Silk, Porcelain and Lacquer: China and Japan and their Trade with Western Europe and the New World, 1500-1644

Abstract

This dissertation focused on the prolific early European trade and consumption of three Asian manufactured goods: Chinese silk and porcelain, and Japanese lacquer in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and has shown how the material cultures of late Ming China and Momoyama/early Edo Japan became inextricably linked with the West. Multiple sources provided new and unexpected documentary and material evidence of this trade by the Iberian Kingdoms of Portugal and Spain, and the trading companies formed in the Northern Netherlands/Dutch Republic and England. They also informed us about the commercial networks through which these Asian goods circulated, and the way in which they were acquired, used and appreciated in the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English societies in Western Europe, and in the multi-ethnic societies of the colonies in the New World. Some new finds relate to the use of porcelain in Western Europe in the sixteenth century, the terminology employed in northwestern Europe to refer to Kraak porcelain, and the Japanese lacquer objects made in European shapes for the Dutch and English trading companies earlier than in Chinese porcelain. This study provides a better understanding of the intercultural exchanges that occurred between the East and West at the time.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.