10
‘Useful Knowledge and Industry: Contributions from Tranquebar’
Conference on Medicine, Science and Empire in the Eighteenth Century
University of Kent, Canterbury
8-9 April, 2011
At a time when manufacturing and industrial development was a key issue of state and economy in Europe, political economists, mercantilist writers and enlightened savants debated the role of manufacturing and trade in economic improvement. A part of this debate included much discussion of the recent trade in Asian goods, no longer limited to spices, medical and botanical specimens, but a major trade in manufactured consumer goods, especially cotton textiles and porcelain. A key part of the political economy of Europe, not only in the writings of individuals, but in the wider culture of commercial tracts, encyclopedias and dictionaries of commerce, and Europe’s many improvement and scientific societies was the topic of Asia. New colonial and projecting policies emerged out of discussions of Asian commodities, policies for adapting these, building European markets for them, and ideas on alternative sources of supply and substitute products.
I argue that this is the period when major export-ware industrial sectors were established, both in Asia and in Europe; designing for and supplying wider world markets became a key priority of economic policy, as well as the manufacturers, merchants projectors and political economy that underlay this.
This leads me into what Joel Mokyr has called the ‘industrial enlightenment’.
Mokyr’s case is that the West developed a very specific ‘useful knowledge’. The real divergence between ‘The West and the rest’ did not arise from differences in resource endowments, but from a ‘knowledge revolution’ that took place in the West and not elsewhere’.
He defined this knowledge revolution as follows:
1. The culture of science, of practice and belief in material progress
2. A pan European industrial enlightenment of travel and translation, and of bridges between intellectuals and producers, between savants and fabricants.
3. Useful knowledge as knowledge of natural phenomena that might be manipulated by human endeavour – encompassed practical and informal knowledge as well as theory and codified formal knowledge – it included the work of those who collected observations, who compiled dictionaries and encyclopedias of arts and manufactures. It included descriptions of industrial skills and crafts. Earlier historians had assumed this artisan knowledge to be ‘secret’ or unintelligible except by practitioners. He argued that ‘useful knowledge’ was more accessible than historians had previously assumed, and that it was more European.
Malachy Postlethwayt opened the 1774 edition of his Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences with his case for the ‘dependence of the prosperity and trade of this nation on the mechanical and manufactured arts’. The government needed to support these so ‘their industrious ingenuity’ may not be surpassed by any rival nation, especially France. His great dictionary would also address ‘’The commerce of the Chinese, and the East Indies, in general; by what means it was carried on. - Of the excessive cheapness of their arts, mfrs, and produce; whereby all European nations are attracted to trade with them, and resort to them for their productions and mfrs. With pertinent observations to carry on their commerce both in a private and public way, and best to the advantage of Europe.’ p. v
Mokyr, and indeed his critics, Epstein and Allen all believed that this knowledge revolution was Europe’s ‘miracle’ over the rest of the world. Their findings, based on what they knew of Europe led them to make large claims about the rest of the world. ‘Many societies we associate with technological stasis were full of highly skilled artisans, not least of all Southern and Eastern Asia.’ ‘There is no doubt the Chinese lacked the aggressive curiosity of the Europeans.’
The challenge to global historians is to investigate the connections between knowledge and wealth. How much was the’ improving culture’ claimed by Mokyr a result of Enlightenment, or of sociability and the Republic of Letters. Or was that knowledge and the technology associated with it simply itself an outcome of higher and rising wages in Europe, as has been argued recently by Robert Allen.
The latter explanation does not satisfy me. Nor can I answer questions about alternative knowledge systems in China and India. But what I can do is to turn to European endeavours to collect the knowledge of manufactures from around to the world. These can be recovered in travellers’ accounts, the surveys of natural historians, and the investigations made by merchants and agents of Europe’s East India Companies. Those accounts provide us with some access to that knowledge of ‘outsiders’, and perceptions at the time of transfers of skills and knowledge. Through these we can approach that question of ‘How much did Europe learn from Asia?’
