Global Design History

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GLOBAL DESIGN HISTORY

Globalism is often discussed using abstract terms, such as ‘networks’ or ‘flows’ and usually in relation to recent history. Global Design History moves us past this limited view of globalism, broadening our sense of this key term in history and theory. Individual chapters focus our attention on objects, and the stories they can tell us about cultural interactions on a global scale. They place these concrete things into contexts, such as trade, empire, mediation, and various forms of design practice. Among the varied topics included are: • • • • • • • • •

the global underpinnings of Renaissance material culture the trade of Indian cottons in the eighteenth century the Japanese tea ceremony as a case of ‘import substitution’ German design in the context of empire handcrafted modernist furniture in Turkey Australian fashions employing ‘ethnic’ motifs an experimental UK–Ghanaian design partnership Chinese social networking websites the international circulation of contemporary architects.

Featuring work from leading design historians and specialists in related disciplines, each chapter is paired with a response, designed to expand the discussion and test the methodologies on offer. An extensive bibliography and resource guide will also aid further research, providing students in particular with a user-friendly model for approaches to global design. Global Design History will be useful for academics, researchers, upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students in design history, the history of art and architecture and related subjects such as anthropology, craft studies and cultural geography. Glenn Adamson is Deputy Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he leads a graduate programme in the History of Design. He is co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft, and author of Thinking Through Craft (2007) and The Craft Reader (2010). Giorgio Riello is Associate Professor in Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of A Foot in the Past (2006) and has recently co-edited The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (2009) and The Fashion History Reader (2010). Sarah Teasley is Tutor in the History of Design and Liaison Tutor in Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, UK. She is co-author of 20th Century Design History (2005), and a specialist in the history of design for mass production in modern Japan.

GLOBAL DESIGN HISTORY

Edited by Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley

First edition published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Editorial selection and material © 2011 Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley Individual chapters and chapter responses © 2011 the contributors The right of Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the contributors for their individual chapters, has been asserted, in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Global design history / edited by Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Design—History. 2. Culture and globalization. I. Adamson, Glenn. II. Riello, Giorgio. III. Teasley, Sarah, 1973– NK1525.G58 2011 745.409—dc22 2010037066

ISBN 0-203-83197-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 13: 978–0–415–57285–9 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978–0–415–57287–3 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978–0–203–83197–7 (ebk)

CONTENTS

Illustrations Contributors Preface Introduction:Towards global design history Sarah Teasley, Giorgio Riello and Glenn Adamson 1 The Global Renaissance: Cross-cultural objects in the early modern period Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Luca Molà Response Dana Leibsohn 2 Global design in Jingdezhen: Local production and global connections Anne Gerritsen Response Beverly Lemire 3 Indian cottons and European fashion, 1400–1800 John Styles Response Prasannan Parthasarathi

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4 Import substitution, innovation and the tea ceremony in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan Christine M. E. Guth Response Maxine Berg 5 The globalization of the fashion city Christopher Breward Response Simona Segre Reinach 6 Performing white South African identity through international and empire exhibitions Dipti Bhagat Response Angus Lockyer 7 ‘From the far corners’:Telephones, globalization, and the production of locality in the 1920s Michael J. Golec Response Anne Balsamo 8 The globalization of the Deutscher Werkbund: Design reform, industrial policy, and German foreign policy, 1907–1914 John V. Maciuika Response Paul Betts 9 Where in the world is design? The case of India, 1900–1945 Victor Margolin Response Christopher Pinney 10 Handmade modernity: Post-war design in Turkey Gökhan Karakus¸

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Response Edward S. Cooke, Jr. 11 Old empire and new global luxury: Fashioning global design Peter McNeil Response Shehnaz Suterwalla 12 Analyzing social networking websites:The design of Happy Network in China Basile Zimmermann Response Ngai-Ling Sum 13 From nation-bound histories to global narratives of architecture Jilly Traganou Response: Global agoraphobia Lucia Allais 14 e-Artisans: Contemporary design for the global market Tom Barker and Ashley Hall

