PAST & PRESENT

NUMBER 182 FEBRUARY 2004

CONTENTS
page

TRAJAN AND THE ORIGINS OF ROMAN HOSTILITY TO THE JEWS:

by Martin Goodman ..................................................... 3

INHERITED STATUS AND SLAVERY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ITALY

AND VENETIAN CRETE: by Sally McKee .......................... 31

LIFE, LOVE AND LITIGATION: SILEBY IN THE 1630S:

by Bernard Capp .......................................................... 55

IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY: GLOBAL HISTORY AND BRITISH

CONSUMER GOODS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY:
by Maxine Berg ........................................................... 85

MATERIAL CULTURE, ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS AND PEASANT

REVOLUTION IN LOWER LANGUEDOC 1770–1840:
by James Livesey ....................................................... 143

THE SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF NATIONALIST POLITICS IN THE WEST

OF IRELAND 1898–1918: by Fergus Campbell .................. 175

CREATING CONSERVATIVE FABIANS: THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY,

POLITICAL EDUCATION AND THE FOUNDING OF ASHRIDGE
COLLEGE: by Clarisse Berthezène .................................... 211

Published by
Oxford University Press
for the Past and Present Society
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY:
GLOBAL HISTORY AND BRITISH
CONSUMER GOODS IN THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY*
Their own steel and iron, in such laborious hands, become equal to the
gold and rubies of the Indies.
David Hume, ‘Of Commerce’ (1752)

In 1983 Captain Michael Hatcher, a British-born Australian,

mounted a salvage operation on a ship in the South China Sea.
He recovered what became known as the Nanking Cargo, sixty
thousand pieces of Ming porcelain from one ship which had
sunk in the mid 1640s on the way from China to Batavia. The
quantities of porcelain recovered caused a minor sensation in
the European art and antiquities markets, and also opened his-
torians’ eyes to the prodigious quantities of what they considered
to be high-luxury wares which were being transported from Asia
to Europe via colonies such as Batavia three centuries ago. The
impact of the Nanking Cargo on the media of today parallels
the effect in Holland and northern Europe of the seizure by the
Dutch of two Portuguese ships, the Santiago and the Santa
Catarina, in 1602. The Catarina alone yielded ten thousand pieces
of porcelain. Great sales fetching extremely high prices extended
into 1604, and had an electrifying effect on Dutch traders.
In the cargoes of the Portuguese ships were also to be found
‘pintadoes’. These curious painted and printed cottons were
initially imported as furnishing fabrics, especially bed hangings,
but from the 1660s they were increasingly marketed as a new
textile for fashionable clothing.1 Europe’s East India Companies

* The ideas for this article were Wrst set out in panel sessions at the ‘ReconWguring
the British’ seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London,
in 2000, at the Economic History conference in Glasgow in 2001 and in my inaug-
ural lecture in 2001 at the University of Warwick. Many thanks to Margot Finn,
Rhys Jenkins, Patrick O’Brien, John Robertson, Andrew Sherratt and Megan
Vaughan for suggestions and critical reading, and to Helen Clifford and Shelagh
Vainker for help with illustrations.
1
Gang Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development, c.2100 BC –
1900 AD (Westport and London, 1997), 115.

© The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2004

86 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

found and promoted the appeal of eastern luxury goods to

western buyers. This link between East and West contributed
to the wider expansion of consumption and industry in Europe
which accompanied and followed it.
It was not until the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
that an import trade in luxury goods from India and China to
Europe was to transform the European economies themselves.
For while there had long been a global trade in luxury goods,
the merchants and East India Companies then discovered that
European markets for these Asian luxury goods might be far
greater than those of the traditional court luxury which had
long underpinned the trade. What happened was that the global
trade in particular types of manufactured consumer goods
stimulated a programme of product innovation in Europe in
attempts to ‘imitate’ and to make indigenous those products
which were at that time manufactured in the advanced consumer
societies of China and India. The import trade in luxury goods
from Asia was a vital step — market potentials beyond court
and aristocratic circles were identiWed in a fashion demand for
the goods: supplies were increased as Asian production of more
varieties and qualities was adapted to the European market.
And ultimately Europeans imitated the goods, developing their
own fashion and luxury consumer-goods industries.
Yet, while Europeans imported these products and copied
them, they did not import the technologies on which they were
based; Asian consumption was transferred to Europe, but not
Asian production systems. The adaptation of European, and
especially British, technologies and resources to the making of
substitute Asian luxuries was to generate a whole range of dif-
ferent consumer products: British new consumer goods. These
became perceived by the end of the eighteenth century as the
distinctive modern alternatives to former Asian and European
luxuries. Eric Hobsbawm once termed foreign trade the ‘spark’
which lit the Industrial Revolution; his argument, much disputed
since, was based on Britain’s exports and re-exports.2 But it was
Europe’s imports from Asia, and imports especially of manu-
factured consumer goods, which were to provide the vital turning
point. Global trade did matter to European industrialization,

2
E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London, 1968), 50; cf. Ralph Davis,
The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester, 1979), 9–11, 62–76.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 87
but not in ways that have been set out in the standard accounts
of the Industrial Revolution and of imperialism.
This article argues that imports of goods from the East made
a difference to the subsequent development of European, but
especially British, consumer markets and production technologies.
This was not, however, a straightforward story of import-
substitution industrialization, that is, of infant industries
developed behind high tariff walls to supply domestic markets.
Instead, Europeans responded to Asian luxuries by learning
from their imports, developing knowledge of markets and
adapting processes. Importing Asian luxuries demanded the
making of consumer markets both at home and abroad for
things never before needed or even desired. Responding to
Asian imported luxuries had far-reaching effects in transforming
both consumption and production.
This article makes the case for a connection between global
luxury, European consumerism and industrialization in the
eighteenth century. My case will be developed in three proposi-
tions, corresponding to three sections of the article. First, global
trade mattered, especially that based on fashion and luxury
spending; particularly important were imports, and the effects
these had in fostering new consumer cultures. The Wrst section
of the article, ‘Global trade and consumption in the eighteenth
century’, will accordingly review the contribution of global
history to the understanding of industrialization. It examines
the signiWcance now attached to consumer culture, especially
global luxury in industrial development. My second argument
is that this consumer culture based on global trade had a direct
impact on production and invention in Britain. Asian imports
stimulated British production of consumer goods, but Asian
technologies were not transferred. Thus my second section,
‘Imports, imitation and production’, focuses on theories of
import-substituting industrialization and the characteristics
of Asian manufactured goods imported to Britain. My third
proposition is that the connection between Asia and Europe
needs to be extended to Africa and the New World if we are to
understand fully the global context of the making of European
and especially British consumer goods. Thus the third section,
‘Empire and British consumer goods’, outlines how British
producers, in imitating Asian goods, drew on the resources
and markets of empire. Britain’s ‘indigenous’ resources were
88 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

perceived to extend beyond her borders to include her New

World colonies from Canada to the Caribbean. Imitative inven-
tion adapting the use of non-eastern materials made Britain’s
new consumer goods ‘indigenous’, not oriental.

I
GLOBAL TRADE AND CONSUMPTION IN
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Global History
The part played by global trade in the history of industrial-
ization has been relatively neglected by recent generations of
economic historians. These found that foreign trade accounted
for less than 10 per cent of the increase in England’s total prod-
uct between 1700 and 1780, and turned to internal domestic
factors for explanations of economic growth.3 The broader
impact of global trade is now, however, due for reconsideration
from the perspective of consumer society. The recent concept
of ‘globalization’ has also stimulated rethinking. Eric Hobsbawm,
for example, perceives recent developments that fall under the
concept of globalization in terms of enormous speed-up, wider
access, abolition of distance and time, and the emancipation of
manufacturing and even agricultural products from the terri-
tories in which they were produced, but the ‘modern industry’
of nineteenth-century Britain anticipated these developments.4
This new sense of the global has not so much led historians to
demonstrate that earlier historical epochs also had a global
dimension, and to measure their effects against current global
dynamics, but has rather urged them to reconsider the subjects
once studied in national, regional or even purely local frame-
works.5

3
Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Mercantilism and Overseas Trade, 1700–1800’, in
Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (eds.), The Economic History of Britain since
1700 (Cambridge, 1994).
4
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm (London, 1998),
‘Introduction’. Refer back to Hobsbawm, ‘The Development of the World
Economy’, Cambridge Jl Econ., iii (1979), 311–17.
5
Much of this rethinking has, however, concentrated on realigning the place of
empire in the development of the British economy. See, for example, P. K. O’Brien,
‘Imperialism and the Rise and Decline of the British Economy, 1688–1989’, New
Left Rev., ccxxxviii (1999). See also Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson,
‘When Did Globalisation Begin?’, European Rev. Econ. Hist., vi (2002), 27–35.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 89
Our understanding of the impact of global trade has been
seen thus far through the work of world historians and theorists
of globalization. Historical structuralists such as Immanuel
Wallerstein, Samir Amin and more recently Giovanni Arrighi
identiWed centre–periphery polarities, but instead of studying
interconnections they focused on issues of domination and
ascendancy by one part of the globe, the West, over the other,
going back to the merchant capitalism of the Wfteenth cen-
tury. The dependency theorists Andre Gunder Frank and Janet
Abu-Lughod developed non-western perspectives on core
and peripheral regions, taking the analysis back to the twelfth
century, but again focused on imperial domination rather than
interconnections.6
Recent global history has reopened debates on economic
transition in Europe in the eighteenth century, but from the
perspective of Asia. Earlier arguments for European exception-
alism have been set aside in favour of conjunctural features,
which in the course of the eighteenth century set in motion
a divergence in development paths between Europe and Asia.
A strong case has been made by Kenneth Pomeranz for more
economic similarities than differences across Eurasia before the
later eighteenth century, followed by divergence after.7 Pomeranz
argued for a basic ecological imbalance which came into play
over the course of the eighteenth century; Europe’s, and espe-
cially Britain’s, access to coal, its development of technologies
using coal and its access to New World resources gave it the lead
over Asia that neither consumption and proto-industrialization
nor labour productivity and market institutions had previously
provided. A cause of divergence so singularly rooted in ecologi-
cal factors has prompted an escalation of criticism focusing on

6
Immanuel Wallerstein, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European
World Economy (New York, 1974); Samir Amin, The Accumulation of Capital on a
World Scale (New York, 1974); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in
the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998); Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The
World System, AD 1250–1350 (New York and Oxford, 1989). See the discussion of
global approaches to history in A. G. Hopkins, ‘The History of Globalization —
and the Globalization of History?’, in A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World
History (London, 2002).
7
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the
Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000); R. Bin Wong, China Transformed:
Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca and London, 1997),
57; R. Bin Wong, ‘The Search for European Differences and Domination in the
Early Modern World: A View from Asia’, Amer. Hist. Rev., cvii (2002), 469.
90 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

factors from agricultural productivity to land organization and

property relations, to demography and social institutions.8 This
debate on the divergence between East and West, like that on
the domination of the West over the East, has not addressed
global interconnections.
The divergence between Europe and Asia may have had an
ecological foundation, but these resource shocks were not
random events; they were historical, cultural and political. The
reasons for the exploitation of coal and New World resources
over the eighteenth century lie in opportunities developed for
technological creativity, cultures of skill and the mercantile and
colonial policies which made New World resources available.
Prasannan Parthasarathi in a recent review of the debate in this
journal makes the point that the key divide between East and
West that opened up in the eighteenth century was based not
on ecology, but on technology. ‘It was not simply the presence
of coal that expanded ecological possibilities, but technical
developments that made possible the widespread adoption of
coal’.9 Furthermore, a recognized technical sophistication in
India and China was not enough in itself; Europe followed
a path of technological development whose end result was a
manufacturing revolution. The innovative activities of British
cotton producers were prompted by the ‘need to out-produce
Indian textiles’.10 Parthasarathi here points to the impact of
global trade in fostering new technologies in Britain: global
interconnections enabled divergent development paths.

8
Jack Goldstone, ‘The Problem of the “Early Modern” World’, Jl Econ. and
Social Hist. of the Orient, xli (1998), 265–75. See ‘AHR Forum: Asia and Europe in
the World Economy’, essays by Manning, Pomeranz, Bin Wong and Ludden,
Amer. Hist. Rev., cvii (2002); ‘Conference: European Miracle’, essays by van
Zanden, Pomeranz, Hunter, Bayly, Pamuk and O’Brien, Itinerario, xxiv (2000);
Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Is there an East Asian Development Path? Long-Term
Comparisons, Constraints, and Continuities’, Jl Econ. and Social Hist. of the Orient,
xliv (2001), 328–36; Philip C. Huang, ‘Development or Involution in Eighteenth-
Century Britain and China?’, Jl Asian Studies, lxi (2002); Kenneth Pomeranz,
‘Beyond the East–West Binary: Resituating Development Paths in the Eighteenth-
Century World’, Jl Asian Studies, lxi (2002).
9
Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘The Great Divergence’, Past and Present, no. 176
(Aug. 2002), 282. This point on the crucial part played by technology is also made
by P. H. H. Vries, ‘Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz
and the Great Divergence’, Jl World Hist., xii (2001), 436–8, and Jack Goldstone,
‘EfXorescence and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the “Rise of
the West” and the Industrial Revolution’, Jl World Hist., xiii (2002), 353–66.
10
Parthasarathi, ‘Great Divergence’, 288.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 91
Technological competition, however, is spurred on by the
prospect of a market, of consumers whose needs and desires
are there to be met, or to be fostered by the prospect of new
or cheaper commodities. Thus a major incentive to this shift
in producer horizons was provided by new frameworks of con-
sumption. Consumerism was a main driver of the global inter-
connections that ultimately fostered Europe’s, and especially
Britain’s, lead over Asia after the later eighteenth century.

