Material Encounters of theEast India Trade 1600-1850
Workshop at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford
Friday 1st & Saturday 2nd July 2011
organised by the ‘Trading Eurasia – Europe’s Asian Centuries’ project, Department of History, University of Warwick
Rationale
The European trade with Asia laid the foundations for a new consumer market in Europe. The goods sold to this market have largely been studied along traditional lines. Historians have focussed their attention on the East India Companies and their imports from Asia. In museums there is a tendency to specialise in the different products brought from Asia. What happens if we think about them as part of a joined up history of material culture and trade?
This workshop is an attempt to bridge the boundaries between the two different perspectives on the topic of material Encounters with Asia, by bringing together historians, curators and dealers. Historians can bridge this existing gap by not only studying the quantity, but also the quality of goods brought to Europe from Asia. How are these qualitative aspects expressed in the archives?
Object specialists can help historians understand how Europe influenced the quality of the goods and how changes in demand altered the trade. How were the varieties in design and quality of porcelain, cotton fabrics, silk and lacquer achieved? How exactly was information transmitted and quality controlled across vast distances and relating to the sheer bulk of goods supplied? Did the methods of selling, for example via auctions, influence product specifications?
Short papers by specialists in different fields of material culture, brought together in interdisciplinary sessions, will be discussed in the light of preliminary quantitative and qualitative results from ongoing research from the project ‘Trading Eurasia – Europe’s Asian’s Centuries’.
We want to ask questions to reveal broader themes that underpin how the goods were made, how design and production information was transmitted and controlled, and what were the crucial similarities and differences between the way the companies and private trade operated?
Each contributor is invited to give a 15 minute illustrated presentation, leaving maximum time for round table discussion and debate.
PROGRAMME OVERVIEW
DAY 1 (1st of July):
10.30-11.00 Register & Coffee
11.00-11.05 Welcome - Maxine Berg (University ofWarwick, Project Leader)
11.05-11.20 Some preliminary findings from the ‘Trading Eurasia – Europe’s Asian Centuries’ Project
Session 1: Collecting the Companies: The material and quantitative evidence
What material evidence do we have concerning the East India Companies trade, what do existing collections represent? How do they relate to changing trends in scholarship and collecting? Are there sources as yet not studied that can help us understand the connection between trade and material culture? The histories of the companies have largely been told as national ones. However the companies did not operate in national frameworks: they competed and collaborated and borrowed from one another. They sold their goods to overlapping markets in Europe, and trade was conducted by merchants belonging to transnational networks.
11.20-12.30 Chair: Chris Nierstrasz, (University of Warwick)
11.25-11.40 Anna Jackson (Keeper, Asian Department,Victoria and Albert Museum, London),
‘Encounters: exhibiting the material culture of trade and exchange’.
11.40-11.55 Lars Olof Loof (City Museum, Gothenburg), ‘Remains and Collections from the Swedish East India Compnay in the Gothenburg City Museum’.
11.55-12.10 Berit Eldvik (Nordiske Museet, Stockholm), ‘Tracing the history of the English East India Company through fabric in the Nordiske Museum’.
12.10-12.25 Martine Gosselink (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
12.25 - 1.00 Questions
1.00- 2.00 Buffet Lunch
Session 2: Part 1: The East - West Dialogue: Shaping Manufacture
How were design and production of objects managed; were there differences between the supply of large bulk orders and one off orders? How was information transmitted? How did ordering systems and quality control/rejection work?
2.00 -3.15 Chair: Felicia Gottmann, (University of Warwick)
2.05-2.20 Brigitte Nicolas (Head Curator, Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Lorient)
‘The secret world of East-India-Company imported Indian textiles'
2.20-35 Kirsten Toftegaard (Danish Museum of Art & Design, Copenhagen)
‘Encounters in patterns between East and West’
2.35-2.50 Sonia Ashmore (Research Fellow, Victoria and Albert Museum, London),
‘How the muslin trade embodied relations between Britain and India’
2.50-3.15 Questions
Object Handling Sessions
3.15 - 5.00
Clare Pollard – Lacquer
Dinah Reynolds - Chinese Export Porcelain
Shelagh Vainker & Ruth Barnes - Textiles
5.00 -5.30 Coffee Break
Session 2: Part 2: The East - West Dialogue: Shaping Manufacture
5.30 Chair: Helen Clifford (University of Warwick)
5.30-5.45 Jessica Harrison-Hall (Curator, Department of Asia, British Museum, London),
‘Distinctions in design transfer’
5.45-6.00 Luisa Mengoni (Victoria and Albert Museum, London),
‘Special orders and transmission of designs from Europe to China’
6.00 -6.30 Questions
7.30 Workshop Dinner
DAY 2 (2nd of July)
Session 3: The Private Trade
How did the private trade differ from that of Company trade? How do we judge the impact of one off and custom made pieces on manufacture and consumption?