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Response Shannon May

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Resource Guide Bibliography Index

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Table carpet, Turkey or Egypt, mid-16th century 1.2 Ewer, brass engraved and damascened with silver with filling of black lacquer, possibly Flanders or Germany and probably decorated in Egypt or Syria, 1450–1500 2.1 Underglaze porcelain dish made in Jingdezhen c.1770. The landscape on this dish represents the traditional Chinese landscape theme, but recreated in Europe and transmitted to China to be reproduced on Chinese porcelain for export to Europe. The design became a staple of European chinoiserie and ‘rococo’ styles 2.2 Early 15th-century large porcelain serving dish made in Jingdezhen for consumers in the Middle East. The rim is scalloped, and the central area is decorated with floral motifs, while the cavetto features large individual blossoms surrounded by smaller ones 2.3 Blue-and-white porcelain dish made in Jingdezhen between 1595 and 1625. These wares, commonly known as kraak porcelain, were mass produced, and thus within reach of a wide spectrum of European consumers. The Dutch referred to this type of bowl as a kraaikop (‘crow cup’), after the bird painted in the well of the cup 4.1 Luzon tea leaf storage jar, 16th century 4.2 Shigaraki tea leaf storage jar, 1400–1500. Museum no: FE 201984 4.3 Bizen fresh water jar, c.1590–1605, stoneware with natural ash glaze 6.1 View of the Cape Dutch exterior (1), British Empire Exhibition, 1925 6.2 View of the Cape Dutch exterior (2), British Empire Exhibition, 1925 7.1 From the Far Corners of the Earth. Promotional booklet front cover

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7.2 The Story of Silk in Your Telephone. Excerpt from a promotional booklet 9.1 The Tata factory 9.2 Maharajah Cigarettes, marketing material 10.1 Azmi and Bediz Koz designed this interior and furniture for architects Nes¸et and S¸aziment Arolat, Ankara, Turkey, in the mid-1960s. This private apartment shows the type of chunky handmade wooden furniture being produced by Ankara’s cabinetmakers from the 1950s inspired by Danish models mixed in with ethnic Turkish glass and textiles. (Couch concept design by Nes¸et and S¸aziment Arolat.) 10.2 The interior of the Interno shop in the mid-1960s in Istanbul, Turkey. Interno was a showcase for the icons of modern design favored by the young design team of Yıldırım Kocacıklıog^lu and Turhan Uncuog^lu. Due to a ban on imports these pieces were handmade, locally-produced copies 11.1 Easton Pearson, Designers. Picos bolero, spring/summer 2004, cotton net, hand embroidered with raffia, silk lining. Ciel dress, spring/summer 2004, cotton net, hand embroidered with raffia and decorated with stone chips, silk lining. Berri skirt, spring/summer 2004, grosgrain viscose belt 11.2 Easton Pearson, Designers. Detail. Berri skirt, spring/summer 2004, cotton net, hand embroidered with raffia and decorated with stone chips, wired tiers and silk lining 11.3 Easton Pearson, Designers. Coro shirt, spring/summer 2004, stripe-weave shirting cotton, hand cut and stitched. Esme top, spring/summer 2004, crystal dobbie cotton, hand decorated. Larkin skirt, spring/summer 2004, screenprinted cotton, hand decorated with plastic sequins. Grosgrain and silk belt, spring/summer 2004, hand made 11.4 Easton Pearson, Designers. Detail. Larkin skirt, spring/summer 2004, screenprinted cotton, hand decorated with plastic sequins. Grosgrain and silk belt, spring/summer 2004, hand made 12.1 Comparison of screenshots of Facebook and Happy Network, July 2008 12.2 Screenshots of Parking Wars on Facebook and Happy Network, July 2008–July 2009. The grey patches have been added to hide users’ names and avatars 14.1 Examples of project collaboration – the final products

