Private trade and monopoly structures : the East India Companies and the commodity trade to Europe in the eighteenth century

Our research is about the trade in material goods from Asia to Europe over this period, and its impact on Europe’s consumer and industrial cultures. It entails a comparative study of Europe’s East India Companies and the private trade from Asia over the period. The commodities trade was heavily dependent on private trade. The historiography to date has left a blind spot in this area, concentrating instead on corruption and malfeasance. Taking a global history approach we investigate the trade in specific consumer goods in many qualities and varieties that linked merchant communities and stimulated information flows. We set out how private trade functioned alongside and in connection with the various European East India companies; we investigate how this changed over time, how it drew on the Company infrastructure, and how it took the risks and developed new and niche markets for specific Asian commodities that the Companies could not sustain

Connected Material Histories: A response

In giving the very first lecture that first year History of Art undergraduates at Oxford will hear, I have usually employed the practice of giving them a sheet of paper with nothing on it but the outlines of the landmasses of the globe, and asking them to draw a line round ‘the West’. The idea was inspired by a reading of Lewis and Wigen’s 1997 book The Myth of Continents (‘justly celebrated’, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam says), and remains a useful pedagogic act up to a point, for the reasons so clearly laid out in that book; also, it breaks the ice, it gets a buzz of conversation going in the room, it certainly foregrounds the topic, central now to art historical enquiry, of the way in which ‘representations are social facts’. But the reason I do not ask them to draw a map round ‘the East’ is I suspect that it would be too easy, or at least done too quickly, and indeed the boundaries of both ‘East’ and ‘Orient’, as ‘Europe’s Other’, can be shown to have fluctuated much less than have the boundaries of what for most Oxford students is still, if somewhat tenuously, ‘us’ or ‘here’. Wherever ‘the East’ is, it all lies (as Subrahmanyam points out in his essay) in that assuredly etic part of the world called Asia. I might, in the privacy of my own hard drive, choose to categorise those European images which I need for teaching as ‘Non-Eastern’ (to balance the ‘Non-Western’ rubric on which my specialist options appear in the syllabus). But that is not a category widely used, or at least not in my own discipline of art history