Europe’s Asian Centuries: Material Culture and Useful Knowledge 1600-1800 Introduction



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Europe’s Asian Centuries: Material Culture and Useful Knowledge 1600-1800

Introduction

During the past ten years there has been a new foregrounding of the role of India and China in emerging European industrialization. Their industrial and agricultural products fed escalating consumer desires in the West. China and India were the ‘first industrial regions’ providing manufactured export goods on a mass scale to markets throughout the world , as they are now doing once again. We are now living in a new Asian Century. But we must remember a history of Europe’s earlier Asian centuries of that period between 1600 and 1800 when Europe discovered and traded in Asian products on a large scale, bringing cotton textiles, ceramics and tea drinking into the fabric of everyday lives. These centuries have been revisited by several generations of historians who have recounted experiences of encounter and possession, and have recast different versions of the ‘rise of the west’.

What I would like to do here is to look back to Europe’s Asian centuries, not just as an event of linked consumer cultures, but of large-scale industrial production, providing for huge domestic and global markets. This was first of all an Indian and Chinese achievement; in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries their industries expanded through labour intensification and reorganization to provide a large scale export ware sector.

Above all this was a manufacturing system adept at providing the goods that people wanted to buy. Products and quality were as significant to this trade as were productivity growth. Theirs was the industry which ultimately stimulated the technological transformation in Europe. European manufacturers and inventors throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century tested their patents, projects and products against the great achievements of translucent Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles in madder red and indigo dyes, in glorious prints or in the textures of the finest muslins. This is the story which should, I want to argue, precede our explanation of European industrialization.



B. Global History

This narrative and analysis of industrialization is part of a recent turning to what we now call global history. That global history was once a history of globalization, centred on big themes of politics and economics. But historians have recently ranged much wider, and global history has brought together historians from many different trajectories – colonial and imperial history, S. Asian and East Asian and more recently South American area studies, Ottoman and Islamic world studies, and historians of cultural and religious encounter and engagement.

This approach to history has challenged the old national histories and area studies as well as periodizations which have dominated our disciplinary divisions. What is Europe in the wider space of Eurasia? What is the early modern in a history which encompasses the Yuan-Ming porcelain trade from Jingdezhen and Chola and Vijayanagar period textile travels? Sanjay Subrahmanyam in a seminal essay published nearly fifteen years ago, identified the ways in which national histories and area studies had disconnected our histories. Historical ethnography, moreover, had emphasised difference from the vantage point of the observer over the observed. He asked that ‘once more, that we not only compare from within our boxes, but spend some time and effort to transcend them, not by comparison alone but by seeking out the at times fragile threads that connected the globe, even as the globe came to be defined as such.’1

And yet it has been difficult to move beyond the economic and political frameworks of those grand narratives of domination and resistance centred on empire building and nation states. Their big questions are very compelling, and the source of enduring interest: they have focussed on the sources of the great divergence between West and East, on the historical phases of globalization, and on the rise and decline of empires.2 3Fifteen years on from ‘Connected Histories’ we still have a long way to go.

The great divergence which has framed so much of our recent thinking in global history has yielded large-scale comparative studies on differences in resource bases, capital inputs, population and wages or institutional structures and state building among the great regions of the world. Investigating the sources of the Great Divergence attracts us because it challenges us to turn our sights outwards from our own internal histories, to compare the resource base of the Yangtze Delta to that of Northwest Europe, to compare London wage rates with those of Beijing. Much data has been collected on these comparisons; the focus has moved out to include comparisons with India as well as China and Japan, and also the Ottoman and Spanish Empires.4

The Divergence debate revived an increasingly narrowed and even moribund economic history. ‘Economic historians previously locked away in the study of their particular country and period have been forced to confront the inter-connectedness of their specialisms.’5 We have learned much, but there is a sense in which the Divergence debate has reinforced a series of much older questions.

First it focussed on what Europe had and Asia did not, subsequently using this as an explanation. Geography, ecology and environment provided an early key indicator of comparison. Pomeranz argued that ecological imbalance in access to coal followed by the development of technologies using coal set the course for a divergence of Europe’s growth over Asia’s from the later eighteenth century. The ensuing debate among a wide group of European, Asian and world historians has only left entrenched a long-standing emphasis on the part played by Britain’s superior coal reserves in her industrialization. 6

Another major issue arising out of the divergence debate is wages and prices, which has coalesced into another old issue, that of wages and the standard of living. Once again intensive, and now global effort is focussed on demonstrating higher wages and standards of living in Britain - indeed not even Britain – but England - than in the rest of Europe, and now the rest of the world, with ensuing consequences for the development of labour-saving technologies.7

The Divergence Debate originally challenged historians to think outside their national boundaries, and to compare Europe with parts of Asia in the period before Europe’s industrialization. But it has been turned by economic historians back to a series of old methodologies and debates. Where during a recent period we had at least started to think about industrialization in a European context, it is ironic that the Divergence Debate has driven us back to narrow considerations of England.

