Peripheral Emporiums: Selling Chinese Silk Textiles at the Auctions of the Scandinavian

Peripheral Emporiums: Selling Chinese silk textiles at the auctions of the Scandinavian East India Companies

I work on the Scandinavian East India Companies, the Danish and the Swedish Companies:

o  “Asiatiska kompaniet”

o  Svenska Ost Indiska Kompaniet.

The two companies were on the one hand quite different.

·  The Danish Company, established already in 1616, traded with China as well as India, where the company had a chain of trading stations.

·  The Swedish company on the other hand was a much slimmer operation, established in 1731 it almost exclusively traded with China.

However, although different in terms of organisation and history, the Scandinavian companies had a lot in common too.

·  As companies based in small neutral countries they were well placed to compete with the bigger companies during periods of European conflicts.

·  Their ships were also frequently used to bring home the fortunes of particularly the English East India Companies’ employees in Asia, as part of the so called remittance trade.

Moreover, and particularly important here, the goods the Scandinavian East India Companies brought to Gothenburg and Copenhagen were to a large extent re-exported.

·  This was the case for between 70% and 90% of the goods.

·  The main reason for this was that the Scandinavian populations was too poor to consume the luxuries from the east.

Hence my title the first part of my title,

·  Gothenborg and Copenhagen were peripheral Emporiums providing richer parts of Europe with East Asian goods.

What sort of goods then?

·  Tea was undoubtedly an important part of the Scandinavian trade,

·  The main reason for this was that the high duties on tea in Britain made smuggling a lucrative business.

·  In fact the trade with tea from China provided the main drive for the Scandinavian East India ventures.

However, tea was not the only goods brought over from the East.

·  Indian textiles and Chinese porcelain and silk were other goods that were shipped over.

And in this paper I am going to talk about some of the Chinese Silk for sale

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My first example is from a catalogue listing the goods for sale in Gothenburgh in August 1748.

·  What makes this sales catalogue particularly interesting is the fact that the prices the stuff was sold for is listed, together with the name of the purchaser.

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All in all 9857 Pieces were for sale in 395 lots. There were 5 general qualities but only 3 in any substantial quantities:

4996 Damask pieces:

Damask is a fabric with a none raised pattern in the same colour as the background fabric.

The Damasks for sale in Gothenburg are described as either “Meuble” or “Poises” (i.e. a flower bouquet).

·  Only 400 out of nearly 5000 Damask pieces were described with the help of a pattern number. About 10 pattern numbers

3250 Taffeta pieces:

·  Is a smooth plain woven fabric, can either be pieced dyed or yarn dyed.

·  The Taffeta for sale in Gothenburg is distinguished as 4, 6, or 8 threads

1040 Paduasoy:

·  originally a French terms a strong corded or grosgrain silk textile

Others qualities:

·  There are also some pieces named “Gorgoroner” and Satin for sale

·  Damask, Taffeta and Paduasoy made up the main bulk of the textiles for sale, about 90%.

Specifications:

·  Next to name the lengths and the width is specified.

·  There were standard three lengths with some small variations:

·  13.8-14.1m;

·  16.2-16.65m;

·  22.8-23.7,

·  Width when specified was 1.25 m.

But these were not the only way in which the textile were described or defined, added to the above parameters was the one of colour

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In fact, colour seems to matter a great deal, maybe not surprisingly since silk is a textile fibre that absorbs dyes easily.

·  All in all there are 26 colours mentioned in the sale catalogue.

·  With the exception of a handful of fabrics that are described as stripy the colour of every piece is specified.

·  With this information I have created this circle diagram. I have tried to match the colour of the segment with the actual colour referred to.

·  So the biggest segment, the blue one, represent the number of pieces which are described as “Sky blue” in the catalogue.

·  Needless to say I have sometimes guessed what colour or shade is referred to with certain names.

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I have recently looked a bit closer at the names of the colours, thinking that this nomenclature can illuminate the trade with Chinese silk.

First of all, the names used in my catalogue is part of European, and maybe particularly French dominated nomenclature for referring to colour.

·  Poneceau (French for Poppy) Påsoo

·  Couleur de Rose Rås

·  Couleur de Chair Cheer

·  Paille Paj

·  Blomerant from French Bleu mourant blömoran

This pay witness to the influence of French fashion, French silk was high fashion in 18th century Sweden.

A brief comparison the names for colours used in the Swedish catalogue with colour references used referring to Chinese silk in the other East India Companies we can see that there is an established international terminology.

·  In the ordering lists of EIC we can find the term Sky blue for example.

·  Bleumerant is one of the most common colour in a Danish sales catalogue from 1756.

There is however a global dimension to the terminology visible in the list of names of colours to.

·  Karmine or Crimson in English, was generally the result of a dye called Kermes, which was made of the insect Kermococcus vermilis planchon.

·  It had been used for red colours in the whole of Eurasia since the prehistoric period, including China.

·  The dye was called Kermes and many European and Asian languages have a name for red which is derived from the word kermes, including here Karmine and Crimson

In general I think it worth underlining the range of colour that arrived with the gods from the East in the late 17th and 18th century

Robert Finlay, in "Weaving the Rainbow: Visions of color in World HIstory" lists names for colours used by common people in England at the time, often washed out brown, blues and grays.

·  Here we find names such as "horse flech", "gooseturd", "rat's colour", "peas porridge" and "puke".

·  In France we find names such as "flea's belly", "Paris mud" and "goose-droppings".

·  Maybe needless to say, I have not come across any of these names when I studied sales catalogues or order lists from the trade with China

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What ever about the names and their history, it is also important to notice that the nomenclature helped distinguishing between different shades of colour.

There are for example:

·  6 different colours of blue (Sky blue, dark blue, mazarine blue, light blue, Blue Turqvin, and Blomerant)

·  5 different colours of red including Pink, (Crimson, Scarlet, Poncea, Coloure de Rose, Colulure the Chair)

·  3 different colours of grey (Ash coloured, Pearl Coloured, Lead Coloured)

·  3 different shades of yellow, (Jonquil, Lemon Yellow and Paille)

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Although this suggest a wide variety of colours it is important to acknowledge that compared to the textiles from India the silk trade comes across as fairly standardized.

Most silk fabric sold at the Swedish auction came in one out of 16 colours.

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We can compare that with the number of colours referred to in the Danish East India Company’s auction 9 years later, in 1756 here there were only significant holdings in 13 different colours.

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This does not mean that the buyers only bought silk in one colour,

When the silk was sold it was sold in bundles containing material in several different colours.

In fact the more variations of colours the higher price it seems to have been sold for.

·  Take for example the 4310 pieces of Damask first listed in the Swedish sales catalogue.

·  They were sold in lots of between 29 and 37 pieces, each peice being 16.5 meters long and (I assume 1.25 meter wide).

Slide 18

The highest price was paid for lots 934-964.

All in all 30 bundles of textiles

·  which each contained 31 pieces,

·  made in 16 different colours.

The lowest price was paid for the last lot,

·  which contained 37 pieces,

·  but which only contained 6 different colours

To sum up then

Colour of silk can help us access issues to do with the market for East India goods in Europe. Next to names and prices I am pursuing the list of purchasers with aim to trace the silk after it left Copenhagen and Gothenburg.