JM

2.12.2012

Ships, spices and museum spaces: The public history of ‘goods from the East’

John McAleer (University of Southampton)

As research projects like ‘Europe’s Asian centuries’ have powerfully demonstrated, Asian commodities have long played a central role in western societies: the financing and logistics of their importation had a huge impact on European shipping and overseas trade, encouraging the growth of European trading companies; their sale and widespread distribution affected European patterns of consumption and taste; and expanding and defending access to Asian markets led, in part at least, to the development and maintenance of European global empires in the early modern period. Recent scholarship has further enriched our understanding of the ways in which goods, such as spices, textiles and tea, affected European societies. This impact was mediated principally through the agency of various East India companies, whose ships were responsible for the vast quantities and varieties of goods which were imported from Asia.This paper considers how the complex history of Europe’s relationship with ‘goods from the East’ might be realised in practice for general museum audiences, by exploring the representation of the East India trading companies, their commercial activities, and their trade in commodities in a number of different museum and public-history contexts.

The discussion examines the role of museums in a number of European cities with a long history of Asian commercial connections, and the UK’s National Maritime Museum (NMM) in particular, as crucial conduits through which the stories of Eurasia’s trading worlds might be brought to a wider general public. And it explores some of the ways in which new research and changing historiographical trends have influenced the interpretation of this history in the recent past. It also touches on ways in which this history is being reinterpreted and harnessed to lubricate present-day Asian-European commercial, cultural and political relationships.In doing so, this paper investigates the possibilities offered, as well as the challenges presented, by surviving material culture for displaying the general themes of the conference: goods and production; retail and consumption; and networks of trade.

The paper begins by outlining some of the object selections and interpretive strategies pursued by the NMM and other museums in order to highlight the impact of ‘goods from the East’ on European societies and the continuing relevance of this history today. It posits the central role of ships, sailors and the sea in bringing Asian goods to European consumers, and suggests that the maritime context of these Eurasian trading networks is a key issue for presenting and understanding the world of Europe’s East India companies. To this end, the discussion considers ways in which ships, and other maritime-related material culture, might be employed in museum contexts, using surviving material culture evidence, to highlight important historical moments and to challenge established historiographical approaches.

The paper concludes by considering if and how multiple interpretations of objects can offer avenues to access the complex nature of this history. Can the immediacy of the story be preserved while, at the same time, paying attention to the nuances of the history? Is it possible to use European East India companies – and the wider ramifications of Europe’s centuries-long maritime trade with Asia – as a springboard for introducing broader themes about the history of European imperialism and global history to general audiences?

Museums and European East India companies: temporary exhibitions

Recently, over two centuries after the demise of most of the European monopoly trading companies, there has been a renewal of scholarly interest in, and recognition of, the fundamental role played by objects and material culture in shaping the history of the European encounter with Asia.[1] This has been inspired by new academic interests and trends in historiography. And this has been matched by a wider public interest in this history, fostered through popular history books, such as Nathaniel’s Nutmeg by Giles Milton.[2] It has been assisted by the fashion for writing ‘commodity histories’.[3] And this foray into popular culture has been apparent in other media too, such as the special ‘guest appearances’ by the British East India Company in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series.[4] As crucial cultural arbiters for bringing history into the public arena, museums and galleries have also been at the forefront of this process. Their institutional remit for using material culture and objects would seem to make them particularly well-placed to explore, examine and interpret a history founded on the supply, movement and consumption of goods.

There has always been a lively interest in presenting the history of goods from the East in Western museums. As with its European competitors, material culture formed a crucial part of the British East India Company’s mercantile, corporate and political identities, and there is a long history of the representation of the company’s activities in museums. Company activity led to the establishment of the India Museum, an institution specifically dedicated to collecting and displaying material from Asia. But the East India Company also contributed to the collections and displays of a range of different museums in Britain.[5]Similarly, the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, was established for the purpose of displaying the results of American trading contact with Asia based on the collections of the East India Marine Society.[6]In these contexts, India and China wereoften presented as being particularly ‘wealthy and exciting’.[7]