Consumption and Luxury

Consumer society, luxury and global trade played their part
over a century before this divergence in ways which we have only
recently begun to understand from the viewpoint of our current
consumer cultures. This is to revive debate on connections
between consumption and the wider economy in the period
before the Industrial Revolution. A ‘consumer revolution’ of
the eighteenth century has been largely discounted by many
historians as a decisive turning point. A ‘consumer society’ of
the seventeenth century was already conceptualized by historians
who explored the genesis then of widespread new spending
patterns, advertising and retailing.11 Equally, historians of
Ming China and Renaissance Italy found vibrant consumer
cultures in their subjects, and the ancient Greek and Roman
shopping experience contains parallels to our own.12

11
Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society:
The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982), 9–33; Joan
Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early
Modern England (Oxford, 1978), 1–23, 158–80. An extended critique of the
‘consumer revolution’ is provided by B. A. Holderness, ‘The Birth of a Consumer
Society’, Eng. Hist. Rev., xcix (1984), 122–4. A later critique is provided in John
Styles, ‘Manufacturing, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-Century England’,
in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London,
1993), esp. 535–42.
12
Craig Clunas, SuperXuous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early
Modern China (Cambridge, 1991); Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand
for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1993), 176–242; H. Van der Wee, ‘Industrial
Dynamics and the Process of Urbanization and De-Urbanization in the Low
Countries from the Late Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century: A Synthesis’, in
Herman Van der Wee (ed.), The Rise and Decline of Urban Industries in Italy and in
the Low Countries (Leuven, 1988); S. Ciriacono, ‘Mass Consumption Goods and
Luxury Goods: The De-Industrialization of the Republic of Venice from the Six-
teenth to the Eighteenth Century’, in Van der Wee (ed.), Rise and Decline of Urban
Industries; Paul Veyne, Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism,
introduction by Oswyn Murray, trans. Brian Pearce (London, 1990).
92 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

It was not consumption in general, however, which provided

the incentive for major shifts in productive resources, but a shift
in tastes for novelties, fashion goods and luxuries. Jan de Vries
made this point in his concept of the ‘industrious revolution’.
This is deWned as a crucial phase of reallocation of household
labour and consumption towards the market; it was stimulated
not by the prospect of more of the same commodities, but by
the desire for novelties and even luxuries.13 De Vries’s theory
is about the impact of luxury, not on the rich, but on modest
and ordinary consumers. It rests on intra-household decisions
over labour, leisure and consumption taken among husbands,
wives and children. De Vries charts a shift away from rela-
tive self-sufWciency in consumer goods towards market-supplied
goods, that is, a shift from traditionally female-supplied home-
produced goods to commercially produced items. The wife in
the de Vries model takes on a primary role as decision-maker in
consumption, and occupies a strategic place at the intersection
of reproduction, production and consumption. She is an ‘active
consumer’ prompted to change the allocation of her labour
from household to market-based production by the prospect of
buying novelties and luxuries for herself and her family. We
can take this point a stage further to argue that the making
of a wide domestic market through a household reallocation
of labour was connected to the rise of new domestically
produced goods which imitated the characteristics of former
globally traded luxuries.
This shift away from the discussion of consumption in
general towards an investigation of the speciWc impact of lux-
uries and novelties in the period reXects the development of our
own current priorities since the 1980s. There has been an
upscaling of consumer aspirations associated with luxury and
designer goods, with the branding revolution described by
Naomi Klein, and with this the decline of the High Street
chains and the mass consumerism which once underpinned
them. The concept of luxury now features in the language of
consumerism. The lifestyle choices of afXuence are associated
with distinction, diversity and individuality, and these are set
13
This refers to the consumer incentive of Jan de Vries’s ‘industrious revolution’.
See de Vries’s critique of ‘consumer revolution’ in his ‘Between Purchasing Power
and the World of Goods’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of
Goods, esp. 85–9, 107–15.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 93
within a framework of globalization.14 Consumption has become
a key marker of inclusion and exclusion as set out in a recent
Human Development Report.15 Production and marketing frame-
works for designer and fashion goods are global, and oriented
increasingly towards Asia.16 Even the production of Britain’s
Xagship luxury chinaware, Wedgwood, has recently been
transferred to China.17
Luxury is central to the global history of consumption. While
our own present preoccupations may have prompted us to give it
more notice, luxury and its connections to world trade are cer-
tainly no new development. Indeed archaeologists have traced
extensive trade networks in exotics such as obsidian back to the
period before farming and extensive cereal production.18 Nei-
ther is luxury a sideline relevant only to aristocrats and what
was once called the ‘international jet set’.19 The early modern
economic debates on luxury no longer seem as remote as they
once did to economic historians, who simply measured the
contribution of international trade and empire to economic
growth and accorded them relatively minor parts.20 These indi-
cators, valuable though they are, need to be placed in a context
of perceptions and responses. Luxury provides a key to trade

14
Naomi Klein, No Logo (London, 2000), 27–62, 195–230; cf. the discussion of
the upscaling of consumption in Juliet Schor, The Overspent American (New York,
1998); and Robert Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of
Excess (New York, 1999). Advertisements featuring the concept of luxury became
common from the later 1990s. See, for example, House and Garden (American edn,
July 1997), and Vogue (UK edn, Jan. 1999).
15
‘Consumption in a Global Village — Unequal and Unbalanced’, in United
Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1998: Consumption
for Human Development (New York, 1998), 46–65.
16
David Held et al., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture
(Cambridge, 1999), 149–87; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimen-
sions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London, 1998), 27–84.
17
‘Thousand Jobs Go as Wedgwood Opts for Cheap Chinese Output’, Guardian,
5 June 2003, 2; ‘China Crisis’, Guardian, G2, 11 June 2003, 2.
18
Andrew Sherratt, ‘Reviving the Grand Narrative: Archaeology and Long-Term
Change’, Jl European Archaeol., iii (1995); Andrew and Susan Sherratt, ‘From
Luxuries to Commodities: The Nature of Mediterranean Bronze Age Trading
Systems’, in N. H. Gale (ed.), Bronze Age Trade in the Mediterranean (Studies in
Mediterranean Archaeology, xc, Jonsered, 1991).
19
See Harvey Leibenstein, ‘Bandwagon, Snob and Veblen Effects in the Theory
of Consumer Demand’, Quart. Jl Econ., lxiv (1950), and Vance Packard, The
Hidden Persuaders (London, 1957).
20
N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution
(Oxford, 1985); Joel Mokyr, ‘Demand vs. Supply in the Industrial Revolution’, in
Joel Mokyr (ed.), The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1985).
94 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

and economic policy in the early modern period. A world

economy, perceived during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries through a trade in luxuries and exotics, provided a
signiWcant source of innovation in technologies, products, mar-
keting strategies and commercial and Wnancial institutions.
That world economy brought greater access to Asian consumer
societies. Asian manufactured goods — silks and Wne cottons,
porcelain, ornamental bronze and brassware, lacquer, ivory and
paper goods — became imported luxuries in Europe. These
goods were special luxuries for Europeans: they were not the
ancient or Persian luxuries of corruption and vice, the gold and
rubies of the Indies. They were luxuries associated with a civil-
ized way of life, appealing especially to the middling classes.
These luxuries provided a demonstration effect to Europeans:
what European merchants and manufacturers learned were
lessons in diversity along with large-scale production, long-
distance trade but high-volume marketing, fashion and taste
in products which relied on lifestyle settings for their con-
sumption.
Europe’s contact with this particular type of Asian con-
sumer good was debated by statesmen and intellectuals within
the framework of a long-standing unease over the moral
impact of luxury expenditure on statecraft and social struc-
ture, along with an ancient, suspicious fascination with
the East. Anxieties over luxury extended from the ancient
world to the modern, and were central to Asian as much as
western moral and economic debate.21 Luxury as debated
during the Enlightenment, however, was disentangled from its
long association with corruption and vice, and transformed
into an economic concept covering production, trade and the
civilizing impact of superXuous commodities. Intellectuals
and statesmen across Europe debated their speciWc national
responses to luxury, and the capacity of their economies
and social structures to produce and to absorb luxury goods.
The terms of the debate shifted from vice and excess to com-
fort and convenience, enjoyment and sociability, taste and

21
For a Wne discussion of the development of these concepts, see Guido Guerzoni,
‘Liberalitas, MagniWcentia, Splendor: The Classic Origins of Italian Renaissance
Lifestyles’, in Neil De Marchi and Craufurd D. W. Goodwin (eds.), Economic
Engagements with Art (Durham, NC, and London, 1999).
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 95
aesthetics.22 International commerce and consumer goods
provided a framework of endorsement for a new modern luxury
as against the corrupting inXuences of ancient luxury.

Oriental Luxury
Anxieties over ancient luxury survived, however, and merged
with new worries over ‘oriental or Persian luxury’, and more
broadly over Asian luxury and the fabled riches of the East.
There was a long history of associating the exotica of the Orient
with the threat posed by Asian luxury in Europe. Livy argued
that Rome had been contaminated with ‘Asiatic luxuries’, since
by deWnition these were from Greece and the East, and had
to be imported.23 The presence of Roman troops in Asia Minor
became a source of moral decline. The representation of Asia
Minor was not just about its commodities, but about its inhab-
itants’ lives, and it was constructed as a place of luxury. The
lifestyle of the traditional Roman farmer was juxtaposed by Cato
to luxury: his Italian herbs were morally superior to imported
tropical spices.24 The association of luxury with eastern exotics
in Rome built on earlier traditions of debate in Greece about
Persian luxury, and in the Mesopotamian and Iranian courts
about Indian luxury. A close link was made by Latin and Greek
writers between India and luxury goods, whether the goods
came from India or not. ‘To Roman consumers, the actual
existence of so distant a place, directly visited by so few
people of note, was far less important than its impact on the
imagination’.25
From Pliny onwards, arguments against eastern luxuries were
predicated on the Wnancial ruin of the West, as silver and gold
Xowed east to purchase the treasures of the Indies. François

22
John Robertson, ‘The Enlightenment above National Context: Political Econ-
omy in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Naples’, Hist. Jl, xl (1997), esp. 678–83,
includes discussion of national responses to luxury. John Crowley connects the
debate on luxury to concepts of comfort and convenience in ‘The Sensibility of
Comfort’, Amer. Hist. Rev., civ (1999); for other treatments, see the essays in
Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates,
Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, 2003), and Michael Kwass, ‘Ordering
the World of Goods: Consumer Revolution and the ClassiWcation of Objects in
Eighteenth-Century France’, Representations, lxxxii (2003).
23 See Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury (Cambridge, 1994), 74–84.
24
Grant Parker, ‘Ex Oriente Luxuria: Indian Commodities and Roman Experience’,
Jl Econ. and Social Hist. of the Orient, xlv (2002).
25
Ibid., 90.
96 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

Bernier, the seventeenth-century French orientalist, described

India as the ‘graveyard of gold and silver’.26 Bernier’s views
formed a standard trope by the eighteenth century. Adam
Anderson in the 1760s dedicated his Historical and Chronologi-
cal Deduction of the Origin of Commerce to the Society for the
Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. In it he
compared Rome’s fatal attraction to eastern luxury with the
rise of the ‘Britannic Empire’ based on peaceful commerce in
things ‘useful and excellent . . . for the Ease, Conveniency, or
Elegance of Life’. Julius Caesar’s conquests, he argued,
brought home the spoils of conquered provinces
more especially eastward, their proconsuls . . . were continually sending
or bringing home immense riches, not only in coin, but also in gold and
silver vessels, and diadems; in vases also, and Wne statues, precious
Stones, exquisite Paintings, and whatever else was rare and excellent,
either for their Tables, or for Furniture, Cloathing, Equipages, Libraries,
Buildings . . . At length, the Sloth, Luxury, and Effeminacy of the
Emperors and People, and the great Neglect of military Discipline etc.
brought upon the Roman Empire many barbarous Invaders . . . peaceful
Commerce likewise suffered a long and almost total Suspension in the
West; the Revival and Increase whereof, and of mercantile, nautical and
manufactural Improvements, etc. will be the main Subject of the
ensuing Work.27
Like Bernier, he condemned the East Indies trade as ‘a pernicious
trade’ which ‘drains all of Europe of the silver which America
brings to it’.28
But a number of the goods associated with the exotic East
were manufactured goods, such as fabrics, carpets, ceramics and
furnishings, all endowed with intriguing colour, pattern and
ornament. They were ‘curiosities’, prefabricated images of the
East, crafted in the Wrst instance for India’s and China’s Arab
consumers. We have only relatively recently realized their
signiWcance for early modern Europeans. Though Europeans
had a long acquaintance with oriental consumer goods, that com-
merce was to take on whole new dimensions with the extension
of maritime trade and the founding of the East India Companies