Comparative static analysis of growth rates, econometric exercises on data sets of prices, wages and productivity has led us away from approaches that change the way we think. The stages of economic history reveal a resurgence of the same questions, similar approaches, and much the same data. During the 1960s we compared European economies, but to map out the stages of economic growth. Questions focused on the sources of economic growth narrowed comparative studies of the European economies. These comparative studies were also applied by some to offer blueprints of development to the Third World.8 During the 1970s, debates over the standard of living and capital formation generated data on and analysis of wages and interest rates in various cities and regions of England, Scotland and parts of Europe.9 Data sets sometimes added to, but more frequently rearranged provided for a return to old questions of growth accounting.10 How much further on have we moved from the questions posed by Nicholas Crafts in 1977 in his ‘Industrial revolution in Britain and France: some thoughts on the question “why was England first”?11 Joel Mokyr’s questions ten years later ‘Has the Industrial Revolution been crowded out? have still to be answered:

‘…the works of Williamson and Crafts mark important advances in the study and understanding of a critical episode in world history, one that will require the collaboration of economists, social historians, demographers, and others to comprehend fully. At this stage it seems that we have run into strongly diminishing returns in analyzing the same body of data over and over again. The highest-return strategy now is to uncover new data and explore hitherto unused sources to fill in a few more corners in this jigsaw puzzle in which most of the pieces will remain missing forever.’12

It is time to shift some of our questions to more open-ended ones over global connections: how did the transmission of material culture and useful knowledge across regions of the world affect the economic and cultural developments in any one of these regions? This leads us into narratives of interaction which could take us deeper into the analysis of imperial domination, but equally lead us into the connections that contributed to economic development in Europe.



Europe’s Asian Centuries

To this end it is time to turn to a large-scale study of EICs and private trade in the transfer of manufactured goods, their material culture and useful knowledge from Asia to Europe.

A hypothesis to investigate is that Europe’s pursuit of quality goods turned a pre-modern encounter with precious and exotic ornament into a modern globally-organized trade in Asian export ware. Ironically, the result was Europe’s industrialization and China’s and India’s displacement as the world’s leading manufacturers. (It is of course a further irony that the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have seen Europe’s loss of those manufacturing catalysts of textiles, ceramics and metal goods back to Asia; but this is another story.)

It is time to look in greater depth at those Asian goods which so fascinated Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The porcelain and textiles collections of our great museums have been intensively studied by museum curators and collectors. Their knowledge is prodigious, and their exhibitions convey a history to a wider public that has only recently reached scholarly history writing. The artefacts they conserve and display are the visual sources of a wider-world impact on European material cultures.13

Trading Eurasia has to be sure been the focus of the many great studies of Europe’s East India Companies. There have been histories of the VOC, the EIC, the French East India Companies, the Danish and Swedish Companies, and the Ostend Company as well as of the Indies projects of other European powers and the private merchants interspersed among them.14 But the histories of these EICs have been hived off into a separate history of colonialism and empire. There are also large-scale quantitative data bases of trade, but this data has been aggregated, and the characteristics of the goods traded expunged from the historical record. How else can an economic historian deal with the hundreds of varieties of cloth traded?

Yet a comment by a French East India Company servant may better capture the realities of the Asian trade. ‘All the science of the merchant, he wrote, is restricted to the knowledge of the different types of these cloth’.15 . It is time that we too enquired into the characteristics and qualities of the goods brought from Asia and how these were integrated into European imaginations and everyday life. This is where I think we can take global history in new directions. We can then look at the impact of the connections in material culture and useful knowledge on crucial economic transitions in the west. One way forward is to investigate the way in which the companies helped to create a large-scale Asian export-ware sector, one that fed Europe’s insatiable demand for millions of pieces of textiles and thousands of tons of porcelain.

First we must remind ourselves of the size of this Asia trade to Europe. Tea, textiles, porcelain, lacquerware , furnishings, drugs and dyestuffs made for a systematic global trade carried in quantities which by the later eighteenth century came to 50,000 tons a year, as estimated by Jan de Vries. This made for just over one pound of Asian goods per person for a European population of roughly 100 million. 16If we look to textiles and porcelain alone, we see the prodigious amounts of these goods reaching Europe from the 17th C. Riello’s recent estimates show 1.3 million pieces of cotton textiles reaching Europe by the late 1680s, and 24.3 million pieces over the period1665-1799. 17 Recent comparative disaggregation of this data indicates the high proportions of plain cottons and muslins, as well as the striped and printed calicoes that were important to the trade. By the early eighteenth century there was a European printing industry drawing on high quality Indian cottons as intermediate goods.