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CONTRIBUTORS

Glenn Adamson is Head of Graduate Studies and Deputy Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim is Renaissance Course Tutor at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Lucia Allais is Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University. Anne Balsamo is Professor at the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts. Tom Barker is Professor of Architecture, Innovation and Design, University of Technology, Sydney. Maxine Berg is Professor in History at the University of Warwick and founder of the Warwick Global History and Culture Centre. Paul Betts is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sussex and Director of the university’s Centre for Modern European Cultural History. Dipti Bhagat is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art, Media and Design at London Metropolitan University, and the Chair of the Design History Society. Christopher Breward is Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Edward S. Cooke, Jr. is Charles F. Montgomery Professor in History of Art, American Decorative Arts and Material Culture at Yale University.

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Anne Gerritsen is Associate Professor in History at the University of Warwick and Director of the Warwick Global History and Culture Centre. Michael J. Golec is Associate Professor in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Christine M. E. Guth is Asian Course Tutor at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum. Ashley Hall is Deputy Head of the Innovation Design Engineering Department, Royal College of Art and Imperial College. Gökhan Karakus¸ is a research curator at the Garanti Galeri, Istanbul. Dana Leibsohn is Associate Professor of Art at Smith College, Massachusetts. Beverly Lemire is Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, Canada. Angus Lockyer is Lecturer in the History of Japan at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. John V. Maciuika is Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History at Baruch College, City University of New York. Victor Margolin is Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Shannon May is an anthropologist with expertise in development and human ecology. She is co-founder of Bridge International Academies, which runs a network of low-cost schools in Nairobi, Kenya. Peter McNeil is Professor of Design History, School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney, and Professor of Fashion Studies at Stockholm University. Luca Molà is Professor of Renaissance History at the European University Institute in Florence. Prasannan Parthasarathi is Associate Professor in History at Boston College. Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. Giorgio Riello is Associate Professor in Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick.

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Simona Segre Reinach is a fashion historian at IULM University, Milan, and IUAV University, Venice. John Styles is Research Professor in History at the University of Hertfordshire. Ngai-Ling Sum is Co-Director of the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Lancaster University. Shehnaz Suterwalla is a PhD student on the Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum course in the History of Design. Sarah Teasley is Tutor in History of Design and Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art. Jilly Traganou is an architect and Assistant Professor in Spatial Design Studies at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York. Basile Zimmermann is Maître Assistant at the Unit of Chinese Studies of the Faculty of Arts in the University of Geneva.

PREFACE

This volume, which addresses the phenomenon of global interaction in design and history, is itself a product of such interaction. The project had its roots in two sites: the first, a scholarly network collaboratively organized by the University of Warwick, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, under the title ‘Global Arts’. With funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this series of seminars brought together curators and academics to discuss globalism and material culture in the early modern period. As is often the case when academics meet to discuss new research horizons, these discussions led naturally to the prospect of a book. It was clear, however, that such an undertaking would need to be extended. It would need to come right up to the present day, and would need to encompass the work of a wider community of scholars. At this point, the project in the UK converged with ‘Towards a History of Design in the Global Economy’, an exploratory research project focusing on modern and contemporary design and architecture funded by the Florence H. and Eugene E. Myers Charitable Trust Fund at Northwestern University. Events organized at the V&A and the Royal College of Art laid further groundwork for the volume, while the Design History Society generously offered to act as the book’s primary sponsor. The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University provided further support. The course in the History of Design at the Royal College of Art, run collaboratively with the V&A, has been an ideal base of operations for two of the book’s editors. This course is the leading programme in the subject area, and its recent addition of a specialism in Asian Design History (under the leadership of Dr. Christine M. E. Guth) has been an important context for the project. Similarly, it would be impossible to imagine this volume without the support of the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick, a pioneering undertaking to broaden the methodology of the study of globalism.