26
François Bernier, Voyage dans l’Empire Moghol (1656–1668), cited in Michel
Morineau, ‘The Indian Challenge: Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Sushil
Chaudhury and Michel Morineau (eds.), Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe
and Asia in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, 1999), 249.
27
Adam Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce,
from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time: Containing an History of the Great Commercial
Interests of the British Empire, 2 vols. (London, 1764), i, ‘Introduction’, p. i.
28
Ibid., p. xxiii.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 97
early in the seventeenth century. This was a trade which was to
change the material culture of Europe, bringing with it new
objects, colours, patterns and Wnishes.29
The part played by luxury consumption may not have been
exceptional to Europe. Indeed global historians debate levels
of consumption and the role of superXuous commodities and
exotica in China, India and Japan. At one level, this is another
aspect of the debate on divergence, with the main focus given
to the consumption of necessaries and comforts by the labouring
poor, that is, of food, textiles, fuel and housing.30 While opti-
mistic perspectives now prevail on levels of consumption even
by relatively ordinary people, as well as on sophisticated cul-
tures of discrimination and taste, many argue that Asia lacked
the incentives which ‘oriental luxury’ provided to the West.
There was no comparable treasure trove which the Chinese
perceived they might retrieve in the West.31 Consumer society
stopped short of attaining a critical mass in China, some his-
torians argue, while in Europe the pace of change in fashion
continued to accelerate. Similarly, in India there appears to be
little evidence of the steady consumption of a middle level of
Wne goods for every noble or merchant house. The older nexus
of luxury consumption in India was that of tribute-giving, gift
exchange and royal collecting.32 Nevertheless, there is general
agreement on sophisticated urban consumer cultures, provid-
ing for large commercial, professional and artisan groups as
well as the elites. Highly developed fashion markets, consumer
29
Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth,
1991 [1978]); J. M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Man-
chester, 1995), 103; P. J. Marshall, ‘Taming the Exotic: The British and India in
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter
(eds.), Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester, 1990); Chandra Mukerji, From
Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York, 1983).
30
See Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 127–65; Huang, ‘Development or Involution
in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China?’, esp. 520–4; Pomeranz, ‘Beyond the
East–West Binary’, esp. 566–71; Robert Brenner and Christopher Isett, ‘England’s
Divergence from China’s Yangzi Delta’, Jl Asian Studies, lxi (2002), esp. 632–4.
31
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of
our Times (London, 1994), 35.
32
Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 153, 157–61; Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Re-Thinking
the Late Imperial Chinese Economy: Development, Disaggregation and Decline
circa 1730–1930’, Itinerario, xxiv, 3–4 (2000), 33–5; S. A. M. Adshead, Material
Culture in Europe and China, 1400–1800 (London, 1997), 25–30, 100–1; C. A.
Bayly, ‘South Asia and the “Great Divergence”’, Itinerario, xxiv, 3–4 (2000), 95;
C. A. Bayly, ‘“Archaic” and “Modern” Globalization in the Eurasian and African
Arena, c.1750–1850’, in Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History, 52.
98 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

sensibilities and a literature on luxury and taste were as much a

part of these cultures as they were to be of Europe’s.33 The
characteristics and wider economic impact of Asian consumer
cultures remain an open question. By contrast, there is now no
doubt that eastern luxury had a profound impact on European
consumption.
In aggregate, imports from Asia looked small, but their most
important characteristic was the increase in the numbers and in
the types of commodities which were brought in not as prestige
goods for collectors, but for steadily expanding markets.34
The import trade in these goods provided an opportunity to
develop a new scale of marketing for what came to be seen as
semi-luxury ware — goods that were produced and traded in
sufWcient volumes to make them affordable to the middling
classes. Some of these goods — particular foodstuffs, tea, coffee,
chocolate, sugar, tobacco — were not just addictive, but were
consumed in particular cultural sites; they were part of the
‘revolution of sociability’ which accompanied the ‘industrious
revolution’.35
Manufactured imports from Asia formed part of this — the
dress, vessels and furnishings which enhanced the material set-
tings of this sociability: Indian and Chinese cottons, espe-
cially muslins and printed calicoes and silks, porcelain tea sets,
lacquer cabinets, screens and tea tables, wallpapers and fans.
Some of these goods on their transfer to Europe found con-
sumer settings in new social practices of dress, display, and din-
ing and drinking rituals associated with porcelain cabinets,
taking tea, coffee-house culture, male drinking clubs and family
33
Craig Clunas, ‘Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the
West’, Amer. Hist. Rev., civ (1999); Clunas, SuperXuous Things, 12–33; Shelagh
Vainker, ‘Luxuries and Necessities in Early Modern China’, in Berg and Eger
(eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century; Peter Burke, ‘Res et Verba: Conspicuous
Consumption in the Early Modern World’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consump-
tion and the World of Goods. Chinese manuals of taste such as Gao Lian, Eight Dis-
courses on the Art of Living from the Studio where Elegance Is Valued (1590) and Wang
Zhenheng, Treatise on SuperXuous Things (1615–20) are discussed by Clunas,
SuperXuous Things, 12–20; see also his chapter on ‘Anxieties about Things’. For
Japanese writings, see Saikaku Ihara, This Scheming World (Rutland, Vt., and
Tokyo, 1965); Howard Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction (Rutland,
Vt., and Tokyo, 1959).
34
Niels Steensgaard, ‘Commodities, Bullion and Services in Intercontinental
Transactions before 1750’, in Hans Pohl (ed.), The European Discovery of the World
and its Economic Effects on Pre-Industrial Society, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart, 1990), 13–14.
35
Bayly, ‘“Archaic” and “Modern” Globalization’, 54.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 99
dinner services. These formed part of the social psychology
termed by Norbert Elias ‘the civilizing process’, that is, a precise
observation of oneself and others within a longer series of moti-
vations and causal connections. The concept described aristo-
cratic and royal court rationality in the sixteenth century, but it
also applied to the consumer culture of the middling classes in
the eighteenth century.36 The exotic provenance of these imports
also made them into luxuries in Europe; physical distance from
the place of production enhanced their value. They formed part
of the early to mid eighteenth-century fashion for the rococo,
and they were highly adaptable to the frequent design changes
demanded by the European fashion system. Plates 1 and 2 show
examples of popular Chinese and Indian imports from the late
seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, testifying to their
long-standing appeal.

II
IMPORTS, IMITATION AND PRODUCTION
The special part played by the reception of Asian luxury goods
into European markets reinforced global trade, and fostered
consumer cultures. But the full signiWcance of the interconnec-
tions between the global luxury trade and industrialization is to
be found in production processes and in the characteristics of
the commodities. These imported luxuries were to activate the
invention of new production processes and new consumer
goods in Britain.

Import Substitution
It was Britain’s idiosyncratic response to her luxury imports
from Asia that stimulated key transformations in the character-
istics of consumer goods and the production processes devel-
oped to provide them. Discussion of the relationship between
imports and industrial development often depicts it as ‘import
substitution’: indeed the term is frequently applied to the early
phases of manufacturing development in Britain, including that
of the cotton industry.

36
Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption (Bloomington, 1988); Stephen
Mennell, Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-Image (Oxford, 1989);
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1982).
100 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

1. Blue and white porcelain cup and saucer, Chinese, late seventeenth century; height
9 cm. Ashmolean Museum, cat. no. X1754. (By permission of the Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford)

Historians referred in past decades to import substitution as

a misguided policy based on mercantilist fallacies. Infant indus-
tries nurtured in the greenhouse of artiWcial trade barriers
would never grow beyond the limits of high-income home mar-
kets. They would wither and die in the winds of international
trade. More recently historians have claimed positive beneWts.
John Styles has attributed the growth of London’s industries in
the early modern period to ‘import substitution’. Parthasarathi,
O’Brien and Inikori have attributed Britain’s industrialization
in cotton, iron and metal wares to policies of tariff protection
undertaken by the English then British state. Inikori sees these
as import-substitution strategies parallel to those of newly
developing countries today.37

37
John Styles, ‘Product Innovation in Early Modern London’, Past and Present,
no. 168 (Aug. 2000); Parthasarathi, ‘Great Divergence’, 290–3; P. K. O’Brien,
T. GrifWths and P. Hunt, ‘Political Components of the Industrial Revolution: Parlia-
ment and the English Cotton Industry, 1660–1774’, Econ. Hist. Rev., xliv (1991);
Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2002), 151, 449.
2. Open robe, printed Indian cotton, with pattern of multicoloured Xoral sprays
overlaid with printed gold spots, English, 1780s. V&A Museum, CT86906. (By
permission of the V&A Picture Library)
102 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

But import substitution is a misleading concept, and does not

adequately capture the process of market development, both
internal and external, and the dynamic interaction of product
development and technological change that made the difference
for Britain in the eighteenth century. The concept derives from
models applied by development economists to less developed
economies after the Second World War, and more recently in the
export promotion policies of parts of Asia in the 1980s; there are
major discrepancies between these models and vital characteris-
tics of Britain’s industrial development in the eighteenth century.
Import-substitution policies of the 1950s focused on protect-
ing the domestic markets of developing countries from world
imports of consumer goods; it was believed that manufactur-
ing their own consumer goods for a national market would set
these countries on the path of economic growth. Certainly pre-
dictions from many of the theories relied on assumptions of a
‘closed economy’, or conditions of industrial development with-
out trade.38 But failures of such ‘import substitution’ to generate
any self-sustained growth and the economic distortions of state-
protected high-cost industry with the attendant misuse of re-
sources were widely recognized by the 1970s in the experiences
of Brazil and India. The World Development Report of 1987 con-
Wrmed a new priority of export-oriented growth based on the
experiences of Korea and Taiwan. There, industries focused on
world markets, and bolstered by state incentives appeared to
offer new models of export-led growth.39 Neither theory, how-
ever, connected the consumer or export industries it dwelt on to
the wider historical development of the capital infrastructures
of the economies concerned.40 The distinctive characteristics of
38
H. J. Bruton, ‘A Reconsideration of Import Substitution’, Jl Econ. Lit., xxxvi
(1998), esp. 908–17; H. J. Bruton, ‘Import Substitution’, in Hollis Chenery and
T. N. Srinivasan (eds.), Handbook of Development Economics, ii (Amsterdam and
Oxford, 1989), esp. 1604–5.
39
Ray Kiely, Industrialization and Development: A Comparative Analysis (London,
1998), 97–114; also see Stephan Haggard, Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics
of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (Ithaca and London, 1990), 1–22.
For a leading proponent of export-led industrialization, see Bela Balassa, New Direc-
tions in the World Economy (Basingstoke, 1989), 14–27.
40
A. O. Hirschman, ‘The Political Economy of Import Substituting Industriali-
zation in Latin America’, Quart. Jl Econ., lxxxii (1968); Bruton, ‘Reconsideration
of Import Substitution’, 922. But see Hirschman’s reXections on the failure of the
‘development project’ in his ‘The Rise and Decline of Development Economics’, in
A. O. Hirschman, Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond (Cambridge,
1981), 1–24.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 103
Britain’s development in the eighteenth century were the growth
of domestic and international markets for consumer goods, and
the exploitation of knowledge and learning which contributed
to technological progress.
Historians looking for new perspectives on the part played by
global trade in Britain’s industrialization have, nevertheless,
applied the concepts of ‘import substitution’ or ‘export-led
growth’ without close reference to the market and technologies.
Static conceptions of a domestic market to be supplied from
within rather than from the international marketplace need to
be assessed alongside more dynamic possibilities.41 Imports
also played a positive part in stimulating a dynamic develop-
ment of domestic consumption: an ‘industrious revolution’
fostered by new desires for non-traditional goods, and by the
experience of goods from outside the region, that is imports,
changed consumer horizons and family behaviour.42 Equally,
applying simple models of export promotion has led to a revival
of histories of the Industrial Revolution as imperial domina-
tion.43 These explanations take us only so far: they leave unex-
plored the stimulation of learning and knowledge offered by
global interconnections, that is, learning desires for new goods
through the experience of importing, and learning skills and
understanding materials in responding to imports.
Imports play their part in transforming knowledge. Develop-
ment economists now argue that many import-substitution
policies failed because they created an environment that dis-
couraged learning; export-oriented growth likewise neglected
tacit knowledge and learning ‘by doing’ and using. The econo-
mies based on these strategies were often enclaves separated off
from wider national capital formation and technology. Such
knowledge accumulation relies on conditions that are dependent
on the basic characteristics of a society; exports and domestic

41
See Styles’s argument that supplying London’s domestic consumers with
home-produced goods on a par with those of Paris and Amsterdam was the great
achievement of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century tariffs: ‘Product Innova-
tion’, 128–30.
42
This key point was made by Jan de Vries in ‘Between Purchasing Power and
the World of Goods’.
43
See Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution, 151, 449. He claims that the
opportunities offered by the domestic market in the later eighteenth century were
too limited; Britain’s major ‘import substitution’ industries, cotton and metals,
relied from the start on sales to overseas markets.
104 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

learning must interact. Thus more recent policies have focused

on the promotion of research and development.44
The widespread import of Asian goods into Europe from the
later seventeenth century coincided with a phase of intense
public interest in technology — what might be called ‘useful
knowledge’. Dense information networks which fostered con-
sumerism and spread fashions must be placed beside the adapt-
able knowledge communities that could change materials and
their applications, adapt designs and envisage the technical
developments that would break through traditional processes.45
A European-wide ‘industrial enlightenment’ brought extensive
circulation of codiWed knowledge, but equally a consciousness
of the signiWcance of ‘tacit knowledge’ and implicit skills.46
Physical contact with the imported good prompted speculation
on how it was made and fostered experimentation with mater-
ials. A process of analysing the foreign manufacturing technique
was simultaneously a process of dissection, experimentation
and adaptation of skills honed to other purposes. Imports
provided a challenge to indigenous learning, breaking down
boundaries between skills, making possible the new technolo-
gies said to have developed in the wake of import substitution.
Certainly Asian goods and their technologies provided new
challenges, perceived at the time to be quite distinct from those
posed by earlier European imports. For example, the know-
ledge of the Chinese porcelain repairman was thus paralleled
by that of the English china-riveter (Plates 3 and 4).