The indicators for porcelain are similar. The British alone imported between 1 and 2 million pieces a year of Chinese porcelain by the early 18th C. The Dutch imported 43 million pieces from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the 18thCentury.18 But there was also a differentiation in the types of porcelain imported. Individual pieces brought into Europe as exotica and curiosities in the sixteenth century gave way by the mid Seventeenth Century to systematic imports of large numbers of pieces systematically produced for Western taste.

Porcelain dealers in Batavia received two million pieces a year by the 1690s; some of these were transhipped to Europe, others entered the intra-Asian trade. By the early eighteenth century these imports of porcelain reached 13.3% of Asian imports by the English East India Company, and the English Customs Accounts recorded high value imports, valued at £150,621 in the later 1750s.19 The European companies imported several thousand chests of porcelain in any one year in the 1760s and 1770 on ships that even much earlier in the eighteenth century brought in over 100,000 tea cups, 40,000 chocolate cups with handles, and 10,000 milk jugs in a single voyage.20

Increasingly after the mid eighteenth century private trade took more of this trade. Officers and seamen on East India Company vessels could carry 80 tons of private trade of all types of oriental decorative wares, furnishings and especially porcelain. The VOC after 1756 declared that its official imports from China were to include only ‘current ware,’ that is dinner plates, tea and coffee cups and saucers, and wares bringing in a fixed profit. The English East India Company did likewise in the 1770s, restricting official imports from China to tea and standard lines of silks and chinaware. Privilege or private trade was the route through which specialty goods were imported.21

The Commercial Ledgers of the English East India Company; similarly the VOC provide an immensely rich detailed account of the products sought from China and India, as well as commentary on those provided. Recent work I have been conducting with postdocs on my project can be conveyed through a few examples from the 1719/1720 and 1730. The list of goods ordered from Canton for the Ship Mountague in 1719 included 218,000 pieces of porcelain, finely described as for example:

‘Boats – of different sizes, variety of paints & sprigs or running work instead of blue sprigs in the border with a pretty deal of scarlet – 10,000; Coloured – 5,000, ditto blue – 5,000. [E/3/100 1720]

…If any Japan Junks be at Canton while you are there which have Japan earthen ware you may buy some…buy none that are large pieces…

If you find any new sort or fashion of china ware which is useful & you think may be acceptable in England buy some of it.’

In 1720 394,000 pieces of textiles in 72 different types were ordered on ships going to Bengal [Chaudhuri – has 462,875 actually imported from Bengal in that year]

Comments on the Sannoes brought back on the first ships were that they were of too deep a blue. ‘They must be of a lighter blue. Some yellow and some red…all sorts to be glazed.’

The taffetas ordered from Canton in 1730 came with the instructions:

‘….one half must be of all sorts of Cloth colours and the other half of lively reds, blues, greens, yellows, and some white, according to the patterns which Mr. Torriano carrys with him, the most variety among the cloth colours the better, bring very few Crimsons, and fewer still of the dark dirty greens…’

On flowered taffetas …’for variety, we should have one thousand pieces more or less, in hopes you may get them better fancy’d and perform’d of various stripes, sprigs and flowers, for many pieces of one pattern will never do.’ [E/3/105 1730]

These East India Companies were selling to merchants who knew their markets. These were goods which reached surprisingly far down the social classes. 30-50% of English inventories from various parts of the country contained chinaware.22 The Irish were also enthusiastic customers. Porcelain was widely smuggled in, and many anticipated the arrival of East Indiamen and auctions of their contents in Cork, Dublin and inland towns.23 More than 50% of recently-studied Dutch and Southern Netherlandish probate inventories left porcelain by the 1740s.24 Other recent studies of the textiles in the inventories of the Amsterdam Orphanage in the 1740s to 1780s show both rich and poor buying Asiatic textiles for different purposes.25

Another important point to remember about the material culture of these goods is their longevity. Chinaware was bequeathed and recycled, distributed through poorer groups in a second-hand trade, sometimes in damaged or chipped form. Likewise clothing and textile furnishings were bequeathed, passed on, or stolen. They were cut down and refashioned from mistresses to servants, from mothers to children, from wealthy households to pedlars remaking and selling on stolen goods. Asian imported commodities and others made to imitate them had a much wider use and cultural impact than indicated in trade data alone.26

The impact of these Asian imports was to stimulate a new industrial response in Europe – one in which European entrepreneurs adapted Asian design, production and industrial organization. I have argued elsewhere that this imitation of Asian consumer goods generated product innovation and invention in Britain and other parts of Europe. Responding to demand from the East India Companies, Asian manufacturers developed an export-ware sector which would first enable the Companies to extend their markets in Europe, and then stimulate European manufacturers to develop their own consumer goods industries.

