Picturing commerce in and from the East Asian maritime circuits, 1550-1800

Abstract

Combining strikingly new scholarship by art historians, historians, and ethnomusicologists, this interdisciplinary volume illuminates trade ties within East Asia, and from East Asia outwards, in the years 1550 to 1800. While not encyclopedic, the selected topics greatly advance our sense of this trade picture. Throughout the book, multi-part trade structures are excavated; the presence of European powers within the Asian trade nexus features as part of this narrative. Visual goods are highlighted, including lacquerwares, musical instruments, Chinese bronze coins, unfired ceramic portrait figurines, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian ceramic vessels. These essays underscore the significance of Asian industries producing multiples, and the rhetorical charge of these goods, shifting in meaning as they move. Building reverberations between merchant networks and the look of the objects themselves, this richly-illustrated book brings to light the Asian trade engine powering the early modern visual cultures of East and Southeast Asia, the American colonies, and Europe.

Contents

1. People and things in motion: the view from the East / Tamara H. Bentley -- Part I. Circuits and exchanges. 2. The maritime trading world of East Asia from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries / Richard von Glahn -- 3. The junk trade and Hokkien merchant networks in maritime Asia, 1570-1760 / James K. Chin -- 4. The trade activities of sixteenth-century Christian daimyo Ōtomo Sōrin / Hiroko Nishida -- Part II. Commodities. 5. From global to local: the diaspora of Asian decorative arts in colonial Latin America / Donna Pierce -- 6. Trans-Pacific connections: contraband mercury trade in the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries / Angela Schottenhammer -- 7. "The features are esteem'd very just": Chinese unfired clay portrait figures of Westerners / William R. Sargent -- Part III. Hybrid aesthetics. 8. The global keyboard: music, visual forms, and maritime trade in the early modern era / Victoria Lindsay Levine -- 9. Barbarian tropes framed anew: three Qing dynasty Chinese lacquer screens of Europeans hunting / Tamara H. Bentley -- 10. Chinese porcelain, the East India Company, and British cultural identity, 1600-1800 / Stacey Pierson.