Modes of Bookkeeping: How Material Samples Illustrate the Limitations of Voc Trading Expertise

Historians have studied the VOC’s textile trade in two extensive but separate bodies of literature—one, the economic historiography, primarily uses numerical evidence, and the other, the art historiography, primarily uses artistic evidence. The bifurcation of the VOC textile historiography by source material leaves a large set of textile samples surviving within the VOC’s books underexamined. This is even though the samples are easily the most visually impressive objects in the archive. The neglected textile samples, when examined as tools of bookkeeping, raise questions about the Company’s competence in evaluating the decorative goods it traded in. This thesis makes a twofold argument: one for the importance of examining non-textual bookkeeping, and a second, that such bookkeeping revealed the VOC was never able to truly master the intricacies of the Asian cotton and silk textile economies. The 584 total surviving textile samples attached to 37 VOC documents, along with the residual evidence from samples that have not survived, reveal a striking lack of textile literacy in the VOC officers who procured these materials. Not only were samples of prospective textile imports from Asia cut and attached in ways that obscured their weave, grain line, and patterns, they were also labeled inconsistently and vaguely. This lack of literacy in Asian textiles agrees not only with similar findings for the VOC’s porcelain trade and Delft’s “porcelain” industry, but also with work done on South Indian weavers. Interpreting the textile samples in the VOC documents then helps us reframe conventional wisdom on the decision making powers of corporations like the VOC, which later morphed into colonial regimes.

Author dc:creator

• Eug Xu

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ramya Sreenivasan

• History

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/62461

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/62461