By the late twentieth century, however, exhibitions on this theme of European commercial contact with Asia were often refracted through the lens of later colonial and post-colonial history. They tended to be temporary shows, often based in art museums or galleries and apparently more interested in issues of representation, and the distribution and collection of luxury items, than the mechanics and logistics involved in getting them to Europe (or America) in the first place. For example, in 1990 the National Portrait Gallery hostedThe Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947. It was one of the first exhibitions to confront the complexities of this history and the material culture it produced. The exhibition brought together objects that explained individual lives, both British and Indian, and their responses to the British presence in India.By virtue of its location and emphasis, however, the exhibition (a temporary display) naturally focused on issues of artistic representation. It tackled such themes by charting the ‘creation and projection of Indians and their lives, and of Indian images of the British’ through the selection, display and juxtaposition of a range of paintings, miniatures and other objects.[8]The title and chronology chosen clearly advertise the fact that the exhibition went well beyond the story of the East India Company and its trade in commodities; in fact, it explored the origins, development and eventual demise of British India, setting the commercial activities of the East India Company in a much wider context. At that time, it was the largest show ever mounted by the gallery. Fittingly, the gallery’s then director, John Hayes, promised a suitably wide-ranging experience for visitors, focusing on ‘the long relationship between the peoples of one of the great ancient civilisations of the East, … and the representatives of a vigorous Western trading nation’.[9]The vigorous trade that acted as a key motivation for drawing the two together, however, seemed somewhat underplayed.

In 2004, Encounters: The meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500–1800 was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It too sought to address the varied nature of the encounters, relationships and misunderstandings between Asians and Europeans in the period, again through the medium of material culture. The geographical and chronological remit was broader than The Raj, however, and it used a greater variety of object types. As the editors of the exhibition catalogue explained, Encounters explored ‘from a broad perspective the way in which Asians and Europeans responded to one another’.[10]The exhibition explicitly recognised that it was not just the material culture of the East India Company that explained the European encounter with Asia in the eighteenth century. As Oliver Impey pointed out, most of the objects on display powerfully demonstrated the fact that East and West were unusual, unfamiliar and, indeed, exotic to each other during the period.[11]

In this context, one might also consider how the activities of other European trading companies have been represented by museums. The events and exhibitions held across the Netherlands in 2004 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Dutch East India Company, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), are a case in point. The commemorations were the product of a campaign to engage the Dutch public with this history, even if the meaning of that commemoration was contested. Schools were provided with educational materials, while a range of museums across the country ‘mounted a vast array of exhibitions on the VOC, its exploits and the implications of Dutch-Asian trade for the metropolis’.[12] One of the most impressive museum exhibitions was ‘De Nederlandse ontmoeting met Azië, 1600–1950’ (‘The Dutch Encounter with Asia’), which opened in October 2002 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.[13] The exhibition was accompanied by an lavish catalogue.[14]In a similar vein, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC combined to organise Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the world in the 16th & 17th centuries. This exhibition brought together over two hundred and fifty objects with the express purpose of illustrating a ‘world in formation’. As one might expect, a large part of the exhibition was devoted to Portuguese trade with Asia, which created ‘a framework for global interaction that endured for centuries’.[15]

Commodities on show: permanent displays in London, Gothenburg, Uppsala and Amsterdam

All of these temporary exhibitions were characterized by the fact that they brought together a panoply of impressive objects, from widely dispersed collections around the world. Accompanied by sumptuous catalogues, they focused on the surviving material culture: generally luxurious and spectacular; precious and unique records of cultural encounter and interaction. But, European East India trading companies were, at their most basic, organisations interested in mundane, diurnal and comestible objects. Their main business involved the transportation of huge quantities of commodities – spices, tea, porcelain and swathes of textiles – back to Europe for sale, fundamentally altering ideas of taste and dress for millions of people. Ironically, the tangible, material and physical items on which the East India companies based their commercial success were ephemeral and few examples have survived, making the elucidation of this aspect of their history particularly challenging for curators, exhibition organizers, and museum visitors alike.

Over the past number of years, however, interest has grown in presenting the more workaday aspects of this history to museum goers. In 2002, the home of the British East India Company’s extensive archives mounted a major exhibition to showcase this material, which was accompanied by an illustrated companion history, public lecture series, and a continuing online exhibition. The British Library’s Trading Places: The East India Company & Asia, 1600–1834explicitly focused on the ‘remarkable story’ of the Company’s history. But the organisers were keen to point out that this was not ‘merely a history of the past’; rather, the exhibition sought to impress visitors with the ‘lasting impression on life in both Britain and Asia’ made by the Company and proclaimed that ‘its legacy is a story of today’.[16] As a commercial organisation, the Company’s activities were meticulously recorded in ledgers, daybooks and letter books that stretch for miles on the shelves of the British Library’s storage rooms. An exhibition at this particular venue, drawing on this wealth of material, offered an opportunity to focus on the mechanics of trade and the logistics of shipping large quantities of goods around the world, as well as the impact of this business on British society. The exhibition did not rely solely on the two-dimensional archives in the library’s care; it borrowed widely from other museums such as the National Maritime Museum and the British Museum in a bid to evoke the world preserved in the archival records.[17]

