This chapter explicates the diverse models scholars have developed to analyze cultural exchange in early modern material culture. With a focus on objects originating in Asia and Europe in the early modern period, the author considers environmental, cultural, technological, social, political, economic, and ideological approaches and factors

This chapter digs into the stuff of the city, examining the range of objects excavated from homes, garbage pits, moats, and even toilets to try to imagine the rhythms and character of daily life for the residents of Ichijōdani.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese scholars eager to assimilate the historical sciences of the West and incorporate their history into universal historical narratives readily adopted the tripartite periodization of Western civilization divided into ancient, medieval, and modern epochs. This framework of linear, stadial progression toward modernity offered liberal intellectuals in China the promise of emancipation from China’s stultifying past and rebirth as full citizens in a modern world of equal nation-states. Marxist scholars invoked a parallel tripartite periodization divided into slave, feudal, and capitalist epochs, but adapted to accentuate the defining feature of Chinese history: the rise of a “bureaucratic, centralized feudal state” that fostered “economic stagnation” throughout the longue durée of the imperial era, from the first universal empire of Qin in the third century bce to the irruption of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century.1 The ideas of “oriental stagnation” and the “Asiatic mode of production” likewise inflected Western historiography on China, and the notion of an unchanging “traditional China” prior to the advent of the West in the post-Opium War era predominated in Western scholarship on Chinese history down to the 1970s.

How was consumption able to rise so dramatically before the age of the Industrial Revolution? The consumer revolution was the result of incremental changes in urban growth, agricultural specialization, commercial development, and proto-industry. Global trade was also a major factor. While agriculture, industry, and intra-European trade expanded gradually in the eighteenth century, intercontinental trade between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas soared, expanding the horizons of the European material world. Global trade introduced European consumers to an array of products from distant lands, from Chinese porcelain and tea to Indian cotton textiles to American tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and sugar. Slavery was integral to global trade. On the west coast of Africa, European merchants traded Indian cloth for human captives, whom they shipped to the Americas in the largest forced migration in human history. In the Americas, European-descended enslavers brutally forced the enslaved to produce large quantities of commodities (tobacco, sugar, and coffee) for European consumption. Global trade also gave rise to import substitution as Europeans producers made cheap imitations of Asian porcelain and textiles. Such import substitution was part of a broad shift from the consumption of high-quality, durable materials that stored value over long periods of time to cheaper, more fragile semidurables that were rapidly replaced. This shift marked the birth of modern materiality and accelerated the fashion cycle.

This chapter deals primarily with the Company commercial policy in East Asia and mainland Southeast Asia but also discusses extensively the first territorial Dutch colony in Taiwan. It highlights the crucial position of Japan where the Dutch could build on their exclusive trading rights in Deshima to procure the precious metals that were necessary for the India trade. The China trade is discussed in connection with the restrictive policies of the Ming and Qing states as well as in the context of the trading interests of the Dutch headquarters in Batavia. In conclusion, a comparison is made between the Dutch position in Mughal India and Qing China as well as between the Dutch Empire and other European empires in Asia.

“I’ll never forgive myself,” laments Professor Henry Jones Senior after hitting Junior with a large vase on the head. The subsequent scenes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade clarify that the Professor’s concern was not directed at his son – who had, after all, come to save him from Nazi captivity – but at the damage inflicted on what appeared to be a fine exemplar of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain.