duties

The salerary books of established home staff Mar 1760 Sept 1860 IOR L/AG/9/4/13-20 and L/AG/19/2/1-10 give complete lists of staff for each quarter of a year including warehouse men and porters.

Information about continental auctions and East India Import

Another aspect which I was interested in was the extent to which the EIC kept track of what was for sale on the continent. Meike found some very interesting material here, George Clifford’s report from Amsterdam containing info about auctions in Gothenburg and Copenhagen. (Him or possibly his father employed Linnaeus for a few years, it was during this period Linnaeus finalised some of his most important work on taxonomy, always nice to cross tracks with previous acquaintances).

This was found in incoming correspondence to the Company (E series). In parts this correspondence in indexed, with short description of the content of letters, I am going to ask Margaret Makepeace more about how this work is progressing (it seems to be on-going). It would make it so much less time consuming to use the index to pick out material, hence it might be worth delaying this material until it has progressed a bit more.

Another reference I found in Huw Bowen’s Business of Empire, worth looking a bit closer at is:

Fort William - India House correspondence and other contemporary papers relating thereto. Vol. X, p. 96-112, 340-52.(Printed source)

“Much depended upon the commercial acumen and methods adopted by the Company’s representatives in Asia, but the directors sought to leave as little as possible to chance by very precisely defining the goods they wished to bring to the market in London. As in previous years,, the regularly assessed the Company’s sales figures, calculated rates of profitability on different commodities, gathered feedback from buyers, and kept a very close eye on the activities of their continental rivals by employing agent to gather commercial intelligence in the major European port cities. All this information as processed in the committees of Buying and Shipping and the translated into lengthy despatches containing indents with very detailed commodity specifications.” (Bowen Business of Empire, p. 236)

Foster’s Index

A final thing I had a look at, was the index produced William Foster, in preparations for his guide to the archives of the EIC. (Fosters Index, Record Dept. Papers). I did some random searches here but did not really score anything of interest. Margaret Makepeace thought highly of it though so might try it again.