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The editors would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the contributors to this volume, who have been unstinting with their time, efforts, and expertise. They have allowed their work to be paired up into a call-and-response structure, which makes for good reading but also (potentially) nervousness for the authors involved. We thank them all for entering into the project’s spirit of debate and collaboration. Elizabeth Bisley, a graduate of the RCA/V&A course, ably provided research support for the bibliography and resource guide that appear at the back of this volume. Like everything else about this book, and indeed the project of global design history itself, these are to be taken as indicative rather than comprehensive, and an invitation to further research.

INTRODUCTION Towards global design history Sarah Teasley, Giorgio Riello and Glenn Adamson

The past decade has seen an explosion in discourse on ‘the global’ as a condition, an approach and sometimes a problem. Most visibly, the impact of economic and manufacturing globalization appears daily through the food we consume, the products we buy, and the news that we watch. Media coverage spectacularizes both global trade and anti-globalization activism; in the meantime, the sheer volume of images and products now literally ‘beamed’ into our daily lives inures us to both globalization’s implications and the anti-globalization movement’s rhetoric. Simply put, the global has become commonplace. This double condition – in which people are at once acutely located in global networks yet increasingly dulled to the implications – has shaped the way we both build new networks and respond to changes in existing ones. Thus, while such global scares as terrorism, financial collapse and pandemics remind us precisely how interconnected we have become, and flows of people, information, capital and goods across national and geographical borders accelerate, we see attempts to block movement through immigration controls, tariffs and other trade barriers, browserblocking software and stricter controls on banking transactions. Within the design world, offshore manufacturing, digital design and manufacturing technologies and automated distribution systems have meant the intensification of transnationallytravelling images and objects, from the latest trends in high-end footwear and avantgarde museum architecture to engine parts, oranges and the lowly kitchen sponge. This condition inevitably raises political issues: is such global connectivity desirable, even ethical? What kind of system might best manage global flows? Should we privilege optimal efficiency or human rights, and are these two goals inseparable or mutually incompatible? And to what extent can or even should we attempt to design and control the parameters of global interactions? Arguably, right-wing economic free market ideologies and left-wing arguments for market controls might be understood as forms of design in their own right. An explicit assessment of the

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politics of the global is not the principal goal of this volume, but each contributor addresses the political implications of design’s imbrication in global networks, either directly or indirectly. As transnational flows become even more recognizably present within daily life, scholars have paid increased attention not only to the politics of globalization, but its other registers as well. Global history has become a recognized area of study, with dedicated journals and research centres. Geographers have been quick to map its effects, and anthropologists and sociologists too have focused their attention on such topics as migrant populations and the impact of global economic and information networks on local life. In design history, the ‘global turn’ has largely taken the form of an expanded geography, both in topics researched by design historians and in the sites of design historical practice. This tendency, which often draws inspiration from intellectual movements such as post-colonialism and world history, seeks to correct the dominant, lopsided representation of the history of design as occurring primarily in Western Europe and the United States, particularly in the modern period, by expanding the field of vision to include design as it is practised and consumed around the world. Modernist design history’s triumphalist narrative of progress emanating from industrializing Europe after 1850 is simply out of date. One prominent example of this approach in action has been the International Committee on Design History and Studies (ICDHS), a biannual meeting of design historians, theoreticians and practitioners concerned with making connections between design historical work in different national, regional and linguistic communities, and recognizing the multiple sites at which this work is done. The ICDHS first convened in 1999 in Barcelona, and has since met in Havana, Istanbul, Guadalajara, Helsinki, Osaka and Brussels, with participants from five continents. As befits such an international gathering, ICHDS meetings address ‘world’ themes such as peripheries and metropoles, the rewriting of narratives, and the cartography of design, and have generated new scholarship on what such an expanded and – some would argue – more accurate and even ethical history of design should do. We should be careful, however: does ‘global’ mean the same as ‘world’ or ‘transnational’? While ‘world’ has tended to emphasize areas that might be civilizations or empires through juxtaposition in a comparative approach, and ‘transnational’ refers to movements across national borders, engaging with the nation as a basic unit and then transcending it, a ‘global’ approach works with connections and to a lesser extent with comparisons. A ‘global’ study does not necessarily concern the entire world; rather, it might address the impact of long-distance forces on the local, as in Anne Gerritsen’s essay in this volume, or movement within a particular region as embedded in larger networks, as in Christine Guth’s essay. Is ‘the global’, then, simply about globalization: about cultural, economic, political and other exchanges and contacts between nations and regions? We are concerned that design history reflects design’s appearance around the world, but neither global power networks nor geography itself are necessarily the concern of every chapter in this volume. Similarly, in our working definition, ‘global design history’ is not a world design history, that is to say, an attempt at comprehensively mapping