Asian Export Ware

Let us now turn in more detail to the characteristics of Asian
export goods and their production processes. Just what could
Europe learn from these? The special feature that distin-
guished Asian manufacture was world-class production of Wne
but affordable consumer ware, marked by diversity, taste and
fashion, and produced and traded throughout Asia on a scale
44
Bruton, ‘Reconsideration of Import Substitution’, 903, 929–30; Alice Amsden,
The Rise of “the Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies (Oxford,
2001), 277–83.
45
See Styles, ‘Product Innovation’, 129, 167.
46
See Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: The Historical Origins of the Knowledge
Economy (Princeton, 2002), 34–74; Larry Stewart, ‘A Meaning for Machines:
Modernity, Utility, and the Eighteenth-Century British Public’, Jl Mod. Hist., lxx
(1998).
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 105
not previously encountered in Europe. These Asian goods
boast all the qualities that European historians have previously
argued were created Wrst in world history in the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century industrial revolutions in Britain and France.
Some of these goods, especially types of ceramics, silks and cal-
icoes, could be functional and routine parts of everyday life in
India and China, but equally, at a higher range of qualities,
could be prized as objects of art. Certainly these were exotics in
Europe, but more signiWcantly, their diversity of quality and
design, combined with their high-volume production and their
long traditions as export ware as well as domestic consumables,
made them into very special transformative luxuries to Europeans.
Some of these goods, especially printed and painted calicoes
and Chinese and Japanese porcelain, were unique to Asia, yet
were produced in an unaccountable range of qualities and
designs, and in volumes unprecedented in Europe. The pre-
existing pan-Asian trade in these goods that European traders
came upon was already extensive, provided for enormously
varied demands and styles from the Philippines to Africa, and
relied on sophisticated trade and Wnancial networks.
Overall levels of trade between Asia and Europe, and between
various regions of Asia, are difWcult to estimate not only because
of the problems of measuring the trade of private merchants, but
also because of the re-export trade among these regions.47 One
study comparing levels of intra-Asian trade with those of Asian
trade to Europe investigates Chinese ceramic exports in the sev-
enteenth century. In the Wrst half of the century only 16 per cent
of Chinese ceramics were exported directly to Europe; exports
to South Seas markets including India, South East Asia and the
Middle East accounted for 60 per cent, and exports to Japan
for 23 per cent.48 These exports included a large proportion of
low-priced coarse wares as well as medium-quality wares going
to South Seas markets, with India and Japan taking most of
the medium-quality wares. Exports to Europe, though a small
47
M. N. Pearson, ‘Merchants and States’, in James D. Tracy (ed.), The Political
Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350–1750 (Cambridge,
1991), esp. 105–7; Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz, ‘Evolution
of Empire: The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean during the Sixteenth Century’, in
Tracy (ed.), Political Economy of Merchant Empires, esp. 314–18.
48
C. Ho, ‘The Ceramic Trade in Asia, 1602–82’, in A. J. H. Latham and
H. Kawakatsu (eds.), Japanese Industrialization and the Asian Economy (London,
1994), esp. 36–49.
106 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

3. Watercolour of a Chinese porcelain repairman. From fo. 789 of a bound volume

of sixty watercolours and manuscript (1798) for George Henry Mason’s Costume of
China (London, 1800). Ashmolean Museum. (By permission of the Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford)

proportion of the total trade at the time, were mainly of higher-

quality goods, and accounted for 50 per cent of the value of
Chinese ceramic exports.49 The textiles and ceramics exported
from Asia were made up and embellished in Europe to Wt with
dress styles and drinking cultures, as illustrated by the hand-
painted frock shown in Plate 5 and the beer mug with a silver
mount shown in Plate 6.

Representations and Technologies

Historians’ perceptions of these commodities have until quite
recently hidden the signiWcance of their attributes. Many his-
torians have repeated the statements made about the Chinese
after the Macartney Expedition in 1792.50 Macartney’s diary
reported a political system whose aim was ‘to persuade the

49
Ibid., 39. Cf. the export trade of the eighteenth century in luxury goods inten-
ded for western markets from China and Japan to Indian ports. See Amin Jaffer,
Furniture from British India and Ceylon (London, 2001), 89–95.
50
J. A. G. Roberts, China through Western Eyes (Stroud, 1991), 1–22; Colin
Mackerras, Western Images of China (Oxford, 1989), 1–65.
4. Advertising handbill for Edmund Morris, ‘China-Rivetter’, c.1770. British Museum,
Banks 37.11. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
108 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

people that they are themselves already perfect and can there-
fore learn nothing from others’. He reiterated the standard view
of China by this time as a static empire going into decline. ‘A
nation that does not advance must retrograde, and Wnally fall
back to barbarism and misery’.51 These statements conveyed
the notion of a country with little interest in western science and
technology, or the wider world, and of a traditional class-bound
society.52 Chinese and European historians in recent decades
have commented on the failure of the Chinese to advance the
technologies they had developed up to the fourteenth century,
and especially to respond to and adopt outside (western) tech-
nologies. Elvin explained China’s aborted inventiveness with a
‘high level equilibrium trap’. Jones praised Chinese technologi-
cal precocity from which the Chinese turned aside in favour of
internal colonization: ‘contractual legalism never replaced stat-
ist morality’. Likewise, Mokyr identiWed a turning away from
technological change when the state lost interest in promoting
it. Landes found a regime of technological and scientiWc inertia
caused by rejection of foreign technology and a lack of social
institutions that would have encouraged a cumulative process
of learning.53
While debate on levels and paths of technological change in
China has reopened, the question that is never asked is why
Chinese and Indian technologies were not transferred to
Europe.54 Such a question may seem absurd, so clear is our
historical certainty of the technological stagnation of China by
the eighteenth century. Yet Chinese and Indian manufactured
commodities were imported on a signiWcant scale, and sought
out by merchants and consumers for their quality, diversity,

51
Mackerras, Western Images of China, 44.
52
Joanna Waley-Cohen, ‘China and Western Technology in the Late Eighteenth
Century’, in Michael Adas (ed.), Technology and European Overseas Enterprise
(Aldershot, 1996). See E. L. Jones’s response to these images of static technologies
in his ‘Patterns of Growth in History’, in John A. James and Mark Thomas (eds.),
Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor
of R. M. Hartwell (Chicago, 1994).
53
Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (London, 1973), 179–99; E. L. Jones,
The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of
Europe and Asia (Cambridge, 1981), 202–22; Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Techno-
logical Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford, 1990), 209–38; David Landes, ‘East
is East and West is West’, in Maxine Berg and Kristine Bruland (eds.), Technological
Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives (Cheltenham, 1998), 19–38.
54
Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 43–60.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 109

5. Frock of cotton, hand-painted in India, made up in Europe, eighteenth century.

From George Baker, Calico Painting and Printing in the East Indies (London, 1921),
pl. 22 (detail C). Bodleian Library, shelfmark 170083 a.1. (By permission of Hod-
der Arnold and the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)

design and adaptability to market and fashion changes, and all

of this at affordable prices. We need to look more closely at the
way production processes were represented and passed on to
become European preconceptions. The oriental order of things
110 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

was associated with artisans and husbandmen living in perpet-

ual misery which allowed the merchant, the prince and the
nobleman a luxurious living built on the fruits of their labour.
Max Weber described oriental merchants as mere pedlars,
colporteurs and small fry, and contrasted them with western
traders who had intelligence, money, a spirit of enterprise and an
aptitude for success.55 Parthasarathi, in the pages of this journal,
pointed out the implications of recognizing this orientalist bias,
not just for the history of Asia, but for that of Europe. He
posed the British revolution in cotton textiles as a response to
India’s dynamism in world markets for these consumer
goods.56 That response, however, was based not just on the
recently recognized competitive achievements of Indian and
Chinese producers, but on European perceptions of products
and processes.
The major source for discovering more about Asian com-
modities comes with its own biases. The great European trad-
ing companies have left admirably preserved sets of records, in
contrast to the private accounts of Indian merchants, where
little regard was given to keeping them beyond a voyage or
transaction, far less beyond the life of the individual business-
man. It is the perennial problem of the patchiness of business
records. These records of the trading companies are in many
cases our only source of information on practices and proc-
esses, and by their nature they conveyed the impression that
Europeans were the dynamic actors in the Asian trade.57 The
biases in our perceptions of the commodities and the trade in
them are continued in the literature of the slave trade. Anti-
slave-trade campaigners from the early nineteenth century in
Europe wanted to show that Africa received only trinkets, guns
and alcohol in return for slaves. But Indian textiles and metal
wares were major players in a trading complex that was not just
triangular, but global. Imports to the Senegambia in the 1730s
were made up of 21.0 per cent metals, 18.5 per cent Indian

55
Michel Morineau, ‘Eastern and Western Merchants from the Sixteenth to the
Eighteenth Centuries’, in Chaudhury and Morineau (eds.), Merchants, Companies and
Trade, 136.
56
Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the
Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India’, Past and Present, no. 158 (Feb.
1998), 105–7.
57
Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984), 154.
6. Cylindrical beer mug with handle, blue and white decoration, silver mount,
Chinese, c.1670; height 23 cm. Ashmolean Museum, cat. no. 1978.801. (By
permission of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
112 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

textiles, 9.7 per cent European textiles, and only 5.6 per cent
Wrearms and another 4.0 per cent gunpowder.58
Many of the accounts of the production of Indian calicoes
and Chinese porcelain convey images of processes steeped in
tradition, hereditary transmission and, in India, division of
labour, process and product by caste and district, as well as by
gender and age.59 Yet in spite of all these biases, the company
records suggest that western traders knew enough about these
commodities for them to have had a demonstration effect on
European taste, technology and trade.
Printed calicoes provide a Wrst example. Here it is very difW-
cult to break through the layers of theories of oriental despot-
ism in the descriptions of production processes. Orme, in his
Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire (1783), described
processes thus:
The women likewise spin the thread designed for the cloths, and then
deliver it to the men, who have Wngers to model it as exquisitely as these
have prepared it . . . The rigid, clumsy Wngers of a European would
scarcely be able to make a piece of canvass, with instruments which are
all that an Indian employs in making a piece of cambric. It is farther
remarkable, that every distinct kind of cloth is the produce of a particu-
lar district, in which the fabric has been transmitted, perhaps for centur-
ies, from father to son, a custom which must have conduced to the
perfection of the manufacture.60

In 1742 the French Jesuit missionary Father Gaston Cœur-

doux described the processes in similar terms as a division of
labour by locality, caste, gender and age. He depicted the cot-
ton painters of South and West India as low-caste Hindus
working on a joint-family basis. Each joint family might special-
ize in one part of the manufacturing process, and in turn sub-
contract out to those of lower rank. One family might draw the
designs, another do the mordanting and a third the waxing.
The drawing of the outlines on the cloth and the application of
the mordant were ‘done by little children as well as older, they

58
Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic
History (Cambridge, 1990), 135.
59
Chaudhuri cites the Dutch observers of Mughal India, Havart and Pelsaert,
who described Indian chintz painters as being ‘like snails which creep on and
appear not to advance’, and who imitated but could not design for themselves.
These observers, he points out, were oblivious to craft production and commercial
capital. See K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the
Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1990), 302–3.
60
Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 298.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 113
stretching the piece on the ground, and sitting upon them, run
over them with a dexterity and exactness peculiar to them-
selves’.61 The representations in these accounts of the hereditary
and static nature of the work process, combined with the degra-
dation of the workforce, are somewhat at odds with the capacity
of the workforce to respond to the levels of demand and absorb
the variety of designs across the Asian trade, and subsequently
for the European trade.62 Recent research also indicates labour
shortages among weavers. Labour disputes and migration of
the Gujarati villagers in the face of harsh treatment add to evid-
ence that wages were much higher than the impression given by
European observers. Indeed it now seems likely that relative
earnings, working conditions and Wnancial security among
Indian calico weavers compared favourably with those of Eng-
lish weavers.63
Chaudhuri and Bayly have described the co-ordination of
these textile producers through many levels of network and
merchant, based on an advance contract system and sophisti-
cated credit and information Xows. The output and adaptabil-
ity of the systems were proverbial; textiles, and predominantly
these cottons, made up 80.6 per cent of the value of the East
India Company’s Asian imports into Britain in 1738–40.64
Observers commented on the ease with which Indian producers
accommodated to European tastes, adapting alien colour

61
John Irwin and K. B. Brett, Origins of Chintz (London, 1970), 8. Cœurdoux’s
account was conveyed in Jean Ryhiner’s Traité sur la fabrication et le commerce des
toiles peintes, written in 1766 but not published until 1865: see Irwin and Brett,
Origins of Chintz, appendix B, ‘Father Cœurdoux’s letters on the technique of
Indian cotton-painting, 1742 and 1747’, with introduction and commentary by
P. R. Schwartz.
62
This adaptability is discussed in A. Dasgupta, ‘Indian Merchants and the
Trade in the Indian Ocean’, in T. Raychaudhuri and I. Habib (eds.), The Cam-
bridge Economic History of India, i (Cambridge, 1982); and K. N. Chaudhuri, The
Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge,
1978), 291, 296; K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘European Trade with India’, in Raychaudhuri
and Habib (eds.), Cambridge Economic History of India, i, 388. On the response to
French markets, see Michel Morineau, ‘The Indian Challenge: Seventeenth to
Eighteenth Centuries’, in Chaudhury and Morineau (eds.), Merchants, Companies
and Trade, esp. 255–7.
63
K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘The Structure of the Indian Textile Industry in the Seven-
teenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Adas (ed.), Technology and European Overseas
Enterprise, 354, 360, 388; Parthasarathi, ‘Rethinking Wages’, 89, 103, 109.
64
Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia, 96; Chaudhuri, ‘European Trade with
India’, 401; C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the
Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983), 60–3, 145–8.
114 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

schemes and Xora derived from pattern books or musters sent

from England, Holland and France. Adaptive imitation was pre-
ferred by the Court of Directors of the East India Company:65
We send you some patterns, which may govern you so far as to see
thereby that we want some new Works . . . endeavour to send us every
year New Patterns, as well of the Flowers as Stripes, at least Wve or six
in a bale, and let the Indians Work their own Fancys, which is always
preferable before any Patterns we can send from Europe.66
The production process was not considered to be transfer-
able, though the few accounts that were left by Europeans of
such processes reveal an intense curiosity. Detailed descrip-
tions of printing, painting and dyeing processes were made as
early as 1734 by Antoine de Beaulieu, a French naval ofWcer,
and in 1742 by Cœurdoux.67 Beaulieu chose the method of
having a painted cotton fabricated before his eyes, and then
wrote down what he thought was happening. Cœurdoux, who
lived in Pondicherry and spoke the local languages, Tamil and
Telugu, chose the method of questioning a number of the paint-
ers he had converted to Catholicism. He hoped his descriptions
would assist European manufacture: ‘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 at
least was the aim I had in mind’. But he certainly felt his inter-
est to be relatively rare: ‘It is surprising that, so far, there should
not have been in this country any European interested in the
matter, endeavouring to enrich his own country with an art from
which so much advantage could be drawn’.68
65
The most detailed account of the trade, production processes and responses
to European markets is provided in John Irwin and P. R. Schwartz, Studies
in Indo-European Textile History (Ahmedabad, 1966), 8–56. The point is made in
Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain,
1660–1800 (Oxford, 1991), 18. Also see Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia, 282;
A. W. Douglas, ‘Cotton Textiles in England: The East India Company’s Attempt
to Exploit Developments in Fashion, 1660–1721’, Jl Brit. Studies, viii (1969);
Styles, ‘Product Innovation’, 125–31, 134–5.
66
Cited in Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 303. See also Styles, ‘Product Innova-
tion’, 135–6.
67
Beaulieu’s description was set out in M. Q*** [Chevalier de Quarelles], Traité
sur les toiles peintes: dans lequel on voit la manière dont on les fabrique aux Indes, & en
Europe (Paris, 1760): see Irwin and Brett, Origins of Chintz, appendix A: ‘Beaulieu’s
account of the technique of Indian cotton-painting, c.1734’, with introduction and
commentary by P. R. Schwartz, 36.
68
Irwin and Brett, Origins of Chintz, 43, 51; cf. G. P. Baker, Calico Printing and
Painting in the East Indies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London,
1921).
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 115
The reports of Cœurdoux and Beaulieu seem to have reached
European textile printers one or two decades later through some
non-specialist articles and a treatise on textile dyeing and print-
ing, and via the Wrst specialist account by a textile manufacturer,
written in Basle by Jean Ryhiner.69 By this time the superior
colour-fast dyes, prints and painting of the Indian fabrics were
attributed to the innate and inherited empirical abilities of the
workforce, and to the water. Ryhiner commented:
Our theory and principles are almost the same as those of the Indians,
but the latter have the advantages of possessing certain herbs which are
more suitable for this method of manufacture; it would also seem that
manpower is more readily available in that country because the use of
painting instead of printing demands a greater degree of skill and is
much slower, which means that even granted all things equal we could
never adopt their methods, for we lack skilled craftsmen and could not
keep the maintenance costs so low.
Father Cœurdoux also argued that ‘it would seem that the
Author of Nature, as a set-off against other advantages which
Europe enjoys, has granted India ingredients, and, above all,
certain waters, whose particular qualities have much to do with
the beautiful combination of painting and dyeing represented
by Indian cloths’.70
These views were also standard in English accounts. The entry
on ‘Callicoe’ in the second edition of Postlethwayt’s Universal
Dictionary of 1757 claimed the best calicoes were made in Seconge:
those made at Seconge grow the fairer, the more you wash them. This is
said to arise from a peculiar virtue of the river that runs by the city,
when the rain falls; for the workmen, having made such prints upon
their cottons as the foreign merchants give them, by several patterns,
dip them into the river often, and that so Wxes the colours that they will
always hold.71
Though the writer of the entry suspected that the Indians used
a metallic solution for their ‘Wne, bright and durable colours’,
and advised British dyers to experiment with metal solutions,
69
See nn. 61 and 67 above. A series of articles on the method of painting cottons
in India in the June, July, August and September numbers of the Journal
œconomique for 1756 bears close similarities to Beaulieu’s account and may have
been based on it. See Irwin and Brett, Origins of Chintz, 36, 44. The Wrst English
account was by the botanist William Roxburgh in his Plants of the Coromandel Coast
(London, 1795). Part of this, describing cotton dyeing and printing, is given in
Irwin and Brett, Origins of Chintz, appendix C, ‘The Roxburgh account of Indian
cotton-painting, 1795’, by P. R. Schwartz.
70
Cited in Irwin and Brett, Origins of Chintz, 44, 45.
71
Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 2nd
edn, 2 vols. (London, 1757), i, s.v. ‘Callicoe’.
116 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

there appears to have been no systematic attempt to transfer

these dyeing and printing technologies. Instead, as we shall see,
separate technologies were devised in Europe to substitute for
what were perceived to be Asian empirical advantage, labour
intensity and nature. These new European technologies devel-
oped through closely integrated groups of dyers and colourists
relying on indigenous traditions and European-wide networks
of knowledge, but not on either chemical theory or, it seems,
writings on extra-European processes.72
The Jesuits, in particular, were well known as conduits of
knowledge of Asian goods and technologies. A merchant selling
exotic goods could exploit this association by adroit juxtaposition
of the name of St Ignatius with the allure of oriental goods; the
advertising trade card shown in Plate 7 sets out the connections.
The production processes of Chinese and Japanese porcelain
were even more mysterious and exotic than those of textiles,
and the consumer impact on Europeans at least as powerful.
Long before the onset of signiWcant trade with Europe, Chinese
producers were famed for the ingenuity of their technology and
scale of their operations. The kiln technologies developed as far
back as the Han period (206 BC–AD 220) surpassed European
techniques until the nineteenth century. By the Song period
multi-chamber ‘dragon kilns’ stretched up hillsides as much as
sixty metres. They could Wre more than Wfty thousand pieces at
a time over several days. They also provided for temperature
differences of as much as 600 °C between the Wrebox in the
lower area and the chimney in the upper, so that in a single
operation a whole range of wares could be produced, from
high-Wred porcelain in the lower chambers to earthenware in
the top.73 The furnaces as described in the eighteenth century
could be relatively small and made of iron, or extremely large
and made of earth. ‘They are two fathoms high, and almost four
fathoms broad’.74 There was also an organizational system of

72
Robert Fox, ‘Science, Practice and Innovation in the Age of Natural Dyes,
1750–1860’, in Berg and Bruland (eds.), Technological Revolutions in Europe.
73
Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, 285; M. Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The
Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Jl World Hist., ix (1998), 148, 156.
74
Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary, ii, s.v. ‘Porcelain’. Postlethwayt provides a
contemporary description of the business organization of the kilns based on the
accounts of the Jesuit Father d’Entrecolles. See also Margaret Medley, The Chinese
Potter: A Practical History of Chinese Ceramics (London, 1989), 171, 241–2, and
Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art
(Princeton, 2000), 98–101.
7. ‘At the sign of St Ignatius: a shop selling goods of all sorts, wholesale and retail’.
The verse at the foot exhorts: ‘Gentlemen, stop letting the old ways govern your
taste. At St Ignatius we sell everything: here are merchants à la mode’. Luxuries on
display include a bag of amber (top left), a bolt of Persian silk being examined for
quality, bales of sugar and indigo (right), and gold and silver braid and lace
(shelves far right); a Jesuit is counting coins at the right-hand counter. A pharmacy
on the left illustrates the trade in medicinal goods. From a bound collection of
trade cards, ‘Recueil d’adresses’, vol. ii, fo. 49: Waddesdon Manor, TC1919,
photographed by Mike Fear. (By permission of Waddesdon Manor, the Rothschild
Collection — The National Trust)
118 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

shared or part ownership practised over many of the kilns;

alternatively, producers could hire access to the kilns for Wring
a batch of pottery.
In the case of porcelain, this economic capacity combined
with Xexibility went with a technology, the porcelain recipe,
that the West was yet to understand, and was unable to repro-
duce even minimally until early in the eighteenth century, and
in any quantity until later in that century. Just as in the case of
printed calicoes, production of porcelain for Europe was added
to that for markets within Asia. Production in this case too had
been honed to meet diverse tastes across social, religious and
national groups from the Middle East to Japan.
There was, nevertheless, a demand shock when Europeans
entered the trade. The Dutch traded a million pieces of porcel-
ain at the end of the seventeenth century, and the Dutch East
India Company imported forty-three million pieces from the
beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the eight-
eenth century. The English, French, Swedish and Danish
Companies shipped another thirty million.75 At the beginning
of the eighteenth century porcelain accounted for 13.3 per cent
of East India Company imports, comparing reasonably with
silk at 19.0 per cent.76 Over this period, China shifted from a
more broadly based consumer goods trade to one based on silk
and tea. The axis of trade shifted from the south to the north,
and from the interior to the coast. This was accompanied by a
shift in population.77 The porcelain city Jingdezhen was rebuilt
in the later seventeenth century, and its factories and workshops
were reorganized and increased in size and productivity. Facto-
ries were departmentalized even down to a high degree of divi-
sion of labour in the decorating studios. Painters specialized in
particular motifs, Xowers, birds and animals or mountains and
rivers, and no one piece of porcelain was a personal creation.
The city was said to have a million people, eight hundred kilns
and three to four thousand factories.78

75
Finlay, ‘Pilgrim Art’, 168.
76
Data taken from Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia, appendix 5, table C.8;
H. B. Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635–1834,
5 vols. (Oxford, 1929), v, 168.
77
Gang Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities, 113; Kent Deng, ‘A Critical Survey of
Recent Research in Chinese Economic History’, Econ. Hist. Rev., liii (2000), 3–4,
13; Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 63–6, 138–9.
78
D. F. Lunsingh Scheurleer, Chinese Export Porcelain (London, 1974), 24–8.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 119
Nathaniel Torriano, Supercargo
We can follow the course of trade through the example of one
English merchant and supercargo, Nathaniel Torriano. The ex-
tensive accounts of the merchant family for the period between
1697 and 1736 were left in Chancery after an extended lawsuit.79
Torriano made two trips to Canton in 1718 and 1721–2, and
another two trips in 1727 and 1730–1. In 1721 and 1727 he was
Chief of Council at Canton. On most of these occasions he
travelled with a group of ships, though in 1727 he went with only
one ship, and acted frequently as chief supercargo. He died at
Batavia during the last voyage.80 As a supercargo, Torriano’s
role was to act as a manager of the enterprise, and as go-between
for the East India Company — to conduct all negotiations with
Chinese ofWcials and mandarins, and to contract with the Chinese
merchants. In return he received his share of a commission of
4–5 per cent on the cargoes bought in China, and considerable
private trade. This private, or personal, trade, encouraged by
the East India Companies as an incentive to ships’ ofWcers and
crews to undertake lengthy voyages and expose themselves to
dangers, allowed them to import a whole range of luxury goods,
including tea, silk, gold and silver. This was the main means of
importing a wide range of manufactured goods, including
lacquerware, fans, painted glass, paper, mats, clay images and
ornaments, as well as most decorative and armorial chinaware.81
On his last voyage in 1731, Torriano, like the other captains,
was allowed thirteen tons’ space on board for his private trade,
and permission for £2,500 to be invested in gold. The capital
he invested was £5,200, and had he lived to return to London,
he stood to realize a proWt of £7,000.82
If we follow the shipping records of Torriano’s Wrst voyage,
we enter a microcosm of the world of the luxury trade with
Asia. Torriano sailed on an East India Company ship from
Portsmouth in January 1718; as a supercargo he left a separate
reckoning for his private trade. He arrived in Batavia on 4 June,
where he bought consignments of calicoes, then sailed on to

79
See National Archives, London, Public Record OfWce (hereafter PRO),
Chancery Masters Exhibits, C 112.24, Torriano.
80
Morse, Chronicles, i, 165, 183, 201.
81
For more on this, see Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia, 287; C. L. Jorg, Porcelain
and the Dutch China Trade (The Hague, 1982), 102–8; G. A. Godden, Oriental Export
Market Porcelain and its InXuence on European Wares (London, 1979), 59, 78.
82
Morse, Chronicles, i, 207.
120 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

Canton to arrive on 20 August. He was soon in touch with the

celebrated Hong merchant Pinkey Chougua, and placed a
number of orders. On 18 November he paid £32. 12s. 2d. for
a total of 4,720 different coloured plates and punch bowls with
gold rims, cups and saucers, and chocolate cups. He went on
several shopping trips with Chougua in the next few days,
spending another £7. 14s. 8d. on the Wrst day on lacquered
ware for tea tables, hand tables, sweetmeat tables, and card
tables, and on silk and taffeta. This was followed by expendi-
ture over the next two days of another £50 on silk, embroidery
and tea, and another two thousand plates, jars and chocolate cups.
Torriano set sail for home on 22 January 1719, stopped at
the Cape on 29 March and St Helena on 18 April, Wnally arriv-
ing in London on 14 July. His accounts for the whole year
afterwards detail the individuals to whom he sold the lots of
china, silk and lacquerware. He sold his last lot of a dozen and
a half plates on 23 July 1720 to a Mrs Curtis, probably a china
dealer, for £1. 13s. Torriano’s story was one amongst hundreds
over the course of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth
centuries. Annual cargoes amounted to hundreds of thousands
of items, and six to eight hundred tons (Plate 8).83
Learning from Asia: Craft or Industry
In the case of porcelain, too, there was no direct copy of the
technology by Europe. There was much less access to know-
ledge than in the case of Indian calico printing. The porcelain
city, far inland from the Canton warehouses where the Europeans
traded, was, however, seen and described by Father François
Xavier d’Entrecolles in the early eighteenth century. His detailed
descriptions of the kilns and the work process passed into
Europe’s celebrated commercial dictionaries, Savary’s Diction-
naire universel de commerce, Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary,
and the Encyclopédie.84 Again, contemporary accounts in Europe

83
For a similarly detailed account of these voyages, see PRO, Chancery Masters
Exhibits, C 108.133, Records of the Bonita, Cooke Papers. Other accounts are set
out in Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 78, 95–104. A masterly account of
the Dutch trade can be found in Jorg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade, 102–9.
84
See the entries for ‘porcelain’ in Jacques Savary des Bruslons, Dictionnaire uni-
versel de commerce, d’histoire naturelle et des arts et métiers, new edn, 5 vols. (Copenhagen,
1759–65); Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary, ii; Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond
d’Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie: ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des
métiers (Paris, 1751–65).
8. Ginger jar, Chinese, early nineteenth century; height 37 cm. Ashmolean
Museum, cat. no. X5183. (By permission of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
122 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

addressed the concentration of production and the division of

labour, but associated this with tradition. Much of the work
was done within an enclosed area in the least frequented part of
Jingdezhen. ‘In this inclosure live and work an incredible
number of labourers, each of whom has his task set him. Before
a piece of porcelain is taken out of this to be carried to the
furnace, it passes through more than twenty hands, and that
without confusion’. Add to this the next stages, and ‘Some say,
that a piece of porcelain has passed through the hands of
seventy workmen’. This included extreme division of labour in
decorating:
The whole science of these, and of the Chinese painters in general is
founded upon no principles, and only consists in following a certain
beaten track, assisted with a narrow and conWned imagination; they
are ignorant of all the beautiful rules of this art: we must, however,
confess that they paint Xowers, animals and lanskips, which are
admired on the porcelain, as well as on screens, and the window
blinds of Wne gauze.85
No direct transfers were made of the porcelain production
processes, apart from the recipe. Little positive signiWcance was
accorded to the extensive division of labour. The Xexibility
allowed by the dragon kiln technology, with choices between
small-scale or high-capacity production, and the application of
a single Wring to the full range of pottery were bypassed, and
traditional European bottle ovens were adapted to the required
Wring at higher temperatures. But the porcelain recipe, long
kept secret by the Chinese, was pursued through all manner of
means from experimentation to alchemy. Experimentation with
the use of all kinds of frit, ash and bone continued even after
the discovery of the kaolin base for porcelain.86 The result was
a range of new stoneware, cream ware and bone china pro-
ducts. Production processes thus do not seem to have been per-

