Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This is an interdisciplinary study providing new insights by bringing together an art historical attention to the physicality of objects with economic analyses of expanding early modern markets. Working in global design history, scholars like Maxine Berg and Giorgio Riello have rightfully stressed that Asian luxury imports (printed and painted cottons from India, porcelain and silk from China, lacquerwares from Japan and China) provided a key spark for the development of a widespread consumer culture in 18th century France and England. I here supplement their observations by tracing the very multi-ethnic process by which Coromandel lacquers were transported from South China to the southeast coast of India for trans-shipment (thus their designation as “Coromandel lacquers”) to the marchands merciers of Paris and the taste advisors of England, concretely demonstrating the global flow of Asian luxury goods and their impact. However, Berg and Riello are primarily focused on the British 18th century consumer revolution as a critical step leading to the industrial revolution. This study of Coromandel lacquer reception shows that on the other side of the world there was a considerable market for these incised lacquer screens among Chinese merchants and scholars, as well as an appreciation of (and imitation of) Japanese lacquers in China. By expanding our vision beyond the British commercial movement towards the industrial revolution, this essay offers new attention to multicultural dimensions of early modern economic globalization, and complicates the story concerning broad-based consumer markets at this time and what they looked like.