Introduction 3

the history of design in all its geographical nooks and crannies. Global design history is not a topic but a methodology, one that acknowledges that design as a practice and product exists wherever there is human activity, on axes of time as well as space, and recognizes the importance of writing histories that introduce the multi-sited and various nature of design practices. Global design history begins from the conviction that knowledge is always fragmentary, partial and provisional, and only comes into its own through the unexpected challenges, confirmations, elaborations and unsettlings that result from encounter. Such a stance is imperative, we feel, particularly for students now adopting the methods they will use to understand the world through their own research. Far from an overarching narrative, then, global design history is a sited approach that recognizes the multiplicities and fragmented condition in which we experience and enact design, as part of being in the world. It is the recognition of interconnectivity, of situation within networks, often of asymmetrical power and exchange. And it can only be written through collaboration. In other words, Global Design History is emphatically not an attempt to write a new master narrative. Rather, this book asks three interrelated questions: what might an awareness of design contribute to global history? What might an awareness of the global contribute to the history of design, and to the practice of design itself? And how might increased attention to the global nuances of design practice today challenge and advance the practice of its history?

Models The contributions included in this volume show the wealth and diversity of focused studies within the developing field of global design history. Our contributors borrow approaches from the social sciences, in particular economics and sociology, from visual and material culture studies, and from the emerging field of global history in the humanities. Two approaches to global history have been key in recent debates: connections and comparisons. Connections are perhaps the easiest way to understand globalism and processes of globalization. Several contributions in this volume show how connections not only contribute to the exchange, trade and circulation of goods or objects; they are themselves shaped by such material artefacts. This demands a ‘centre-less’ logic for design history, in which the place/space of creation, and the spirit of the ‘pioneer’ or creative mind, are sidelined in order to privilege the interactive movement of things and ideas, and the processes of cross-fertilization of taste. One might think about the different meanings assumed by a specific object when moving across cultures; or the power of communication for ideas, images, and concepts concerning material or immaterial products, as illustrated by Michael Golec in the case of the American telephone systems of the 1920s. Communication is a particularly important concept in design history, most readily theorized in terms of codification and de-codification of design specifications, but also by skills and knowledge of productive processes and ideas about artefacts. As

