1. Global Commodities: Asian Goods in Europe 1600-1800

2. Key questions
Why did Europeans increase their demand for quality and luxury goods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? What impact did encounters with wider-world cultures and commodities play in this? How did precious cargoes turn into Asian export ware? What impact did this trade have on Europe’s own manufactures?

4. Material Culture

5. Objects
Objects and Texts
Who made it? Who owned it?
Who used it?
Problems of interpretation.

7. Global History
A different scale
A different point of view

8. Trade with Asia
Europeans as a whole consumed c. 1 lb. of Asian goods per person in the 18thC.
Jan de Vries: The industrious revolution
Trading Routes
East India Companies

10. Quantities Traded 1.1% per annum -the trade with the Americas
50,000 tons sent annually from all of Asia to all of Europe at the end of the 18th Century.
Could fit into one of today’s container ships.
2% of annual earnings in NW Europe or:
1 lb. of Asian goods per person over Europe’s 100 million.

12. EIC (1600) VOC (1602); Compagnie des Indes Orientales (1684)
China Trade: Ostend (1722); Swedish EIC (1731); Danish Companies 1668 and 1732

13. Mochi Cotton, Silk Embroidery of Gujarat , c. 1700, V&A IS: 15-1953
Mochi Cotton,Silk Embroidery of Gujarat c V&A IS: ; Painted and Dyed Cotton Hanging Coromandel Coast for the Western Market late 17th or early 18thC. V&A:IS
Painted and Dyed Cotton Hanging, Coromandel Coast for the Western Market, late 17th or early 18th C., V&A IS
Mochi Cotton, Silk Embroidery of Gujarat , c. 1700, V&A IS:

14. Sample Book

17. Threads of Feeling Foundling Hospital: John Styles

20. Quantities and Qualities
Textiles: a typical order to Bengal in the 1730s:
c. 590,000 pieces in 38 different types, and 98 different varieties.
Porcelain: : The Dutch imported 43 million pieces; the English, French, Danish and Swedish companies 30 million pieces.

22. Tea
1770s Legal tea in EIC warehouses was £5.9 million pounds million lbs. smuggled in.
16.3 million lbs in 1785, and 21 million lbs by
The Tea Commutation Act of 1784 reduced the duty from 119% to 12.5%
Tea varieties: black: Pekoe, Souchong, Congua; Bohea

23. European Consumption
Why were Asian goods so desirable?
Self-society interaction
Tastes and experience of the self
Varieties and social demarcation
Sociability

24. European Product Innovation
Printed calicoes and muslins
Fine Earthenware - Staffordshire

26. Samuel Oldknow’s Mellor Mill