But how can we study this? Historians in the past debated the extent to which the early stages of Europe’s industrialization were processes of import substitution. The concept of import substitution itself derives from models applied by development economists to less developed economies after the Second World War; these were advised to promote with high tariff walls industries which would produce goods similar to those formerly imported.

There were parallel theories of export promotion to describe developments in parts of Asia, especially S. Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s, where specific industries competed with western counterparts. The limitations of these policies have been retold many times since the 1980s. 27 But these concepts are too narrow to help us to understand Europe’s remarkable response to Asia’s manufacturing leadership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Historians applying these twentieth century models failed to connect trade with consumer markets or technologies. They did not identify the ways that imports from outside a region changed consumer horizons and family behaviour, in short, what Jan de Vries has called an ‘industrious revolution’. Their discussions of export promotion have been part of the older framework of industry and empire. Most fundamentally, they have left unexplored the stimulation of learning and knowledge offered by global interconnections; the learning of new skills and understanding materials offered in the response to imports.

A better model entails two developments. First, there was the accessing of diverse quality consumer goods from Asia. Cultivation of an export ware sector by the East India Companies entailed industrial development in Asia and marketing there and onwards to Europe which focussed on variety, quality and quantity.

Second, there was a process of imitative invention in Europe to create a consumer goods sector. This was based in product innovation, new technologies and organization. The widespread import of Asian goods into Europe from the seventeenth century onwards came with dense information networks which fostered markets, but also spurred those involved to envisage changing materials, adapting designs and introducing new techniques that would break through traditional processes.

Physical contact with imported objects was vital; European manufacturers came to the East India Company auctions to touch the cloth, count the threads, and assess the quality. Europe’s early porcelain manufacturers borrowed princely Chinese porcelain collections to a similar purpose. Armed with this information, they dissected, experimented and adapted skills honed to other purposes.28 Asian goods and their technologies provided new challenges, perceived at the time to be quite distinct from those posed by earlier European imports.

It is also vital to see that Lancashire’s incipient and rapidly growing cotton industry in the early 18thC. was focussed on developing its export markets as well as meeting domestic demand. The Calico Acts banned imports of printed cottons in 1701; in 1721 this extended to all cottons, but not if they were printed in England and subsequently re-exported.

This export ware focus was thus transmitted into the early developing printing and cotton industry in Britain itself. Britain’s own export markets were built rapidly in the American and Caribbean colonies, and her cotton manufacturers tried at the outset to compete with EIC merchants in the Africa trade.

Eighteenth-century political economists and manufacturers understood this. They saw that the impact of Asia was both one of both material culture and useful knowledge. What Europeans appreciated was the scale and diversity of those Asian imports. The Asian technologies were based on imitative principles: modularity, standardization, mechanical replication. Craft skill combined with mass production to produce diverse and distinctive products. In eighteenth-century terms, exotic ornament was being turned into ‘modern luxuries’.

The remainder of my paper will investigate these connections between East India Company trade and the learning entailed in gathering ‘useful knowledge.’ This entails connecting eighteenth-century commerce with what has come to be termed the ‘industrial enlightenment’.



Global Connections: Material Culture and Useful Knowledge

My focus on imports and an Asian export-ware sector leads to a new interrogation of connections – connections both in material culture - in the making of commodities – and in the knowledge of production. This leads us into issues of what Joel Mokyr has called the ‘industrial enlightenment’. Mokyr made a case that the West developed a very specific ‘useful knowledge’. This ‘useful knowledge’ was knowledge of natural phenomena that might be manipulated by human endeavour: it encompassed practical and informal knowledge as well as theory and codified formal knowledge; it included the work of those who collected observations and who compiled dictionaries and encyclopedias of arts and manufactures with their descriptions of industrial skills and crafts.29

Mokyr took a firm line that the real divergence between the West and the rest of the world did not arise from differences in resource endowments, but from a ‘knowledge revolution’ that took place in the West and not elsewhere’. Mokyr, and indeed his critics, Epstein and Allen, all believed that this knowledge revolution was Europe’s ‘miracle’ over the rest of the world.30 ‘Useful knowledge was developed with an aggressiveness and single mindedness no society had experienced before’.31

Mokyr provocatively declared: ‘Many societies we associate with technological stasis were full of highly skilled artisans, not least of all Southern and Eastern Asia.’ This contrasts with ‘a society where the world of artisans is constantly shocked with infusions of new knowledge from outsiders.’32

Indeed, Kuznets’ claim back in 1965 that ‘useful knowledge’ was the source of modern economic growth did not open the comparative global history that started with the ‘divergence’ debate. Kenneth Pomeranz who coined the ‘great divergence’ and has led the new global

Historians of science have now taken up Asia’s alternative knowledge systems, and have developed concepts of ‘cosmopolitan science’. But what I want to argue here is that trade was not just in commodities, but in the knowledge of manufactures in other parts of the world.