85
Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary, ii, s.v. ‘Porcelain’. Similar accounts of
Chinese porcelain production and criticism of the painting, especially the irregular-
ity of the designs, deviations from nature and monstrous human Wgures, can be
found in The Wonders of Nature and Art: Being an Account of Whatever Is Most Curi-
ous and Remarkable throughout the World, 3 vols. (London, 1750), iii, 158–63.
86
See Lorna Weatherill, The Growth of the Pottery Industry in England, 1660–1815
(London, 1986); Simeon Shaw, History of the Staffordshire Potteries and the Rise and
Progress of the Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain with References to Genuine Specimens
and Notices of Eminent Potters (London, 1900 [1829]), 90; Hilary Young, English
Porcelain, 1745–95: Its Makers, Design, Marketing and Consumption (London, 1999),
14–31.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 123
ceived as transferable; instead, existing western technologies
would have to be adapted, and new ones developed to produce
the coveted commodities.
The standard explanation for the failure to transfer Chinese
and Indian luxury technologies to Europe is lack of access. The
proverbial secrecy over the Chinese porcelain recipe and long
distance of the production centre from the Chinese coast, the
closure of Japan to the West, and the careful guarding of the
specialist skills of artisan communities in India all contributed
to the immobility of technologies. Certainly there is much to
this explanation. In India rare skills transmitted through family
and customary practices were not easily reproduced. Rulers
protected trade secrets which were only acquired by others
when they ‘seized and repatriated whole artisan communi-
ties’.87 European merchants in India and China were kept at
one remove from producers, and dealt through indigenous inter-
mediaries. But equally, by the eighteenth century, accounts by
Jesuit observers in China were widely available in Europe; the
nine-page account of porcelain in Postlethwayt’s Universal Dic-
tionary was one of its longest entries.
The high demand for Indian cloth in the eighteenth century
and conditions of labour scarcity in South India also limited the
power that rulers, merchants or company ofWcials could wield
over the labour and movements of Indian weavers. Other
explanations for the absence of technology transfer focus on
labour intensity and resource endowment. These explanations
were long used about technologies within Europe, yet such
techniques were transferred, and adapted to differing labour
endowments and to coal instead of wood-fuel environments.
The cases of Venetian glass and of Swedish and Walloon iron
are well-known examples among many.88 Another explanation
must lie in contemporary perceptions of Asian technologies.
Orientalist descriptions of low-paid labour and static techniques
were at odds with the admiration expressed for Asian commodities.
It is in the characteristics of the goods themselves that we can
Wnd clues about responses to the techniques. The qualitative

87
Bayly, ‘“Archaic” and “Modern” Globalization’, 57.
88
W. Patrick McCray, Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice: The Fragile Craft
(Aldershot, 1999); Chris Evans and Göran Ryden, ‘Kinship and the Transmission
of Skills: Bar Iron Production in Britain and Sweden, 1500–1860’, in Berg and
Bruland (eds.), Technological Revolutions in Europe.
124 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

features of Indian calicoes and Chinese and Japanese porcelain

were vital to their success. Too few economic historians look at
what qualitative features underlie the demand in the product
markets they study.89 These Asian goods were distinctively
coloured and patterned, Wnely textured or, in the case of porcel-
ain, both heat-resistant and translucent. They were also adapt-
able to the sense of recognition that made them objects of
beauty and desire not just in Asia but in Europe too.90 The
East India Companies seized an opportunity to develop luxury
and semi-luxury markets for the textiles, seeking out chintz
printed on Wne cloth to establish a fashion good, then sub-
sequently diversifying to broader qualities.91 They did the same
with porcelain, developing middle-class and gentry markets
for tea ware, dinner services and armorial ware. Associating
these commodities with taste and fashion was crucial to these
markets.92

89
I survey discussion in economic theory of the impact of quality on demand in
my ‘From Imitation to Invention: Creating Commodities in Eighteenth-Century
England’, Econ. Hist. Rev., lv (2002). For recent, though relatively rare, treatments
among economic historians of quality change, see P. C. Reynard, ‘Manufacturing
Quality in the Pre-Industrial Age: Finding Value in Diversity’, Econ. Hist. Rev., liii
(2000), and Roy Church, ‘New Perspectives on the History of Products, Firms,
Marketing, and Consumers in Britain and the United States since the Mid-
Nineteenth Century’, Econ. Hist. Rev., lii (1999). For an earlier statement of the
signiWcance of quality differences for cotton prices, see S. D. Chapman, ‘Quality
vs. Quantity in the Industrial Revolution: The Case of Textile Printing’, Northern
Hist., xxi (1985).
90
On the aesthetic recognition of and taste for porcelain in Europe, see R. A.
Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1993),
and his ‘The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica’, in
Renaissance Quart., xlii (1989); Finlay, ‘Pilgrim Art’, 169–71.
91
Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, 14–17; John Irwin, ‘Indian Textile Trade in the
Seventeenth Century’, in Irwin and Schwartz, Studies in Indo-European Textile History,
15–18, 36–8, 46–7; Young, English Porcelain, 10–12.
92
During the eighteenth century English families commissioned four thousand
dinner services with coats of arms; these were priced at ten times those of
unmarked settings. Finlay, ‘Pilgrim Art’, 171, and D. S. Howard, Chinese Armorial
Porcelain (London, 1974). On cultural settings for the use of this porcelain, see
Mary W. Helms, ‘Essay on Objects: Interpretations of Distance Made Tangible’, in
S. B. Schwartz, Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and ReXecting on the
Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge,
1994); Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities
and Meaning of Table Manners (New York, 1991); Lorna Weatherill, Consumer
Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London, 1988), 157–9; Sarah
Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics (Manchester, 1999); Elizabeth Kowaleski-
Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century
(New York, 1997), 19–72.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 125
Imitation
As we have seen, China and Japan were especially equipped to
provide the consumer ware for this market. These were long-
standing models of highly urbanized commercial societies, with
their own domestic consumer cultures, as well as an extensive
Asian maritime trade. Europe’s commercial writers were fascin-
ated by the technical superiority and commercial success of
Asian arts and manufactures. What they admired above all,
however, were commodities which reXected high levels of
workmanship. Malachy Postlethwayt remarked in his entry on
‘ArtiWcer, or Artisan, or Mechanic’:
Were the Chinese or the East Indians, in general, to be deprived of their
ingenious artiWcers, or, if you please, manufacturers they would, very
probably, degenerate into the like savage dispositions with the wildest
Africans, or American Indians. And this, we may presume, would prove
the case also among the Europeans.93
He urged handling and studying the imports from the weavers
of Bengal, the Japanese lacquer makers and indigo dyers and
Chinese and Japanese porcelains. Their linen cloth was ‘of such
Wneness, that very long and broad pieces of it may easily be
drawn through a small ring’. The Japanese lacca was
so Wne and curious, that whereas in this country, one may buy an ordin-
ary small box for three or four crowns; one of the same size, when made
in Japan of exquisite lacca, will sell for more than eighty crowns. The
colours wherewith they dye their stuffs never fade: I have seen one of
them . . . extracted out of a Xower like to saffron, and one pound of it
costs an incredible price.
He thus advised careful observation of Asian imports: ‘in what-
ever mechanical or manufactured arts other nations may excel
Great Britain, our artists should be upon the watch, not only to
imitate, but surpass, if possible . . . Those which are imported,
and which they can see, handle and minutely examine, they are
most like to imitate or excel’.94

93
Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary, i, s.v. ‘ArtiWcer, or Artisan, or Mechanic’.
94
Ibid., s.v. ‘Mechanical Arts’. Similar remarks were made by French commentators
on the role of the Jesuit missions as conduits of technology from East to West.
M. Poivre responded to Father Cœurdoux thus: ‘it should be the desire of our trav-
ellers, in quitting their country, not to be forgetful that there are no people who are
not in possession of some particular art, the knowledge of which would be useful
to Europe . . . those who work amongst the Chinese missions are the only travellers
who have given an example of work so useful. The pains they have taken to discover
the methods of the Chinese workers of porcelain, the cultivation of the mulberry and
(cont. on p. 126)
126 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

Similar admiration was expressed in other encyclopedias and

dictionaries for the ingenuity of the peoples of the East Indies.
Indian chintzes and calicoes, both painted and printed, were
derived from the ability of the people ‘to imitate a pattern or
copy a Picture at Wrst sight, so that it will be hard to distinguish
the copy from the original’. Likewise they were praised for
long-lasting colours, inlaying ivory, woodwork and sculptures,
canes and cases of tortoiseshell, ‘and an abundance of other
pretty toys’. There were also Chinese colours and varnishes,
inks and paper ‘in vain attempted to be imitated in Europe’,
silks ‘more substantial and more skilfully and more durably
wrought and decorated’ than those made in Europe, as well as
Japanese cabinets and Wne lacquers praised for their high crafts-
manship.95 Manufacturing consumer goods in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Europe was perceived to be about
learning from Asia. Admiration for Asian craftsmanship was
followed, however, not by a direct process of copying, but by a
more subtle process of ‘imitation’.
The key response to these commodities in Europe was a pro-
cess of product innovation and invention through imitation.
Asian commodities were especially admired as luxuries, not just
because of quality or rarity, but because of their status as imita-
tive commodities.96 Their value derived not from their materials,
but from the craftsmanship that so effectively replicated the
natural world — in the case of printed calicoes, the vividly imi-
tated European and exotic Xowers and gardens. In the case of
(n. 94 cont.)
the nurture of the silk worm, have merited the thanks of all their countrymen’. And
Savary commented on the French missions in his Dictionnaire universel de commerce:
‘They have done much to promote the trade of France; and this work being done
under the disguise of religion, is the less perceptible, thereby enabling France to
advance her trade and increase her possessions at the expense of those of Great
Britain’. Cited in George P. Baker, Calico Painting and Printing in the East Indies in
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1921), 17.
95
Wonders of Nature and Art, iii, 82–3, 144–7, 153–8; A New and Complete Dic-
tionary of Arts and Sciences; Comprehending all the Branches of Useful Knowledge . . . By
a Society of Gentlemen (London, 1754–5), 2496–2500.
96
See Adam Smith’s discussion of imitation as an aesthetic quality in Neil De
Marchi, ‘Adam Smith’s Accommodation of “Altogether Endless Desires”’, in
Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in
Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester, 1999); also see Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van
Miegroet, ‘Ingenuity, Preference and the Pricing of Pictures: The Smith–Reynolds
Connection’, in De Marchi and Goodwin (eds.), Economic Engagements with Art.
On imitation as an incentive to product innovation and invention, see my ‘From
Imitation to Invention’.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 127
porcelain, craftsmanship mimicked silver.97 The European
mimesis, in turn, was not to produce a direct import substitute,
a lesser or perhaps more expensive version of the original, but
to turn that imitation into product innovation. In the case of
calicoes, Dutch and English Xower paintings and prints were
substituted for Persian Decani miniatures, and fashion dress
fabrics for tent hangings.98 Japanese lacquerware imported as
wooden furniture and boxes became British japanning applied
to all sorts of surfaces from papier mâché to tinware and to all
manner of goods. Britain’s successful transfer of chinaware was
not another porcelain, but Wne earthenware and cream ware.
While porcelain works proliferated across Europe’s court cities
once the recipe was discovered, these were royal manufactories
and their products high luxuries. Britain’s own porcelain
works, while more diverse in their output, were still set within
the framework of the luxury trades. They imitated oriental por-
celain and followed rococo designs. Staffordshire earthenware,
by contrast, made its success on an imitative material and dis-
tinctive design. Wedgwood’s and the Staffordshire potters’
earthenware substitute for porcelain was thus set in a design
context of imitating Greek earthenware and classical forms.
His new fashion commodity in vase ware imitated the precious
stones, porphyries, marbles and gems of the ancient world.99
Matthew Boulton’s and the Birmingham toymakers’ alloys and
impressive array of mechanical devices for cutting, turning,
stamping, pressing and printing metals produced a parallel
domestic material culture in metal ornament.100 Plates 9 and 10

97
Mukerji, From Graven Images; Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge,
1993), 187–90, 213–15; Beverly Lemire, ‘Domesticating the Exotic: Floral Culture
and the East India Calico Trade with England, c.1600–1800’, Textile: The Journal
of Cloth and Culture, i (2003); Jessica Rawson, ‘Central Asian Silver and its InXuence
on Chinese Ceramics’, Bull. Asia Inst., v (1991); Jessica Rawson, Ancient China: Art
and Archaeology (London, 1980).
98
John Irwin and Margaret Hall, Indian Painted and Printed Fabrics (Ahmedabad,
1971), 22–5, 36–42.
99
Young, English Porcelain; Michael Vickers and D. Gill, Artful Crafts: Ancient
Greek Silverware and Pottery (Oxford, 1994); Michael Vickers, ‘Value and Simpli-
city: Eighteenth-Century Taste and the Study of Greek Vases’, Past and Present, no.
116 (Aug. 1987).
100
Maxine Berg, ‘Product Innovation in Core Consumer Industries’, in Berg and
Bruland (eds.), Technological Revolutions in Europe, and ‘Inventors of the World of
Goods’, in Kristine Bruland and Patrick O’Brien (eds.), From Family Firms to Cor-
porate Capitalism (Oxford, 1998); Helen Clifford, ‘Concepts of Invention, Identity
(cont. on p. 128)
128 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