We can turn to the recent extensive work of historians of science and medicine, especially those who have written on the history of botany and medicine –from my colleague, David Arnold, to Richard Grove, and David Chambers, David MacKay, Richard Drayton, Londa Schiebinger, David Miller, Hal Cook, Sujit Sivasundaram, Kapil Raj, and a number of my colleagues here today. They have conveyed to us the intense interest of 17th and 18th Century savants and botanical collectors in the crops and plants of the wider world. But who collected the knowledge of Asia’s industries – the resources, technologies, work and skill that produced those oriental luxuries sought by Europeans and consumers in other parts of the world, as well as more quotidian and useful products such as iron and steel, soda and saltpetre.
Europeans certainly wanted to learn more about the arts of China. But access to such knowledge was difficult. The 9 octo pages on porcelain of the two volumes of the 1774 edition of Postlethwayts Dictionary relied on Pere d’Entrecolle’s reports from 1712. When Macartney set out on his ambassadorial mission in 1792 he carried the wishes an English King who ‘directed his people to discover new regions of the globe’, ‘to extend knowledge of the world and to find the various productions of the earth’.
At the same time those seeking such knowledge of Asia’s manufactures had greater access to India. This was a key period in the 1780s and 1790s when India not yet de-industrialised, and when Britain in process of industrialization. India’s cotton industry was producing far and away the greatest part of the world’s textiles, but Britain’s small industry was mechanizing and growing rapidly; Britain’s iron industry , transformed by coal-fired smelting met all challengers apart from the Swedes; her fine metal manufactures were the wonder of the rest of Europe. But her position in the world was uncertain in the wake of the recent loss of those American colonies which had provided what Pomeranz came to call the ‘ghost acres’. They and the increasingly dysfunctional Caribbean colonies had been the laboratories and research centres for an aggressive mercantilist industrial policy of transferring the luxuries of the East to the West – in a whole range of crops and manufactures from coffee, spices, dyes and drugs to silk and cotton, to shipbuilding, potash and saltpetre production.
At this stage there were no certainties on development paths. Manufacturers, industrial spies and technological investigators travelled, collected and translated processes they found across Europe. They also did so in that Asian powerhouse of manufacture, India, which they could access through the East India Companies and through Catholic and Protestant missions.
1. Industries of India
From the18thC. we find a number of EIC agents and other merchants, physicians and plant hunters undertaking systematic investigations of centres and processes of production. A number of natural historians came with the Protestant missions. They learned vernacular languages as well as the language of learning, Sanskrit and Persian, and integrated with a number of EIC surgeons and physicians, including those working in the Company botanical gardens. There were Baptist missionaries at the Danish colony of Serampore , and the Pietist and Moravian missionaries at the Danish colony of Tranquebar. Much written recently on their translations, the printing presses they introduced (date for Tranquebar), their acquisition of indigenous medical remedies, and especially their large botanical and zoological herbaria, collections and publications together with those of their close associates in the Company botanical gardens. There was Plantae Malabaricae, commissioned by August Johann von Hugo and compiled in the later 1730s and 1740s (now in the University of Göttingen, see Jensen) and Christoph TheodosiusWalther’s Herbarium Trangambariense (1743), cited in Jensen, pp. 20-21). They were among many herbaria and collections made by members of the group. They connected too with the great project culminating in William Roxburgh’s Plants of the Coast of Coromandel (date) and Patrick Russell’s Account of Indian Serpents, Collected on the Coast of Coromandel (1796-1807).