This knowledge can be recovered in political economy, travellers’ accounts, the surveys of natural historians, and the investigations made by merchants and agents of Europe’s East India Companies. Those accounts provide us with some access to that knowledge of ‘outsiders’, and perceptions at the time of transfers of skills and knowledge. Through these we can approach the question: ‘how much did Europe learn from Asia?’

If we turn first to contemporary economic writing, what we find is a political economy addressed to products, their characteristics and their qualities, to innovation based in artisan skill, and to learning from China and India. We can look to David Hume’s point ‘our own steel and iron, in such laborious hands, become equal to the gold and rubies of the Indies.’

At a less abstract level, the political economy of products took the form of an extensive print culture of dictionaries and encyclopedias, itself closely linked to a network of Societies of Improvement.

One example - Postlethwayt set out the purpose of the new edition of his Universal Dictionary in 1774 to look at the dependence of the prosperity and trade of this nation on the mechanical and manufactured

arts. Government and the legislature needed to support these so ‘their industrious ingenuity’ may not be surpassed by any rival nation especially France. His Dictionary would also address ‘the commerce of the Chinese, and the East Indies, in general; by what means they are carried on. - Of the excessive cheapness of their arts, manufactures, and produce; whereby all European nations are attracted to trade with them, and resort to them for their productions and manufacture. With pertinent observations to carry on their commerce both in a private and public way, and best to the advantage of Europe’ .33

The extended entry on Porcelain – 9 folio pages in a two-volume work – was based on Pere d’Entrecolle’s accounts of 1712. It provided detailed accounts of the division of labour and the kilns, and high praise for the quality and price of the ceramics: 'What render the Oriental porcelain so universally estimable is, not only its general delicacy, but its general greater cheapness compared to that of Dresden, or any other nation: [We] will [never] vend so large a quantity as is done by the Asiatics in general.'34

The projects of the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce which advertised premiums for priority inventions and new products. The Premium List for 1763 included an offer of £100 for ‘the greatest Improvement in dying Cotton to answer the Purposes of the Turkey or India Red…’

This political economy of Asian arts in Europe also connected with wider European endeavours to collect the knowledge of manufactures from around the world. It was difficult to access that knowledge of manufactures in China and Japan. India seemed more accessible. This was the period when India was not yet de-industrialised, and Britain was still in the process of industrialization.

During a key period of 1780s and 1790s India’s cotton industry was producing far and away the greatest part of the world’s textiles, but Britain’s industry was mechanizing and growing rapidly; Britain’s iron industry, transformed by coal-fired smelting met all challengers apart from the Swedes; her fine metal manufactures were the wonder of the rest of Europe. But at this stage nothing was certain – manufacturers, industrial spies and technological investigators travelled, collected and translated processes they found across Europe. The Swede, R.R. Angerstein’s diary of 1753-55 with its detailed accounts and drawings is but one example. They also did so in that Asian powerhouse of manufacture, India, which they could access through the East India Companies and through Catholic and Protestant missions.

The paper will now investigate two examples of the collecting the knowledge of manufactures. The first who I will not discuss whom I have no time to discuss today is Anton Hove, a Polish plant collector sent by Joseph Banks under the subterfuge of gathering plants for Kew, but in reality as an industrial spy sent to gather the best cotton plants of the Gujarat, but also to discover the methods and tools of fine spinning and cotton weaving.

These issues of procurement and of quality of both raw cotton and cotton fabrics which lay behind these intensely detailed enquiries into local conditions of the textile manufacture were also vital in attempts to gather ‘useful knowledge’ in an emerging cotton textile industry 4,500 miles from Surat and Bombay.