9. Silver mounted teapot, red stoneware, Chinese, c.1720; height 19.1 cm. From
David S. Howard, A Tale of Three Cities: Canton, Shanghai & Hong Kong: Three
Centuries of Sino-British Trade in the Decorative Arts (exhibition catalogue, 1997).
(By permission of Sotheby’s, London)

illustrate a Chinese luxury import and a new domestic luxury

product. Wedgwood’s teapot substitutes for the Chinese import,
but draws on classical design. The black basalt earthenware is
not just a copy of Etruscan prototypes, but connects back to
the appeal of the red stoneware teapot.
These European and especially British new consumer goods
tapped into an aesthetic principle behind consumer demand
(n. 100 cont.)
and Imitation in the London and Provincial Metal-Working Trades, 1750–1800’, Jl
Design Hist., xii (1999). On Adam Smith’s views of these innovations in metal wares,
especially in Birmingham and ShefWeld, see Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence,
ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978 [1762–3, 1766]), 336;
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. McFie
(Oxford, 1976 [1759]), bk IV, ch. 1, 180, 183; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (London, 1776), i, bk I, ch. xi, 260.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 129

10. Teapot (the spout broken and ground down) and cover, black basalt, with
encaustic decoration in blue and white; mark ‘Wedgwood & Bentley’ impressed
1769–80; height 14.7 cm. V&A Museum, W.310-1867. (By permission of the
V&A Picture Library)

previously satisWed by Asia’s manufactured products. They

were goods marked by variety and novelty, and in their
‘creative imitation’ they brought taste and distinction to their
middling-class consumers. These goods were not, however,
individual craft products. Part of their attraction was the
modernity of their production processes: the use of different
raw materials and sources of energy such as coal, and sophisti-
cated systems of division of labour and mechanization. We
have seen that Chinese and Indian goods were also produced
under systems of extensive division of labour, and in some
cases deployed large-scale concentrated production processes,
though these were not the features of their production processes
130 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

generally conveyed to the West. Instead, sold as luxuries, they

were represented as craft products. Yet the success story
behind the scale and diversity of Asian imports into Europe was
actually one of technologies based on imitative principles.
Large-scale production and extensive division of labour relied
on modularity, standardization and mechanical replication,
interchangeable parts, and assembly of objects from these
parts. These are production systems to be found in the making
of bronze ritual vessels in the China of the twelfth century BC,
in the Xi’an terracotta army of the second century BC, and in
porcelain production from the fourth and third millennia BC.
The dragon kilns were the ultimate Xexible technology. Even
the decorating processes on Chinese export porcelain applied a
modular system of mixing and matching standardized motifs.101
Paradoxically, in imitating Asian consumer goods, perceived
in Europe as luxuries, the British achieved what was actually an
Asian success story — new, quality, semi-luxury consumer
goods produced with advanced industrial techniques. But the
British techniques, based on the use of coal and a whole range
of substitute ‘indigenous’ materials and alloys, were distinctive,
and the goods were new products. These inventions and products
were Europe’s, and especially Britain’s, new consumer goods.
They were the modern luxuries praised by such enlightened
economic writers as Montesquieu, Hume and Smith. In felicitous
terms, Hume, in his essay ‘Of Commerce’ of 1752, explained
the connections:
If we consult history, we shall Wnd, that in most nations foreign trade
has preceded any reWnement in home manufactures, and given birth to
domestic luxury . . . Thus men become acquainted with the pleasures of
luxury, and the proWts of commerce; and their delicacy and industry being
once awakened, carry them on to further improvements in every branch
of domestic as well as foreign trade; and this perhaps is the chief advantage
which arises from a commerce with strangers. It rouses men from their
indolence; and, presenting the gayer and more opulent part of the
nation with objects of luxury which they never before dreamed of, raises
in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors
enjoyed . . . Imitation soon diffuses all those arts, while domestic manu-
facturers emulate the foreign in their improvements, and work up every
home commodity to the utmost perfection of which it is susceptible.
Their own steel and iron, in such laborious hands, become equal to the
gold and rubies of the Indies.102

101
Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things.
102
David Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and
Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), 264.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 131
David Hume’s remarkable insight into the processes of learn-
ing from trade identiWed the role of foreign luxury in awakening
the imagination, and the effect of imitation of foreign arts in
fostering the technological improvement and reWnement of
domestic goods. Thus the gold and rubies of the Indies Wnd
their British parallel in the possibilities and riches represented
by the formerly mundane steel and iron. Britain’s new crucible-
cast steel, based on processes of heating with coked coal and
Wreclay crucibles, relied on the lateral transfer of long-standing
tacit knowledge in the working of Wreclay for bricks, glass fur-
naces and earthenware kilns. Knowledge gained in consumer-
goods production, especially of glass and earthenware, made a
vital contribution to Britain’s advantage in iron and steel pro-
duction. Iron and steel were the superior materials of machinery,
tools and weapons, but equally they were a new ‘gold and
rubies’, the material of the Wnest metal ornament and jewellery,
of watch and clock springs and precision instruments.103
We have seen how British consumer goods achieved their
success on principles of imitation in technology, design and
marketing. But imitation was much more than an aesthetic
characteristic of consumer demand: it was a stated national
goal. A key aim of many of the patents taken out for invention
and projects to produce new consumer goods in Britain over the
period was stated to be the ‘imitation’ of French and Chinese
goods. And indeed the goal in 1754 of the Society of Arts,
Manufactures and Commerce, responsible since the mid eight-
eenth century for providing project premiums as an alternative
to patent registration, was ‘to improve design, to invent British
luxuries and to discover new uses for indigenous and British
colonial raw materials’. Patria provided Europeans, Bayly argues,
with a great advantage over Asia.104 State power was deployed
to block the import of Indian calicoes, and heavy import duties
were imposed on lacquerware and porcelain. Inventors declared
their aim to be to head off French, Chinese and Indian imports.
But we can take this much further. British merchants also

103
J. R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in
the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, 1998), 205–21; see also Berg, ‘Product Innova-
tion in Core Consumer Industries’.
104
Bayly, ‘South Asia and the “Great Divergence”’, 100.
132 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

focused on access to imports as the key to a new pivotal role for

Britain in the global economy.

III
EMPIRE AND BRITISH CONSUMER GOODS

The Americas
The process of inventing new consumer goods to substitute for
Asian luxuries was not just about connections between Europe
and Asia, but included Africa and the Americas. The focus of
much of this historical literature on trade, imperialism and
industrialization has also been on exports.105 The point of
European colonial systems and the slave trade in the New
World, it is argued, was to create a land-intensive periphery to
enable Europe to exchange a constantly increasing volume of
manufactured exports for raw materials, colonial groceries and
foodstuffs.106 But economic indicators point to a much greater
signiWcance for Britain of her West Indian and North American
colonies for both exports and imports. Coercive slave econo-
mies in the Americas could be relied on for the raw materials
needed by ‘core’ economies.107 Imports from Asia to Britain
in the Wrst half of the eighteenth century were worth less than
half the value of those from the Americas, and exports from
Britain to Asia were only worth a quarter of those going to
the Americas.108 The goals which incorporated West Africa,
the Caribbean and North America into the production and
distribution of global luxury were about merchants’ search for
imports — for manufactured goods and colonial groceries, but
also for dyestuffs for the woollen and linen industries, for high-
grade iron and other metals for metalworkers, for clays and
kaolin for potters, for potash, for sulphuric acid for glassmaking,

105
O’Brien, ‘Imperialism and the Rise and Decline of the British Economy’, esp.
52–60; Engerman, ‘Mercantilism and Overseas Trade’; François Crouzet, ‘Toward
an Export Economy: British Exports during the Industrial Revolution’, Explorations
in Econ. Hist., xvii (1980), esp. 77–92.
106
There is an extended discussion of this in Pomeranz, Great Divergence, ch. 6.
107
Ibid., p. 20.
108
P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century, iii, Britain
and India’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 6th ser., x (2000), 3; Linda Colley, Britons: For-
ging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), 68–71.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 133
bleaching and soap production, and for Xax and cotton. Britain
ran her commercial empire, and supervised its trade through
Acts of Trade and Navigation, and the Board of Trade from
1696. Free-trade areas and bounties were established, and
these provided new opportunities for developing British con-
sumer goods.109
The role of trade and empire in British merchants’ perceptions
of the nation’s economic power can be compared with earlier
European responses to world trade. Britain’s perceptions of its
relation to France and to the East bore parallels to France’s
perception of Dutch economic power in the mid seventeenth
century. The Dutch Republic was then perceived to be ‘le
magasin général’, notable for cheap freightage and low interest, as
a storehouse of world commodities and a showcase of advanced
industrial techniques.110 The British in the early to mid eight-
eenth century were seeking to be this centre point of global
economic power. In the 1760s, in the wake of British success in
the Seven Years War which left her with new colonial territories
from India and West Africa to North America and the Carib-
bean, British public opinion conceived of a homogenizing
imperialist vision, ‘imparting even to the most uncultivated of
our species, the happiness of Britons’.111 Colonists in back-
country America could see themselves as ‘English people who
happened to live in the provinces’. They could consume the same
wide range of British and oriental commodities as could those
who shopped with the grocer Abraham Dent of Westmorland,
with his bountiful stock of rice, raisins, vinegar, oil, brandy and
numerous other goods from the Mediterranean, the Baltic,
India, the Americas and the Caribbean.112

109
Jacob Price, ‘The Imperial Economy, 1700–1776’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The
Oxford History of the British Empire, ii, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), espe-
cially the points made on p. 80 on the differences in priorities between merchants and
politicians.
110
Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806
(Oxford, 1995), 307–18.
111
Gentleman’s Mag., xxxiii (1763), 291, cited in Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the
People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1998), 204.
112
T. H. Breen, ‘“Baubles of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of
the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 119 (May 1988), 103; David Hancock,
Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Com-
munity, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 30–1; Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna Mui,
Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England (Toronto, 1989); Simon Smith,
(cont. on p. 134)
134 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

Likewise import substitution was seen to take place within

Britain and her territories. Colonial territories would provide
sources of exotic raw materials alternative to those formerly
brought from the East, and places of experimentation in develop-
ing the materials for new British consumer and luxury goods.
These sources were now perceived to be indigenous to a wider
Britain which included far-Xung territories with different cli-
mates, soils and resources. This was a time to deploy exotic raw
materials deriving from Canada and the West Indies to West
Africa in new products and design styles; they provided the
variety and novelty to be joined to imitation.113 Postlethwayt put
it thus: ‘our colony trade is our own trade, under our own conduct
and control . . . why may not we become sellers of all North
American, as well as our island productions, to other nations?’114
The point of this strategy was to engage global trade policies
in contributing to the needs of British manufacturing. It did
not rely on individual monopolies and the conXicts these caused
with other interest groups. This is illustrated by the opposition
of British manufacturers later in the century to the industrial
policies of the East India Company. The Company was
condemned by some producers for extending its portfolio from
commercial to industrial activity:
whether they will print their own callicoes; make their own gunpowder;
wind, spin and weave, their own cottons; bake and reWne their own
sugars; or even manufacture those articles fabricated from our staple
domestic produce, and which, by their charter, they are obligated to
export. A calamitous alternative would then be the lot of the persons
who are now engaged in such manufactures: unable to trade to India, or
to cope in this country with the gigantic strides of a manufacturing
East-India Company, they must either abandon their pursuits, or
be degraded into dependants on the all-sweeping monopolists by whom
they are injured.115
(n. 112 cont.)
‘“A Town Shaped Out for Trade”: Kendal’s Integration into Commercial Networks,
1675–1731’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle
economie europee, secc. XIII–XVIII (Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica
‘F. Datini’, Atti delle settimane di studio e altri convegni, xxxii, Florence, 2001).
113
Price, ‘Imperial Economy’, 80–6; Matthew Craske, ‘Plan and Control:
Design and the Competitive Spirit in Early and Mid-Eighteenth Century England’,
Jl Design Hist., xii (1999). For the role of the Seven Years War, the primacy of colo-
nial over Continental campaigns and the imperial vision of politics, see Wilson,
Sense of the People, 190–205.
114
Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 3rd
edn, 2 vols. (London, 1766), i, p. xxxi.
115
Considerations on the Attempt of the East-India Company to Become Manufac-
turers in Great Britain (London, 1796), 33.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 135
The East India Company’s hold on India was increasingly seen as
precarious in the face of the hostility of ‘war-like princes’, and the
Company’s projects were viewed as the schemes of speculators.116
The West Indies, Canada and the American colonies were
perceived differently.
The West Indies were seen as a laboratory for experimen-
tation in the production of all manner of eastern primary
products — not just cacao and coffee, the colonial groceries we
usually associate with the Caribbean, but also tea, black pepper,
rhubarb and other medicines. Success would mean that tea,
coffee and chocolate, produced on colonial plantations, would
no longer be imported luxuries, but ‘indigenous’ consumer goods.
Though still ‘imported’ in the national accounts, their terms
were more favourable and British control over their production
and mercantile networks more certain.117
In like manner the projectors to the Society of Arts, Manu-
factures and Commerce investigated a whole range of possibili-
ties, such as producing raw silk in the southern American
colonies to provide an alternative to imports from Turkey, Italy
and Persia.118 The Society was organized into six standing
committees, one of which was ‘British Colonies and Trade’.
This committee spread information about the Americas, as well as
promoting machines, crops and projects that might be developed
there.119
A priority of the Society was the making of the East in the
West, and plans to develop the ‘latent resources’ of the Americas
to substitute for eastern materials: ‘The obtaining the products
of the East and the transporting them in a growing state to the
West Indies has ever been an object of consideration with the
Society’.120 Letters to the Society going back to the mid 1750s
116
Ibid., 3–6, 26.
117
Price, ‘Imperial Economy’, 86.
118
D. G. C. Allan, William Shipley: Founder of the Royal Society of Arts (London,
1968); D. G. C. Allan and J. L. Abbott (eds.), The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts & Sciences:
Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts
(Athens, Ga., and London, 1992), 91–119; Premiums Offered by the Society Instituted
at London, for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London,
1768–75); Transactions of the Society Instituted at London for the Encouragement of
Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, with the Premiums Offered in the Year 1783, i
(London, 1783), 20.
119
Hancock, Citizens of the World, 35.
120
Transactions of the Society Instituted at London for the Encouragement of Arts,
Manufactures and Commerce, with the Premiums Offered in the Year 1786, iv (London,
1786), 217–18.
136 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

