Abstract
William Hogarth’s group portrait of the Strode family, painted around 1738 and now part of the Tate Collection, is a typical eighteenth-century conversation piece. A small cluster of people dressed in the latest fashions are depicted in a tastefully decorated domestic interior. They are engaged in everyday activities, like making conversation or drinking tea. Images such as this one have often been analysed by historians as evidence of the transformation taking place in British society at the time: the rise of the ‘middling sort’, the genesis of a consumer society, and the impact of the new objects and comestibles that were becoming increasingly available as a result of long-distance maritime trade. In this painting, the delicate silver tea service being used by the Strode family, and the tea caddy strategically located on the floor in the centre foreground of the painting, draw attention to the widespread consumption of tea in eighteenth-century Britain.
Chris Nierstrasz’s book, Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles, is less interested in using this sort of visual evidence, but it does adopt important and influential ideas from historians of consumption to explore the growing demand for items such as tea and textiles in eighteenth-century Europe. As Nierstrasz points out, economic historians have been at odds with historians of consumption for some time about the influence of such long-distance trade on European societies. The former have tended to argue that commodities imported from Asia were luxuries, accessible to only the most wealthy stratum of society and therefore without any meaningful impact on the general populace. But Nierstrasz makes the case for moving beyond total quantities and absolute prices. He asserts that Asian commodities need to be seen not just as luxuries that affected consumption patterns at the highest echelons of society. Instead his research reveals that they were important across a broader base of the economy. After all, the British East India Company imported 15 types of tea and some 200 varieties of textiles. The success of the various European East India companies suggests, therefore, that consumers liked variety and choice in the textiles they purchased and the teas they drank. Until now, we have known very little about the effect of this on the various companies importing these goods. The success of this book is in adding copious detail, based on painstaking archival research. In doing so, it will make a contribution to the scholarship of European East India companies, their trading activities, and their impact on European societies.
Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles also fulfils other important functions in the historiography of this episode in the development of global and transnational trade. First, it is structured around a comparative study of the British and Dutch East India companies. As a result, it eschews a common problem: the narrative clarity of focusing on one company often has the unintended consequence of suggesting its uniqueness and exceptionalism. While it is inevitably a difficult task to compare across these companies and their respective contexts, Nierstrasz largely succeeds keeping the comparative element in view throughout. He avoids making sweeping generalizations about the rise and fall of these companies. Instead, he focuses on providing a deeply textured study of their activities. He argues persuasively that they were rivals not just in Asia but also in Europe; they were not only competing for trade and empire in the East, they were also competing with each for market share in the West. And their monopolies, often perceived as impenetrable and unshakeable were, according to Nierstrasz’s research, permeable and ultimately imperfect. This is the key conclusion. Powerful though they were, these corporate behemoths could neither exercise a perfect control nor exert a perfect monopoly on their trades in tea and textiles.
Beyond the contributions made to the historiography of the subject, there are some fascinating insights here. For example, the attention given to the prevalence and importance of smuggling, and the ways in which this was interwoven with government decisions on taxation, is something that many historians of maritime Britain and Europe will appreciate. Similarly, we learn that the Dutch company was much quicker off the mark in importing bohea black tea than its British rival, which was still concentrating on green tea until the mid-eighteenth century (p. 113). In terms of paying for Chinese tea, Nierstrasz discusses the variety of methods employed by the East India companies: they could re-direct the profits from their intra-Asia trade, they could use the income derived from their empires in Asia, or they could harness the wealth and purchasing power of their servants (in the form of using bills of exchange) (pp. 67–74). This discussion of the mechanics of trade illustrates the lengths to which these companies went in order to use the most economic and fiscally efficient way of managing their affairs.
One slightly puzzling feature of the book is the fact that the plates are colour reproductions of the black-and-white figures spread throughout the body of the text. One wonders if we could have got twice as many illustrations in here, thereby helping to reinforce the variety and choice of commodities on offer to eighteenth-century consumers. This book is for advanced students of the subject. Ultimately, the narrative power and the interpretative possibilities offered by the single, individual company are strong and will always remain attractive to scholars, students and general readers. But this book is an important remainder that this is far from being the whole story. As well as underlining the fact that different companies operated in the same maritime and commercial spaces, Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles reminds us of the importance of the cornucopia of commodities imported by Europe’s East India companies.