[The mechanisation of the British cotton textile industry was proceeding through the 1780s and 1790s drawing on lessons of quality and also those of division of labour derived from the Indian products with which they competed. British manufacturers faced the fierce competition of hand-painted Indian textiles, hand-made muslins; they realized the advantage of these Indian fabrics lay in quality and price. In a highly-charged atmosphere of competition and high demand workshops then factories in Lancashire and Mulhouse now produced quality goods, rapid design change, and prices afforded by the middling then labouring classes. Samuel Oldknow in Stockport started a muslin manufacture in Stockport in 1782; he used what was then called the Muslin wheel, Crompton’s mule, first invented in 1779. His markets were in London’s fashion trade, and his products competed directly with those of India, facing a’ severe burst of competition’ whenever East India Company vessels unloaded cargoes of textiles.’35

The demanding London merchants he tried to please prepared a history of the rise and progress of the British muslin and calico manufacture for the Lords of the Council for Trade in 1786. They claimed ‘the object they [the inventors] grasped was great indeed – to establish a Manufacture in Britain that should rival in some measure the Fabrics of Bengall’. The challenge was great ‘there are more India Goods coming into the Market than has been known of these many years in so short a time.’ 36

A Committee convened in 1812 on Crompton’s petition claimed ‘in the invention of the mule may be found one of the chief causes of the transference of the seat of an industry to the Western from the Eastern world, where it had been situated from time immemorial.’37

This very close entanglement of Indian textile manufacture and the technological development of the emerging British industry are subjects explored in Prasannan Parthasarathi’s new book, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not.

Anton Hove’s close analysis of cotton plants and cultivation, but also of spinning and weaving processes and technologies at precisely this time of the later 1780s takes us to the heart of both the product and market development of material culture, and the collection of useful knowledge from Asia.]

My second example, which I do want to dwell on arises out of the knowledge exchange in Protestant and Catholic missions on the Coromandel coast. Both took place at a similar time, and both entailed careful investigations of tacit knowledge with a view to codifying and transmitting aspects of an Indian knowledge of manufactures back to Europe. A local site of knowledge exchange is the Coromandel coast, and especially the small community of Tharangampadi, then known as Tranquebar. A number of East India Company agents and physicians integrated with the natural historians who came with the missions ;

Jesuit and Catholic missionaries in the French factories, then Pietist, and Moravian missionaries at the Danish colony of Tranquebar; similar processes occurred among the Baptists who settled with the Danes at Serampore in Bengal. These missionaries learned languages – Sanskrit and Persian, but also vernacular languages: in South India – Tamil, Telegu, Telinga, Malayan. The French accounts of calico printing on the Coromandel coast are now well-known. Father Coeurdoux questioned a number of calico painters, and hoped his account would assist in perfecting the art of dyeing in Europe. Jean Rhyner, the Basle chemist drew on these and other French accounts in 1766, and concluded ‘even granted all things equaled we could never adopt their methods, for we lack skilled craftsmen and could not keep the maintenance costs so low.’38

Another to be fascinated with Indian technologies and industries was Benjamin Heyne,a German chemist and mineralogist from the Moravian mission in Tranquebar who later worked for the English East India Company as Acting Botanist at the pepper plantation at Samulcotah, After the plantation was closed in 1800, Heyne was appointed to find a site in Mysore for a new botanical garden, and chose former royal garden of Tipu Sultan at Bangalore. He was appointed Botanist and Naturalist at Madras in 1802 and superintendant of a newly established Natural History Museum there. In 1804 he was appointed to the Company’s garden at Bangalore, and in the years following was assigned to assist Buchanan in the Mysore Survey.39

In the 1780s and 1790s Heyne displayed an intense curiosity in dyeing techniques, in the extraction processes of the fabled diamond mines of South India, in the skilled labour that produced fine Indian iron and its even finer steel or wootz, as well as a range of other useful industries from copper to saltpetre, soda and glass manufacture. Heyne was one of a remarkable group of missionaries and natural historians at the Danish factory in Tranquebar, a group now of great interest to historians of science and medicine.40

The Pietist Halle mission of the Franke Foundation of the early eighteenth century brought a number of physicians with a strong background and interest not just in medicine, but in broader natural history, and especially botany. German missionaries also came to the Danish factory in a later Moravian mission.

[ This group originally sent from Herrnhut in German Lower Silesia came to Trnaquebar at the behest of the Danish Asiatic Company enroute to establish a mission and trading factory on the Nicobar Islands. Though they came to Tranquebar in 1760, it soon became apparent that they could not settle on the islands, and they stayed instead in Tranquebar. The Moravians based themselves two kilometres west of Tranquebar. They were regarded with suspicion and opposed by the well-established Halle missionaries in the small town. The Moravians in turn opposed the Lutherans of the Danish Halle mission because they sought to keep a separate identity from the larger Lutheran church. Unlike the Halle missionaries, they brought with them a number of artisans, and they established gardens with the purpose of seeking self-sufficiency. They engaged quickly and easily with the local Tamil population, and also traded their collections of plant specimens with the English East India Company and to Joseph Banks in London41 ]

]A number of their surgeons became very well-known in the wider world of botanical and natural history collecting. These included Johann Koenig who had arrived in 1768 as a surgeon, and who initiated those already there in Linnaean methodology, along with John Peter Rottler, Johann Gottfried Klein, and Christoph John, another avid natural historian, the leader of the mission during the later eighteenth century.

