Treasure Fleets of the Eastern Oceans

Department of History

Special Subject

Treasure Fleets of the Eastern Oceans:

China, India and the West 1601-1833

HI31F

Module Booklet 2016

Module Director: Professor Maxine Berg

Room H020

Tel. 02476 523377

23377 (internal)

Office Hours: Wednesdays 4:00-5:00 (by appointment),

or Thursdays: 1:00-3:00

Treasure Fleets of the Eastern Oceans: China, India and the West 1601-1833

Aims and Objectives:

The module will allow students to investigate how European encounters with Asia worked at the level of exchanges of material culture. As a Special Subject this will develop students’ skills in identifying and deploying primary sources to frame and substantiate their historical analyses. This module develops the use of Warwick’s electronic sources – ECCO and the Goldsmith-Kress Collection on-line as well as other electronic repositories. It introduces students to museum collections and art collections, as well as colonial and shipping records, correspondence and travellers’ accounts.

Context:

There are no prerequisites for this Special Subject. It opens opportunities for in depth reading, understanding, research and writing on global and colonial history, especially exploring Europe’s encounter with Asia. It builds on other single themes discussed in Year 1-2 Options ‘The Dragon’s Ascent: the Rise of Modern China’, and Year 2 Option ‘Galleons and Caravans’. It complements Advanced Option ‘China and the Wider World’. The Special Subject connects senior undergraduates to a major new research area in the department centred on Asian and global history. Undergraduates will engage with a new secondary literature on global history, in new initiatives inmuseum displays and documents collections focussed on East-West connections.

Times & Places:

The course tutor is Professor Maxine Berg. Office Room H020. Office Hours areWednesday 4:00-5:00 (by appointment), or Thursdays: 1:00-3:00, but other times can be arranged by e-mail, or just drop by. Students are also encouraged to attend the seminars and workshops of the Global History and Culture Centre. These take place approximately three Wednesdays per term at 5:00. A programme will be distributed, and will be available on the website. Also please make use of the website: www2.warwick.ac.uk/go/globalhistory

Syllabus:

The module explores European discovery and trade in Asian exotic and luxury commodities. Those commodities: spices, textiles, porcelain and tea, brought from South-east Asia, China and India transformed the domestic lives of Europe’s elites and ordinary people. The module emphasises the encounters and connections of Asia’s and Europe’s material cultures. It investigates how curious exotics collected on voyages of discovery became European desirables and even necessities. It looks at how the goods were traded first by Asian merchants, then by Europe’s East India Companies. It looks at how these precious goods for world trade were made, and then transported in long-distance sea voyages. It shows how the trade was organized across far-flung trading posts via ships risking storms, privateering and war. Such goods from afar became the gifts of diplomatic missions. They inspired scientific expeditions and experiments, and they entered into the European art world. The treasure fleets of discovery and encounter turned to the ships and navies of empire. The module connects older historiographies of colonialism and imperialism to new questions arising from global history. It looks to art history, the histories of collecting and display and anthropology to understand the meanings of the goods and the desires for exotic cargoes.

Teaching and Learning:

The module will be taught through a combination of thematic seminar discussions, library visits and individual tutorial sessions on long essays. Most students will complete a 4,500 word long essay or a 9,000 word Dissertation based on original research involving primary sources. The module does not include lectures.

Expected Learning Outcomes:

(By the end of the module the student should be able to....) / Which teaching and learning methods enable students to achieve this learning outcome? / Which assessment methods will measure the achievement of this learning outcome?
Have enhanced their research, writing and communication skills. / Seminar discussions, individual research/reading and essay writing / 2 examination papers (some students will substitute an assessed research paper for oneexamination paper)
Have gained an understanding of the availability, uses and limits of primary source material for historical analysis.
Have deployed electronic technologies in their learning.
Have a broad knowledge of the history of long distance trade, the East India Companies and exchange of material cultures in the period between 1601 and 1833.

Course Work:

Regular attendance at seminars and active participation is expected. Students are also expected to attend the special sessions set up for the course including the Library Internet Sources session. All will be expected to submit three pieces of non-assessed work. For those who do a long essay there will be two short essays and a long-essay proposal with outline and bibliography. Fully examined students will submit three short essays.

Core & Additional Reading:

Uploads of and links to many of the core primary readings will be available on the module web pages:

(

The web pages will also contain some secondary readings not easily available in the library. Other secondary reading will be available in the library. There are also suggestions for further reading which may be used in short and long essays. Students should also make wide use of online sources which will be listed in the course booklet and further discussed at the online sources session.