10.10-11.30 Chair: Hanna Hodacs, (University of Warwick)
10.15-10.30 Menno Fitski (Curator of East Asian Art, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam),
Kakiemon and the trade in Japanese porcelain’
10.30-10.45 Roger Smith (Independent Historian, London),
’The Emperor’s Clocks - presents, tribute or trade?’
10.45-11.00 Patrick Conner (Martyn Gregory, London), ‘Odd Fancys hit well' - Chinese export painting in the 18th century’
11.00-11.30 Questions
11.30-12.00 Coffee Break
Session 4: East India Trade Objects and the Interior
This final session of the workshop looks at the impact East India objects made in the home, using inventories as evidence. This arena connects to a forthcoming3-year project of Warwick University's History department, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and beginning in September 2011. 'The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857', a project lead by Margot Finn, aims to trace and assess the impact and significance of the flow of ‘Oriental’ commodities into British Georgian and Victorian country houses. It does so by combining the efforts of amateur and professional historians: a key component of the project is the integration of research (often empirically rich but incompletely contextualised) conducted by family and local historians with research framed by key questions about aesthetic change, identity formation, cultural geographies, patronage and power.
How did Asian luxuries shape and challenge British and sub-national identities of gender, self, family and place? Were Scottish, Welsh, English and British Oriental aesthetics, as manifested in the home, distinctive markers of global families’ regional affiliations? Did material practices associated with furnishing the country house strengthen or contradict stereotypes of the Orient that dominated print-based sources? Over time, how did the definition of what constituted ‘Asian’, ‘British’ and ‘European’ luxuries change, and what role did East India Company families play in that transformation?
By integrating our research findings into a web-portal to which local and family historians will also contribute, we hope to generate and harness new research findings from archives across the UK and abroad to address these domestic questions about 18th- and 19th-century global commerce.
12.00-1.30 Chair: Margot Finn (University of Warwick)
12.05-12.20 Kevin Rogers (Architectural historian and Associate Director, Peter Inskip Associates, London),
‘Fabrics connected with the East India Company in London merchant inventories’
12.20-12.35 Kévin Le Doudic (CERHIO CNRS, European University of Brittany, University of South Brittany, Lorient, France),
‘From Artefact to Daily Life Environment: The ‘East India Company Style’, in the Eighteenth Century Pondicherry Trading Post’
12.35-1.00 Questions
1.00-1.30 Concluding Discussion & Summary - Maxine Berg
1.30-2.30 Buffet Lunch at Ashmolean
SYNOPSES
Anna Jackson, Keeper, Asian Department, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
‘Encounters: exhibiting the material culture of trade and exchange'
In 2004 the V&A staged an exhibition 'Encounters: the meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800' which examined the dynamic period of commercial, cultural and technological exchange that followed Vasco da Gama's sea voyage to India. This paper will look back at the exhibition, examining the ideas that informed it, the challenges that accompanied it, and the objects through which we constructed the narrative.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1196_encounters/index.html
Lars Olof Loof, City Museum, Gothenburg
‘Remains and Collections from the Swedish East Inda Compnay in the Gothenburg City Museum’.
I would like to introduce our collections, and how we have looked upon this eastern influenced heritage during the last 200 years. The big collections have focused very much upon porcelain (china!), but we could also look upon ivory, silk, cotton, furniture and wall-paper. I still believe that some of these categories are too much forgotten. Connections with the European continent and the British Isles - from a northerna point of view.
Berit Eldvik, Nordiske Museet, Stockholm
‘Tracing the history of the English East India Company through fabric in the Nordiske Museum’.