Away from their institutional or archival ‘homes’, as it were, the story of European countries’ trading relationships with the East is perhaps most appropriately displayed in history museums. In the United Kingdom, one of the principal museums of ‘national history’ is the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (NMM). As an institution which played a significant part in Britain’s maritime history, presenting the East India Company to audiences is something with which the NMM has been intimately involved over the years.[18] Indeed, its collections of materialin this area– from ship models and ship portraits, to manuscripts and medals – make this one of the museum’s most important non-naval narratives. The preponderance of paintings entitled ‘An East Indiaman in a stiff breeze’ or ‘An East Indiaman at anchor’ (of which there are, literally, hundreds in the collection) should not disguise the fact that identifying objects with which to tell a suitably rounded and balanced history of the Company was not an easy task for those involved.

The museum has been at the forefront of new approaches to maritime history over the past few decades, confronting similarly vexed historiographical challenges, which encompass the presentation of this kind of subject to today’s museum audiences.[19]The latest iteration of this approach to presenting maritime and imperial history opened in 2011. This new gallery, originally code-named ‘Asian Seas’, is entirely devoted to the history of the East India Company. Traders: The East India Company and Asiarepresented the changing world of maritime history and its presentation to the general public. This is the first permanent gallery dedicated to the history of the Company in its hometown. Traders and the collection upon which it draws, reflect the fact that aspects of the Company’s history, ignored or skirted over in the past, can be retrieved by the use and display of material culture. Thegallery was predicated on two key concepts or intellectual organising principles. First, the commodities of the East India Company and their impact on British society; and, second, the importance of the maritime aspect to this broader history.

Briefly, the narrative is arranged in five key sections. The gallery begins by introducing visitors to the people, places and cultures of the Indian Ocean World before the arrival of the European trading companies. Using some of the Museum’s unique collections of Asian ship models, ethnographic material, and other interpretative devices, this section evokes the complexity, diversity, and sophistication of cultures and trading activities in the Indian Ocean. Following this introductory space, visitors move into a long gallery that uses a combination of material culture, text panels, visual images and interactive displays to tell the history of the East India Company in a roughly chronological progression.

This part of the display situates commodities at the heart of the interpretation strategy. The narrative of the gallery – the core, organising principle around which the objects are interpreted – was constructed using four key ‘commodities’ traded by the Company and which characterized its career at different phases of its development: spices, textiles, tea and power. The ‘Spice Trade’ section explores the beginnings of the English East India Company: a small operation that lagged far behind its European rivals in the luxury trade in expensive Asian spices. In the eighteenth century, the Company’s interests shifted from spices to textiles, and from South East Asia to India. It became a cloth merchant to the world, developing markets for high-quality textiles in Britain and beyond. The visitor then follows the Company as it attempts to break into the lucrative tea trade centred on China and strictly controlled by the Emperor. The last section of the gallery focuses on the ramifications of the Company’s trading activities: the Company’s administration of India and its downfall following the Opium Wars with China, and the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857.[20] The gallery was accompanied by a book that used the museum’s collection to tell the maritime history of the East India Company.[21]

One of the challenges faced by any museum is the nature and constraints of its collections, the contexts in which they were acquired and the accretion of historical interpretations which can sometimes limit the interpretative possibilities of the objects. In the NMM’s case, the strong naval narratives running through the museum’s collections and its historical displays have often drawn on objects from Asia. In the Traders gallery, however, the limited range of Asian goods in the museum’s collection were interpreted in the context, not of naval history, but rather mercantile and commodity history. For example, a sailor’s neckerchief or bandana worn by Samuel Enderby at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 has generally been interpreted in this context in the past. In the Traders gallery, however, it is displayed together with objects that illustrate the impact of the trade in textiles on British taste and fashion.[22] Similarly, Chinese export porcelain collected by James Cook, which was presumably acquired by the museum because of its connection with this iconic figure in British maritime history, is interpreted as part of the interest in all things Chinese which riveted British society in the eighteenth century.[23]And the vase presented by the Queen of Naples to Horatio Nelson – perhaps the most iconic of all the naval personalties associated with the Museum – is also displayed and interpreted in this context.[24]Given the limited number of surviving examples in the museum’s collection, the exhibition also employed interpretative devices, such as ‘info-graphics’ and video footage, to explore elements of the history of the trade.