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Gerritsen and Guth make clear in their essays, it is not just a matter of highlighting conceptual and material channels of communication, or of demonstrating how medium affects message and vice versa. As theories of communication make clear, connections often happen in an unstructured manner. They are affected by material and social conditions – a hill is easier to cross than a lake, and a friendly government is preferable to an enemy one. Like our image of history itself, lines of communication are malleable entities that are continuously re-cast. Historians like to talk about ‘entanglements’ not just to underline the human nature of connections, but also their messiness, complexity and impermanence. Such old-fashioned concepts as ‘influence’ (a hobby-horse in art historical circles) can be revivified through epidemiological metaphors to explain global processes of conception, success, as well as the phenomena of ‘bubbling up’, diffusion and ‘de-fusion’ of taste, fashion and design. In both its theoretical and practical forms, design has embraced the notion of networks. While establishing the importance of tracing the movements and agency of individual actors, network analysis links design to forms of professional organizations influenced by modern media of communication. Network theory helps us to understand how knowledge (of any form, from a decorative pattern or method of weaving to an industrial technique or piece of proprietary software) is transmitted across cultures. Symmetries and asymmetries of information – as economists remind us – account for profound differences in design across the globe, even in the present age of so-called cultural homogeneity. Papers in this volume address these issues in various ways. For example, John V. Maciuika’s essay on the global networks of the Deutscher Werkbund shows the making and unmaking of specific forms of design networks supported by forms of political power. Christopher Breward focuses on ‘fashion cities’ to reflect on the role of individual nodes within a globally networked system. Many connective historical narratives focus on questions of progress or modernization. These may combine economic explanations (trade, production, etc.) with cultural aspects (reception, negotiation, refusal, etc.). Conversely, comparative forms of global/world history focus on differences, discontinuities and fractures. Economic historians have contributed to comparative forms of global history through a decadelong debate over the so-called ‘great divergence’, the idea that the European economy ‘industrialized’ and society ‘modernized’ during the eighteenth century, while other parts of the world did not. Within this narrative, the twenty-first-century industrialization of India and China is seen as part of a process of ‘convergence’. While potentially compatible with the Eurocentrism that somewhat ironically haunts global history, the problem of why Europe grew rich and Asia did not in the modern period (and the consequent problem of how and why Asia is becoming as rich as Europe now) is indeed an important question for design history, a discipline that has long considered its subject matter central to processes of economic development. In this volume, the contribution by Victor Margolin on India vis-à-vis Europe, and John Styles’ look at early English importation of Indian cotton textiles, address issues of comparative development and thoughtfully raise the question of what made European design, innovation and associated economic growth, distinctive.

Introduction 5

Comparative methodologies are not widely used in design history. This is surprising if one thinks about the wealth of studies on different nations – both in Europe and also, increasingly, outside the borders of the Western world – that have addressed implicitly transnational topics such as the professionalization of design, the emergence of specific stylistic vocabularies, or the cultural embeddedness of design. The juxtaposition and eventual cross-referencing of existing research is one of the areas of great potential for the study both of design and design history. As Basile Zimmermann’s paper analysing online social networks in contemporary China shows, this approach can shed light not only on cultural similarities and differences but also on ideas of ‘cultural suitability’, attitudes to reproduction and copying. Comparisons also help us in understanding forms of hybridism and the borrowing of conceptual and material language, as Gökhan Karakus and his respondent, Edward S. Cooke, Jr., indicate in their discussion of modernism in Turkey. So how might design history add to these attempts to model the global? What appears distinctive to the field, when compared to other forms of history, is the materiality of its subject matter: the object. Objects are both the outcomes and the conveyors of design. The concept of reification (the process of making real) might appear rather crude and old-fashioned in an age when digital creation and communication seem to be separating creativity from materiality. However, several of the essays included here find in the confined, concrete space of the ‘designed object’ a way to deal with sometimes bewildering geographies and chronologies. For instance, Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Luca Molà’s analysis of the famous Molino ewer, now preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, presents it as the product of cross-cultural networks of manufacturing. This is one object that captures in its materiality complex relationships of production, taste and meaning that developed in space from Northern Europe (where the main body of the object was made), to Syria/Egypt (where it was inlaid in silver), and Venice (where it was used by the Molino family). The aspiration of global design history is not to privilege a special class of ‘global design objects’, those artefacts that represent processes of globalization better than others do. In fact, objects can only ever be local, but they capture in their material folds processes and ideas that are often super-local. The object is therefore never the final topic of research; it is the methodological tool through which innovative forms of research take shape. In her response to Ajmar-Wollheim and Molà, Dana Leibsohn refers to ‘difficult objects’ that challenge and disrupt established narratives. Curators refer to ‘surviving objects’ that testify to events and historical processes that other sources cannot reveal. Other essays in this volume, including Peter McNeil’s analysis of the collections of Australian designers Easton Pearson, creatively move from the materiality of artefacts to their linguistic valences, zooming in and out to connect the object with large-scale processes or to contextualize specific historical issues within what we might call ‘object-scapes’. The importance given to objects in design history is perhaps second only to the importance given to people. Even more than objects, human beings are space- and time-bound. Gerritsen uses ceramics, their Chinese producers and their cosmopolitan