Teaching:

Lectures per week / None
Seminars per week / 2 2-hour seminars per week for 9 weeks
Tutorials per week / Linked to essay production
Laboratory sessions / None
Total contact hours / 36
Module duration (weeks, if applicable) / 10(including 1 reading weeks)
Other (please describe):e.g. distance-learning, intensive weekend teaching

Assessment Methods:

i)Maximum word length for long essays (4,500) and dissertations (9,000) does not include footnotes and bibliography. There is no 10% allowance for going over this length.

ii)All second-year option modules have moved to a 50/50 model of assessment in which all students will write a 4,500 word essay and undertake a final 2 question/ 2 hour exam paper (consisting of 10 questions). This does not include European World, which continues to be assessed via a 3-hour exam.

iii)Assessment of Special Subjects and Advanced Options will also follow a 50/50 model (2 hour exam and 4,500 word essay) unless students are writing an attached Dissertation, in which case they will undertake a 3 hour exam paper and will not be permitted to write a long essay.

iv)Visiting students will be assessed via a new standard mode based on essays rather than exams:

Term 2 - 2 x short essays due Week 5 and Week 9 of Term 1
Term 3 – 1 short essay or exam practice paper – Week 3.
1 x long essay or dissertation due Week 2 of Term 3

Seminar Topics:

Autumn Term

Week 1.Global History: New Perspectives.

Seaborne Empires of the Indian Ocean: Ports and Emporia.

Week 2.Fleets from the Western Oceans: the Portuguese and the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

.Straits of Malacca and the Malabar Coast: the Spice Trade.

Week 3.Japanese Encounters: the Closure of Japan and Dutch Traders.

Day Trip: The Docklands Museum

Week 4.The English East India Company.

.The French East India Company.

Week 5.The Textile Century: Indian Cottons and European consumers.

Oriental Luxuries: the Chinaware Revolution.

Week 6.Reading Week

Week 7.The Tea Trade: Taxes and Smugglers

Primary Sources and Long Essay Topics.

Week 8.Ships and Sailors, Pirates and Captives.

Science and Empire: Botany and Plantations.

Week 9.Cartography, Sea Charts and Cook’s Third Voyage

Princes and Traders: the Macartney Embassy to China.

Week10.Long Essay Presentations (TBC)

Summer Term

Week 3.Revision Session – 11 May 10-12

Indicative Readings

Primary Sources:

Francois Bernier,Travels in the Mughal Empire. 1656-1668 (ed. &translated by Archibald Constable, 1891).

Biswas, Kalipada, 1950 ,The Original Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks Relating to the Foundation of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta (Calcutta: royal Asiatic Society of Bengal).

Stephen H. Gregg, ed., Empire and Identity.An Eighteenth-Century Sourcebook (Paper, Palgrave, 2005).

J.L. Cranmer-Byng, An Embassy to China. being the Journal kept by Lord Macartney during his Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung 1793-1794 (London, 1962).

Sir George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (Dublin 1793).

Warren R. Dawson, The Banks Letters. A Calendar of the Manuscript Correspondence (London.British Museum, 1958).

H.B. Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company trading to China 1635-1834 , 5 vols.(Oxford, 1926),

The Letters of Pere d’Entrecolles’. translated by Robert Tichane in Robert Tichane, Ching-te-chen. Views of a Porcelain City (Painted Post, NY), 1983

William Alexander and George Henry Mason, Costume of China (London, 1800).

The Diaries of AnandaRangaPillai (12 vols). 1730-80.

Frances Buchanan. A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar, 3 vols. London 1807.

Electronic Resources:

The Making of the Modern World:The Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature

Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO)

Empire Online

[Log-in to these resources via the Warwick Library Catalogue]

Secondary Sources:

David Arnold, ‘Agriculture and ‘Improvement’ in Early Colonial India: a pre-history of development’, Journal of Agrarian Change, vol. 5, no. 4, Oct. 2005, p. 505-525.

C.A. Bayly, Rulers, townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770-1870 (Cambridge, 1983)

C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (1989).

Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global Origins of British Consumers’, Past and Present, 182, Feb. 2004, pp. 85-142.

Maxine Berg ‘Britain, Industry and Perceptions of China: Matthew Boulton, ‘[Useful Knowledge’ and the MacartneyEmbasssy to China 1792-4’, Journal of Global History (2006).

Huw Bowen, The Business of empire.The East India Company and imperial Britain 1765-1833 (Cambridge, 2006).

Kenneth Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (Cambridge, 2003).

K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean.

K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660-1760 (Cambridge, 1978).

K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe. Economy and Society of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1990).

S. Chaudhury and M. Morineau, Merchants, Companies and Trade (1999).

Carlo Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires.Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700 (1992).

Linda Colley, Captives (London, 2002).

Philip D. Curtin, Cross Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984).