Parallel investigations of handicraft, manufacturing processes and industry engaged some within the group. Jensen cites the work of Benjamin Cnoll (1705-67), medical doctor to the Tranquebar Mission. Cnoll not only took part in the pharmaceutical and botanical endeavours of others in the Mission, but investigated chemical and mineralogical aspects of borax manufacture in the region. Borax was used as a flux in soldering metals, notably gold; it was imported from India, but little was known about it. Cnoll’s accounts first printed in 1743 were published in other European journals and in translations through the 1750s. He was asked at the time also to write on saltpetre and zinc, but these were not processed in the area close to Tranquebar. (cited in Jensen, pp. 16-18) [Niklas Thode Jensen, ‘Making it in Tranquebar: Science, Medicine and the Circulation of Knowledge in the Danishj-Halle Mission, c. 1732-44’ unpublished paper, 2011]
Cnoll’s account and chemical analysis of borax manufacture coincides with other better-known accounts of the textile dyeing and printing processes along the Coromandel coast. The dyes and prints on cottons so admired by European merchants and consumers were mysterious, but of enormous interest to investigators. Helenus Scott (EIC surgeon) wrote to Sir Joseph Banks on difficulty of learning the arts of the Indians: ‘It is extremely difficult to learn the arts of the Indians…for father to son exercises the same trade and the punishment of being excluded from the caste or doing anything injurious to its interests is so dreadful that it is often impossible to find an inducement to make them communicate anything.’ (Riello, p. 116). Members of the French East India Company and the Catholic mission in Pondicherry wrote accounts influential in Europe. Beaulieu produced a mss. description of the production stages in 1734. It included a piece of cloth attached to the mss to show the results after each step. Father Coeurdoux questioned a number of calico painters whom he had converted to Catholicism ‘ I do not know whether the letter I wrote in 1742 on painted cottons in India can prove of any assistance in perfecting the art of dyeing in Europe: that least was the aim I had in mind.’ P. 114 MB –
The Basle chemist, Jean Rhyner consulted both accounts, and concluded: ‘Our theory and principles are almost the same as those of the Indians, but the latter have the advantages of possessing certain herbs…the use of painting rather than printing demands a greater degree of skill, and is much slower, which means that even granted all things equalddd we could never adopt their methods, for we lack skilled craftsmen and could not keep the maintenance costs so low.’ see P&P piece – p. 115
The fascination with Indian technologies and industries continued. The surveys of Benjamin Heyne in the 1780s and 1790s arising out of the Tranquebar mission and the social networks with EIC surgeons and botanists, James Anderson and William Roxburgh, show an intense curiosity in dyeing techniques, in the extraction processes of the fabled diamond mines of South India, in the skilled labour that produced fine Indian iron and steel or wootz, and a range of other useful industries from copper to saltpetre and soda manufacture.
How should we approach these surveys? One approach is to wrap them up in those later enterprises of colonial science in India – the Survey of India – not established until 1878 – or the topographical surveys of Francis Buchanan and Colin McKenzie which started with Buchanan’s A Journey from Madras Through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar (London, W. Bulmer & Co., 1807). We can treat this technological investigators as agents of empire in their enterprises of practical and economic botany following through Sir Joseph Banks’ search for dyes, drugs, and foodstuffs, and investigating their acclimatization to different parts of the empire. We can look for the underlying orientalist assumptions of the surveys, and the political economy of empire framing their financing and their output. But above all it is important to look at the texts, and the efforts of those at far remove from their European frameworks to describe, codify and analyse the industrial processes of India.
2. Benjamin Heyne
Heyne was part of the Protestant Moravian Mission in Tranquebar: Johann Koenig arrived in 1768 as surgeo, and initiated those there in Linnaean methodology, John Peter Rottler (1749-1836) joined in 1776. Johann Gottfried Klein, born in Tranquebar in 1766, left as a boy, but returned there in 1791 as Surgeon. Benjamin Heyne (1770-1819) joined as a physician, at a time similar to Klein. Christoph John, the leader of the mission during his time there, was an avid natural historian and became his mentor . After the end of the Moravian mission in Tranquebar, John arranged for him to become temporary botanist for the EIC at the pepper plantations at Samalkot. There he supervised the introduction of useful trees and plants to the territory above the Coromandel coast , the Northern Circars. The Samalkot plantation closed in 1800, and Clive asked Heyne to find a site in Mysore for a new botanical garden. He chose the former royal garden of the Tipu Sultan at Bangalore (Desmond, p. 41). He was appointed Botanist and Naturalist at Madras in 1802 and superintendant of a newly established Natural History Museum there. In 1804 he was appointed to the Company’s garden at Bangalore, and in the years following was assigned to assist Buchanan in the Mysore Survey. In 1809 went back to the Army, and was assigned to the eighth regiment of native cavalry at Talna, the northernmost point of the Madras Army.