There were close networks among the physicians and natural historians of the Moravian mission and those centred around the East India Company botanical gardens –Christoph John kept up a close correspondence with William Roxburgh and James Anderson. He traded books and seeds for the delightful printed calicoes he and his wife craved; ‘Mrs. John and I are most anxiously waiting for the kindly promised long cloth & chintz & if we don’t get them soon, we must return to the primitive state of Adam & Eve.’42 The herbaria sent to Halle by the Pietists of Tranquebar were followed by the Roxburgh’s great botanical project which culminated in his Plants of the Coast of Coromandel 43(date)

The fascination with Indian technologies and industries continued. The surveys of Benjamin Heyne in the 1780s and 1790s arose out of these networks. Heyne’s accounts show an intense curiosity in dyeing techniques, in the extraction processes of the fabled diamond mines of South India, in the skilled labour that produced fine Indian iron and steel or wootz, and a range of other useful industries from copper to saltpetre and soda manufacture.

How should we approach his surveys? One approach is to wrap them up in those later enterprises of colonial science in India – the Survey of India – not established until 1878 – or the topographical surveys of Francis Buchanan and Colin McKenzie which started with Buchanan’s A Journey from Madras Through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar (London, W. Bulmer & Co., 1807).

We can treat him and other 18thC. technological investigators as agents of empire in their enterprises of practical and economic botany following through Sir Joseph Banks’ search for dyes, drugs, and foodstuffs, and investigating their acclimatization to different parts of the empire.44 We can look for the underlying orientalist assumptions of the surveys, and the political economy of empire framing their financing and their output. But above all it is important to look at the texts, and the efforts of those at far remove from their European frameworks to describe, codify and analyse the industrial processes of India.

Heyne’s accounts of his industrial journeys were sent to Christoph John at the Tranquebar mission as he wrote them, then circulated onward to William Roxburgh in the early to mid 1790s. A number of them were revised and entered into Reports to the Board of Control, and several were further revised, and finally appeared as chapters in his Tracts, Historical and Statistical, on India45;

Heyne’s accounts suggest that there are a number of issues of which we need to take account if we are to gauge the significance of this form of global ‘useful knowledge’


  1. Difficulties of travel

  2. Secrecy and access to knowledge

  3. Descriptions of labour and craft, especially in diamond mines, textile dyeing processes, iron manufacture and saltpetre production.

  4. Scientific theory and industrial processes

  5. Prospects of development

Difficulties of Travel:

He described journeys where ‘my suite consisted of near forty persons: twelve palankeen boys for myself, a flambeau bearer); carriers for baggage, books and provisions, servants, a draughtsman and two plant collectors and a small guard of armed men is…necessary as a protection from robbers and tigers…People in England have no conception of the labour and expense which it costs to obtain a box of insects or plants…’46



Secrecy

He encountered hostility and efforts to block his investigations in the copper mines, at areas of soda and saltpetre production, and in the diamond mines; he admired ‘ the extraordinary skill of the People in the discovery of Diamond mines’…the knowledge of which, they have always been very tenacious in keeping to themselves as much as possible.’47

At some points this secrecy was about the power of the local zemindars and fears and hostility over Europeans. In the relatively wealthy country of the zamindar, Nasareddy he found the ‘bazaar is large and well

Labour and Crafts

Heyne visited diamond mines and iron works, textile centres and areas manufacturing saltpetre and soda. The fabled diamond mines of Golconda had long declined by 1790; the focus of Europe’s trade in diamond had shifted after the mid eighteenth-century to producers in Brazil, but the mines in surrounding areas continued on a smaller scale, Heyne explored those of Mellavilly, south west of Ellore. He provided detailed accounts of the diamond beds, how they were worked, and the division of labour..

‘Sixteen persons, men and women, are employed in each mine, and each received one pagoda of wages per month. Half of them are employed in mining and the other half in carrying on the subsequent operations. These people are inhabitants of the neighbouring villages, suders, who from their infancy, are brought up to this work, and with the ideas necessary for the undertaking, they pride themselves on their honesty to their employers.’ 48

His earlier account found people from the age of 12 working in the mines. The men ‘dig the ground… the women and children carry in baskets on their heads the several strata of earth to the places allotted for each sort.’