A.R. Disney, Twilight of the Pepper Empire (Cambridge, 1978).

Natacha Eaton, ‘Between mimesis and alterity: art, gift and diplomacy in colonial India, 1770-1800’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 47, 2004, pp. 816-844.

Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: the Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, 9 (1993), pp. 141-188.

Natasha Glaisyer, ‘Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, Historical Journal, 14 (2004), pp. 451-476.

Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800 (Minneapolis: 1976).

Conrad Gill, Merchants and Mariners of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1961).

G. Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain.

Stuart Gordon, When Asia was the World (Yale, 2007).

Wang Gungwu, ‘Merchants without empire: the Hokkien sojourning communities’ in James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC and London, 1995).

John Irwin and K.B. Brett, Origins of Chintz (London, 1970). Contains eighteenth-century accounts of cotton dyeing and printing in India byRhyiner, Father Coeurdoux and William Roxburgh

Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East (London, 2005).

Rose Kerr and Nigel Wood, Ceramic Technology.Vol5 Science and Civilization inChina, vol. 5 part 12.

LotharLedderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, 2000).

David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science and Empire, 1780-1801 (London, 1985).

Peter Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empire (OUP, 2005).

P.J. Marshall, The Eighteenth Century in Indian History. Revolution or Evolution?(OUP 2005).

Hoh-Cheung & Lorna H. Mui, ‘Smuggling and the British Tea Trade before 1784’, American Historical Review 74, 1968.

Hoh-Cheung & Lorna H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1989).

Hoh-cheungMui and Lorna H. Mui, The management of monopoly. A study of the East India Company’s conduct of its tea trade, 1784-1833 (Vancouver, 1984).

Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (1983).

P. Parthasarathi, ‘Rethinking wages and competitiveness in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present, 158 (198), pp. 79-109.

P. Parthaasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720-1800 (Cambridge, 2001).

M.N. Pearson,Spices in the Indian Ocean World.

M.N. Pearson, The World of the Indian Ocean 1500-1800 (Ashgate 2005).

Anne Pérotin-Dumon, ‘The pirate and the emperor: power and the law on the seas, 1450-1850’ in James D. Tracy, The Political Economy of Merchant Empires (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 196-227.

Om Prakash, ‘Spices and the Spice trade’, Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, Vol 5.

Geoff Quilley, ‘Signs of Commerce: The East India Company and the Patronage of Eighteenth-Century British Art’, in H.V. Bowen et. al, The Worlds of the East India Company.

Antony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, c. 1450-1680, w vols. (New Haven, Yale U. Press), 1988-93).

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History (OUP India 2005)

Tirthankar Roy, ‘Knowledge and Divergence from the Perspective of Early Modern India’, Journal of Global History, 3, 2008, pp. 361-387.

James D. Tracy, The Rise of Merchant Empires (Cambridge, 1990).

George D. Winius& Marcus P.M. Vink, The Merchant Warrior Pacified. The VOC and its Changing Political Economy in India (Oxford paper, 1994).

Seminars

Week 1. Global History: New Perspectives

Seminar Questions:

What is new about Global History?
What makes global trade possible?
What made Europeans curious about the rest of the world?

Secondary Reading:

C.A.Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons(Oxford, 2004), chapters 1 and 2.

Catherine Hall, Review of C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, Institute of Historical Research Book Review (2004), available here: *

Maxine Berg ed., Writing the History of the Global: Challeges for the Twenty-first Century (Oxford, 2013) (proofs also available on module website).*

AHR Conversation: How Size Matters: The Qeustion of Scale in History’, The American Historical Review, 118.5 (December, 2013), pp. 1431-1472.

Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World’, History and Theory 50 (2011), pp. 188-202.

Francesca Trivellato, ‘Is there a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?’, Californai Italian Studies 2.1 (2-11). Online at

Marten Jerven, ‘An Uneven Playing Field: Comparisons in Global Economic History’, Journal of Global History 7 (2012), pp. 107-128.*

Seaborne empires of the Indian Ocean: Ports and Emporia

Seminar Questions:

1.What attracted traders to the Indian Ocean?

2.How effective were Indian overseas merchants and traders?

Secondary Reading:

Om Prakash, ‘The Indian Maritime Merchant, 1500-1800’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47, 3 (2004), pp. 435-457.*

K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750(Cambridge, 1985), chapters 1, 2 and 5.

K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1990), chapter 11, pp. 355-360.

Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe (Cambridge, 2006), chap. 6.

Uma Das Gupta (ed.), The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant 1500-1800. Collected Eassya of Ashin Das Gupta (New Delhi, 2004). Introduction by Subrahmanyam, chap. 1- The Maritime Merchant and Indian History and chap. 2 – India and the Indian Ocean 1500-1800. *