I will talk about some Indian hand painted textiles, so called Palampores. They have been in the Nordiska museum since long time without any documentation and without any knowledges of the origin from my predecessors. I will try to give you the history behind them and their connection to the English East India Company through their first believed owners. They are, at least most of them, pieces in the great puzzle of re-exportation and private trade with the Asian goods.
Martine Gosselink, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
‘Comparing the Competitors: the Portuguese and the Dutch1500-1700’
Why, where and how the Dutch East India Company (VOC) took over the position of the Portuguese, and how different attitudes towards religion, diplomacy and trade influenced merchandiseand luxury items.
During the 16th and 17th centuries Portugal and the Netherlands established huge empires. Whereas the Portuguese developed theirs as early as 1500, the Dutch had their kick off around 1600. By that time the two powers bumped into each other in Sri Lanka, Japan, Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia and various other places. During the decades to follow, the Netherlands managed to take over the Portuguese position in many of these regions.
The Rijksmuseum is preparing an exhibition, which envisages dealing with this take over. By showing trade products and luxury items from settlements controlled by the Portuguese and subsequently the Dutch, the ‘Rijks’ will try to reveal differences and similarities between the governing methods of the two colonial powers. By comparing these objects from different periods, we plan to show the differences in social-political structures, the impact for the local inhabitants and the changes in the trading market.
Brigitte Nicolas, Head Curator, Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Lorient,
‘The secret world of East-India-Company imported Indian textiles'
From 1660 onwards, with the aid of the East India Companies, the European import of Indian textiles began to expand rapidly.
Historians do not yet study this hugely important commercial development in great detail, whilst the general public remains unaware that cotton textiles formed the largest part of the Companies’ trade.
The analysis of travel accounts and the East India Company Archives enables us slowly to unveil the secret world of Indian textiles. In the course of the eighteenth century these spread throughout France, both legally and through channels of smuggling and illicit trade. The Museum of the East India Companies in Lorient has set itself the task of their identification and classification in order to incorporate into its collections the evidence of a phenomenon whose repercussions in the eighteenth century, be it on fashion, on the economy, or on the textile industry, were considerable.
Kirsten Toftegaard, Danish Museum of Art & Design, Copenhagen,
‘Encounters in patterns between East and West’
This paper will try to explore some features in patterns for the printed textile made in India in the seventeenth and eighteenth century for export especially to Europe. By looking in pattern books and illustrations of plants and flowers from the period the paper tries to analyze some of the recognizable features in the way the plants are drawn. The paper is based on an ongoing research for a coming exhibition at Designmuseum Danmark in spring 2012 and as such must be considered as work in progress.
Jessica Harrison-Hall, Curator, Department of Asia, British Museum, London,
‘Distinctions in design transfer’
This short paper distinguishes between and discusses three quite different types of design transfer. Firstly there are those designs from 1520 to 1850 which are commissioned, produced and supplied to a particular identifiable individual customer or regional market. Secondly there are those designs which are ordered for a particular market or consumer but are perhaps considered exotic/attractive by other clients and sold to overlapping markets, often stimulating the rapid production of local copies. Thirdly there are those transfers of design which occur with a time lag of up to one hundred years. The British Museum, V&A Museum and National Museum of China are collaborating to produce an exhibition for the summer of 2012 in Beijing. This show will present ceramics produced for the elite of geographically diverse markets for a general audience that rarely has an opportunity to see such material within China.
Luisa Mengoni, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
‘Special orders and transmission of designs from Europe to China’
A large number of 'private orders' commissioned in China included porcelain with patterns and shapes taken from or inspired by European sources, such as prints, drawings and designs. This topic has generally been discussed as an aspect of the China trade, but less in connection with the production of similarly decorated ceramics made at factories in the Netherlands, England, France, Germany and Italy.
This contribution aims to locate the commission and export of Chinese porcelain with European designs in the context of a wider phenomenon of consumption and changing production patterns that also affected European ceramic factories during the end of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century. It will explore to what extent new fashion trends and market demands across Europe, combined with the circulation and availability of printed illustrated material and new economies of design work, affected and shaped the nature of 'special orders' made in China and their desirability as commodities to be ordered and sold in the European market.
Menno Fitski, Curator of East Asian Art, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam,
‘Kakiemon and the trade in Japanese porcelain’
Kakiemon was a luxurious commodity that occupied a special place within the trade, and the presentation will explore how trade was interlinked with the reception and role of Kakiemon in Europe.