Heyne’s present of a gold fanam to the headman made him very communicative. He ‘pointed out a variety of small stones that were thrown away…and assured me they always indicated the presence of diamonds when they occur in beds at some depth underground.’49

At another point he gave a morose servant of the Rajah two yards of scarlet broadcloth and he lightened up a bit. He ‘told me it was his business to search in the river Hebe after the rains for red earth washed down from the mountains in which earth diamonds were always found. ‘50

He wrote of labour forces that ‘are not guarded, and do not seem to be under any control. Everything is left implicitly to their good faith; which at all times is, perhaps the best way to ensure fidelity. ‘ 51

Heyne went on to another of India’s recognized industries, its iron manufacture. After an earlier report on the iron works at Lechemporam he wrote ‘my attention to this branch of science or rather Indian Manufactures has been raised as that I could not but avail myself of the first opportunity that offered to see works of the kind at other places’. He had a ‘hope of becoming useful by rendering myself enabled to point out a place , where iron works of consequence might be erected with a full prospect of success…’52

He found the iron smelterers of the Northern Circars equally poor. A group of 8 or 9, miners, smelters, wood cutters and labourers could produce ‘considerable iron…’the finest in every respect for tools, razors etc…the demand for it is great.’53 These smelting works however, notwithstanding their diminutive scale, attract the attention of every curious observer, on account of the simplicity of every part of the process and the goodness of the iron obtained.’ 54

Science

Heyne attempted where possible to connect his formal scientific knowledge to the processes he witnessed.. At the diamond mines of Mallavilly he discussed Bergman’s dissertation on the Earth of Gems, and debates over Boyle’s theories on gems. ‘This is a subject on which I have made some experiments, read much and thought not a little. I may hereafter find time to collect my inferences.’ 55 He assayed the ores in the copper mines of Ayricondalah, heated these in a crucible with a flux, but found the experimentation process in the field inconclusive.56 (



Prospects for Development

Heyne concluded that diamond mining and processing, though much reduced from its former times, was still viable. He admired the quality of iron produced by artisan smelters, but regretted the lack of coal, and hence the cast iron then leading the British iron industry. Indian steel (or wootz) soon to be much investigated by the Royal Society, was however, another matter. Heyne thought there was much to be gained in promoting the manufacture, for English steel ‘is worse in quality than it was some thirty or forty years ago’… I am of opinion it would prove a source of considerable Revenue to the country…’ 57

experiments by Stodart, and the prevailing view that ‘wootz is superior for many purposes to any steel used in this country.’ 58

This artisanal smelting declined with entry of British and Swedish iron into India in the Nineteenth Century. Larger scale works including EIC backed ironworks such as Porto Novo in the early nineteenth century traded to the Woolwich Arsenal to replace Swedish iron, but eventually were not cost effective, and India’s iron industry went the way of so many other industries.

Prasannan Parthasarathi in a recent seminar conveyed the continued significance of this industrial enterprise into the early 19thC. Between 1775 and 1825 India was the second largest market for Boulton and Watt steam engines, and by 1825 India had the knowledge to maintain the engines, and shortly after built them in Calcutta.

Purpose of the Surveys:

Heyne’s industrial surveys were made in the 1780s and 1790s, some probably during the period when he was at the Tranquebar mission, and others later while he was Acting Botanist at Samulcotah. He set an agenda coinciding with that enlightenment search for ‘useful knowledge’ connecting with what Mokyr has called the ‘industrial enlightenment. Heyne admired resources, skills and above all quality products. His arduous journeys and painstaking analysis of Indian products and how they were made provided connections between European investigators and indigenous producers, and connections in material culture and useful knowledge between Asia and Europe.



Conclusion:

A small place in Southern Indian and a German Moravian industrial traveller lead us back to Europe’s Asian Centuries. They reveal the interlinking of Asia’s and Europe’s manufacturing economies where the demands of an export ware sector fed into those of Europe’s industrialization.

Delivering designs to meet European tastes, delivering high volumes and responding to new fashion, the key constraint was meeting demands for quality, reliability and standards. These were issues about products that any competing European industrial system would have to meet. They created a highly-charged competitive atmosphere of trade, product development and invention.

While Benjamin Heyne was testing the quality of S. Indian iron and calculating the profitability of a trade in Indian saltpetre, Robert Peel and Samuel Oldknow were at the EIC auctions in London, as was Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf in Lorient, testing their own new-invented European cotton products and prints against the quality and variety of recently arrived shipments from India.



The global connection my project and wider work pursues is the ways that mercantile trade to China and India underpinned the development of industrious and industrial revolutions in Europe.


1 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31 (1997), pp. 735-762, 761-2.

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