from projectors, inventors, planters, commercial writers and

statesmen in the American and Caribbean colonies connected
the development of local resources to British substitutes for
eastern or European imports. Edmund Quincy wrote to the
Society in 1765: ‘the various soils and climates of the American
Colonies will yield upon due encouragement and cultivation
almost every principal commodity at present imported from
foreigners, either for necessity, convenience or luxury’.121
These perspectives continued beyond the American Revolu-
tion. William Tatham wrote to the Society in 1802 to endorse
Cantillon’s doctrine that nations became great by foreign com-
merce, and to urge conciliation with America:
then will it apply with peculiar force to the interest of this insulated
country that there are no points of human economy which so much
concern them as the expansion of that commerce by which they thrive;
and the discovery of those latent resources which multiply the means
and material that increase their arts and manufactures and stimulate the
industry of the people.122
The Committee on British Colonies and Trade offered pre-
miums for the development of colonial cotton and indigo, and
of barilla for use in the manufacture of soda, soap and glass;
others were offered for the development of viticulture and wine
production, and for the cultivation of hemp, olive and cinnamon
trees. The successive attempts to establish a source of British
indigo, Wrst in the Caribbean and subsequently in South Carolina,
are a clear example of this strategy.123 A rich correspondence
detailed the difWculties, successes and failures of attempting to
introduce mulberry trees, silkworms and silk manufacture into
South Carolina, Connecticut and New England; the successive
efforts to propagate a substitute for cochineal in Jamaica, and
numerous other attempts at dyestuffs; and the projects for West
India cotton in Tobago. The corresponding Barbados Society of
Arts, Manufactures and Commerce declared its purpose to be to
‘Wnd a solution to the problem of the island’s over dependence
121
Letter from Edmund Quincy on the improvement of the colonies in the
Americas, 30 June 1765, Colonial Correspondence of the Society of Arts, Manu-
factures and Commerce, Royal Society of Arts, London (hereafter RSA), PR.GE/
110/19/10.
122
William Tatham, ‘Essay on the Extension of Commerce and the Culture of
Latent Resources in America’ (handwritten manuscript, London, 26 Mar. 1802),
RSA, PR.MC/104/10/85.
123
Premiums Offered by the Society Instituted at London; Price, ‘Imperial Econ-
omy’, 80.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 137
on sugar crops and the idleness and sloth of the white popula-
tion’. Proposals included coffee and cacao cultivation, a paper
manufacture, hemp, Xax and cotton, and dyestuffs ‘similar to
that used in India or China’.124
Africa
Global reach in the development of a British consumer good to
substitute for an Indian luxury extended to tapping into
resources in Africa. Here the example is provided by calico
printing, and the resources were not only slaves, but the gum of
the acacia tree. That resource provided a global link between
Africa and the British cotton industry that long pre-dated the
development (though not the idea) of cotton plantations in the
Americas. This example can be provided through the story of
Samuel Touchet, speculator and promoter with a vision.
Touchet, hailing from a family of Manchester cotton mer-
chants and manufacturers, had Wnancial interests in cotton
from the Levant, linen yarn from Europe, and the African slave
trade, as well as shipping interests, insurance brokerage and
other speculations. Touchet in the mid 1740s saw where the
future lay, and promoted an elaborate scheme to monopolize
the supply of raw cotton, to Wnance and control the mechaniza-
tion of cotton spinning, and to monopolize the source of a key
raw material in calico printing — Senegal gum.125 The Wrst
two parts of his scheme, controlling raw cotton supplies and
controlling mechanized spinning, failed. In Birmingham, the
centre not only of so much of the product innovation of the
time, but of mechanical invention of all types, Touchet

124
Joshua Steele to the Society, 14 July 1781, RSA, PR.M/104/10/200; and 6
Dec. 1786, RSA, PR.MC/104/10/71.
125
Samuel Touchet’s story is told in A. P. Wadsworth and Julia de Lacy Mann,
The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600–1780 (Manchester, 1931), 156–7,
244–7, 444. For more recent discussion of the role of Senegal gum in the European
cotton industry, see Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution, 396–401. Some
background on the climate of ‘projecting’, speculation and venture capitalism
around eighteenth-century invention may be gathered from Christine MacLeod,
Inventing the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1988), chs. 6 and 7, and her ‘The
1690s Patent Boom: Invention or Stock-Jobbing?’, Econ. Hist. Rev., xxxix (1986);
see also Inikori’s example of a later speculator in gum, Miles Nightingale, a
London dry-salter: Africans and the Industrial Revolution, 400. See Liliane Hilaire-
Pérez, L’Invention technique au siècle des lumières (Paris, 2000) for some discussion
of speculation and invention in France. Much remains to be done linking the
activities of speculators such as Touchet.
138 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

Wnanced Wyatt and Paul, who were experimenting in the

mechanization of roller spinning throughout the later 1740s
and 1750s. The mill and the machine ultimately failed, only to
be picked up again, copied and commercialized more effec-
tively by Richard Arkwright, so-called inventor of the spinning
frame, ten years later.
The third arm of Touchet’s strategy was control of the Senegal
gum trade. The acacia trees of the Senegambia, then under the
control of the French, were in the eighteenth century perceived
to be the only source of this vital component for the European
papermaking and textile printing trades.126 The gum forests
were exploited by desert merchants relying on slave labour for
extraction and for transportation in desert caravans. The
Compagnie des Indes shipped more than one thousand tons of
it in 1743 and again in 1746, and prices rose sharply over the
period from the 1740s to the 1820s to Wfteen times the price
prevailing in the early eighteenth century. There was a percep-
tion that the high price of French gum was causing a crisis in
the British textile industry. Indeed there were Orders in Coun-
cil and a petition of calico printers to the House of Commons
in 1751 and 1752, and corresponding discussions of this in the
Foreign Affairs Ministry in France.127 Control of Senegal gum
would provide Touchet with the key to command of the calico
printing industry, and with this the command of the early British
cotton trade.128
The trade in Senegal gum was also part of a complex global
trade on the African coast involving slaves, gold, Indian cotton,
American tobacco and French brandy. But next to slaves it was
the gum trade from this part of the West African coast which
yielded the highest trade value to both the British and the

126
For more on the pivotal role of calico printing in the development of the British
and French cotton industries, see S. D. Chapman and Serge Chassagne, European
Textile Printers in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1981).
127
See Journal of the House of Commons, xxvi (1752), 376, 441–4, and Papers of
the Board of Trade, Dd.63, both cited in Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton Trade and
Industrial Lancashire, 245; André Delcourt, La France et les établissements français au
Sénégal entre 1713 et 1763: la Compagnie des Indes et le Sénégal: la guerre de la gomme
(Dakar, 1952), 343–4.
128
P. D. Curtin, Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of
the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975), 109–21, 215–17, 320–33; P. D. Curtin, The Rise
and Fall of the Plantation Complex (Cambridge, 1990), 113–28; Delcourt, La France
et les établissements français, 343–5; Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic
Slave Trade, trans. Ayi Kwei Armah (Cambridge, 1998), 71–80.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 139
French.129 Slaves were also in bountiful supply as famine and
harvest failure in the region drove indigenous peoples to the
coast.130 Senegal was a special African preserve of the Compagnie
des Indes after it renounced its monopoly on the entire French
slave trade in 1725. The supply of slaves was fostered, however,
not just by ecological factors, but by African consumerism, gen-
erated by stockpiles of enticing European, Asian and American
imports offered with credit and bribes to local elites. Slaves
as well as gum were exchanged for highly valued European
merchandise; but markets for European products were highly
differentiated between staples, ‘high technology’ manufactures
and luxury goods. Where gum might be traded by desert warriors
for Wnished metal goods, paper, powder, shot, trade beads, Indian
guinée cloth and other consumer manufactures, slaves were the
foreign exchange for the most expensive and valuable imports
such as guns, pistols, luxury cloth and furnishings.131 Slaves
were also traded between English and French merchants, by
private agreement after 1752 with the Royal African Company,
in exchange for gum for the English market.132 The special
place of the Senegambia and its trade in gum and slaves placed it
at the interface between trade with Asia, Europe and the West
Indies. Senegal was set on the major trading route to the West
Indies, on a route via Madeira, the Azores and Cape Verde
islands that could be navigated at all times of the year, with ships
going on to the West Indies or returning directly to Europe.133
The outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1756 provided
Touchet with his opportunity, and with the secret support of
Pitt, he outWtted Wve of his own armed vessels at the cost of
£10,200, joined up with several of the king’s vessels in the
Canaries, and attacked and took the French posts of Gorée and
Saint-Louis in Senegambia. He looked forward to a monopoly
of many years on the trade from the region in gum, slaves,

129
Curtin, Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa, 327. See the account of the
gum trade, describing its strategic signiWcance to the French, English, Dutch and
Portuguese, in Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary, 2nd edn, i, s.v. ‘Gum’.
130
J. F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River
Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge, 1993), 60–1; Curtin, Economic Change in Pre-
Colonial Africa, 109–11; James L. Webb, Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic
Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850 (Madison, 1995).
131
Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce, 62–3, 68–74.
132
Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 245.
133
Ibid., 65–6, 71–7.
140 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

ivory, gold and wax. He also saw the opportunity of pursuing

the attempts, thus far unsuccessful, of British cotton merchants
to supplant Indian guinée cloth in African markets. But this was
not to be — he was undermined by the interests of the Royal
African Company, and the peace settlement of 1763 which
ceded the post at Gorée to the French. The British held on to
Saint-Louis and the Senegal valley until 1783, when Senegal
was returned to France.134 Touchet had pursued an outdated
strategy of projector and speculator; he was perceived as a
monopolist now overtaken by a new international system of free
trading zones, tariff incentives and the reciprocal arrangements
conducted by state powers. The calico-printing interests were
said to have preferred their chances on the French market to
those with an English monopolist. This global Wnancial schemer
who quite correctly predicted the meteoric rise of a cotton
industry based on the consumer demand for printed calicoes
was by 1770 reported by Horace Walpole to be a ‘broken
merchant of a very bad character’.135
Touchet’s case illustrates a widespread perception of the role
of colonial territories and British trading monopolies within a
global economy. These territories were perceived as part of a
broad-fronted initiative to bypass eastern luxury imports, and
to produce not just import substitutes, but new goods attractive
to international as well as domestic markets. The colonies were
not just an aspect of European power politics; they were per-
ceived at the time to form an integral part of a process of
modernization, import substitution, consumer goods provision,

134
See Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary, 2nd and 3rd edns, i, s.v. ‘Gum’. The
details of the French and British rivalry over the Senegambia and the gum trade,
especially from the 1730s to the 1750s, are set out in Delcourt, La France et les éta-
blissements français, 324–46. On the part played by Touchet, see Wadsworth and
Mann, Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 245. On the cotton manufacture and
the African trade, see ibid., 118, 127, 158. See especially the discussion of the infer-
ior dyes in English cottons, and the precise qualities demanded by African mer-
chants. See also Curtin, Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa, 319–21; Barry,
Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 73. For a recent discussion, see Inikori,
Africans and the Industrial Revolution, 397–402.
135
Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 145–61, 247.
The Royal African Company entertained hopes of selling British cotton goods to
Africa, but consumer preferences remained highly biased in favour of a range of
very speciWc, differentiated Indian cottons: the indigo-dyed guinée; the niconees, a
striped calico from Broach and Baroda; and tapseals, a mixed silk and cotton cloth
woven in Cambay and Ahmadabad. See Curtin, Economic Change in Pre-Colonial
Africa, 319–20.
 IN PURSUIT OF LUXURY 141
and what would later come to be perceived as industrialization.
The extension of Britain’s geographical boundaries was about
making her luxuries indigenous, and not ‘oriental’. They would
thus be ‘tamed’, made modern and domestic. New products
would be made with different raw materials, sourced in Britain
and her territories, especially in North America and the
Caribbean, and the development of new technologies would
allow the ‘imitation’ of oriental luxuries.

IV
CONCLUSION
Jan de Vries identiWed in household behaviour the key connec-
tion between consumption and production that had previously
eluded those seeking the wider economic impact of consumer
society. That connection was also to be found in the global lux-
ury goods trade. Imports of manufactured luxury and fashion
goods prompted a process of product innovation leading to
industrialization. That innovation was founded in a trade in
goods, but not in a transfer of knowledge: cultural represen-
tations prevailed over integration of technologies. An import
trade in luxury goods from China and India to Europe in the
later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provoked attempts
to ‘imitate’ goods made in the advanced consumer societies of
Asia, and to do so through the adaptation of European and
especially British productive techniques and resources. This
process of ‘making the East in the West’ generated a whole
range of different consumer products: British new consumer
goods. Imports in a global luxury trade, imitative invention
provoked by these, and a new geographical extension of the
frontiers of ‘indigenous’ resources accessed through colonies
provided a crucial connection between consumption and pro-
duction in the origins of industrialization.
Recent generations of historians of British and European
industrialization have argued that the origins of industrializa-
tion were to be found in western exceptionalism. Placing western
industrial development within a global consumer perspective
opens new questions on interconnections between East and
West, and the particular part played by empire at this early
stage. Britain’s eighteenth-century empire provided geographical
142 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 182

access to alternative resources and, together with British pro-

duction processes, provided the means to bypass eastern luxury
imports. The result of this creative adaptation of global luxury
was an industrialization based on British consumer goods. By the
end of the eighteenth century, these new consumer goods had
come to be perceived in Europe and America as the distinctive
modern alternatives to former Asian and European luxuries.136

University of Warwick Maxine Berg

136
This accounts for the anglomanie prevailing in fashion consumer markets by
the last decades of the eighteenth century. See Carolyn Sargentson, Merchants and
Luxury Markets (London, 1996), 119–27. Also see my ‘French Fancy and Cool
Britannia: The Fashion Markets of Early Modern Europe’, in Cavaciocchi (ed.),
Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle economie europee, 543–6; Harris, Industrial
Espionage and Technology Transfer, 173–221.