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consumers to highlight the relationship between the local and the global and their mutual influence. Tom Barker and Ashley Hall, in their account of a collaborative project between London- and Accra-based design schools, NGOs and governmental organizations, stress the importance of particular personal actions and relations in shaping the course of the project. Recent global history has given great attention to the role of individuals in the attempt both to connect the micro and the macro, and to better understand agency (that is, the question of who decides what). Processes that might appear impersonal and supra-human in nature can be partly grasped through attending to particular life histories – which may or may not be treated as exceptional. Individuals express agency through objects and their design. A design history with global ambitions cannot ignore the role of consumers, and their attraction to ideas such as the ‘exotic’, the ‘ethnic’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘origin’. Nor should consumers’ capacity to refuse and negotiate design and artefacts be overlooked. Today, as McNeil makes clear, these phenomena are particularly evident in the field of fashion, where diasporic influences, cosmopolitan ideals, and local stereotypes inform not just the ways in which fashion is represented on catwalks or in magazines, but also the choices of consumers around the world. This brief discussion of models prompts a further question: in a field of subject matter that is for all practical purposes infinite, what sort of priorities might a global history of design set itself? We have already argued that a large-scale story, which tries to explain everything, is unsuitable to a field whose complexity and nuances should be preserved and safeguarded, even highlighted. One of the current preoccupations is revisionism. Classic interpretations of design as characterized by the double-breasted straitjacket of modernity and industrialization are already being challenged by global approaches. A half-century ago, in Pioneers of Modern Design (1936), Nikolaus Pevsner accepted that design was both ‘modern’ and quintessentially ‘industrial’, but by doing so placed it within a history that was both European and Eurocentric. A global perspective seriously questions such assumptions, and the grand narrative of design evolution they imply. Furthermore, it more accurately reflects design’s actual situation as a globally always-local practice, thus opening doors for history’s participation in the present. In this volume, the concept of design is proved to be useful in the study of periods prior to Pevsner’s ‘modern’, and in places where neither modernity nor industrialization are concepts of much heuristic power. However, we should not see the present ‘global-mania’ as just an occasion for disciplinary reassessment.

Subjects Where does global design history belong, then? Not only where it might seem most obvious – along the sailing routes of the East India Company, say, or sweatshops in the so-called ‘Third World’. Paradoxically, to be concerned with the global is in some ways to think independently of geography. Global design history is not a matter of studying ‘hot spots’ of exchange; it demands that all design be understood as implicated in a network of mutually relevant, geographically expansive connections.

Introduction 7

It is therefore helpful to think about certain characteristic subjects that act as helpful points of entry to the global. Amongst these, one of the most obvious is exchange. By this, we mean the simple movement of things in cultural space. Exchange is a term that can be applied not only to commodities intended for the market, but also tools, images, ideas and prototypes. Under this heading can be placed such diverse subtopics as commercial trade, scientific correspondence, the transplanting of plants and animals, and objects carried during migration (both voluntary and enforced). Design history is a unique way to link these disparate phenomena together. As Guth’s essay, amongst others, makes clear, focusing on objects permits us to see exchange as a materialized totality, not limited to particular frameworks such as economics, aesthetics, or technology. Any instance of exchange finds three key variables at work: value, information, and time. When an object moves across a boundary, its value is invariably redetermined – often increased, sometimes reduced, and certainly altered. (One can even argue that ‘boundaries’ are little more than lines, legal and otherwise, that mark such shifts.) How objects gain, retain, or lose value is partly determined by the information they might carry. How well can objects be read by those who come into contact with them? This depends very much on the things and people involved, but regardless, translatability is one clear advantage that artefacts have over texts. The content they carry, insofar as it is grounded in matters such as function and materiality, travels more easily than information embedded in written language. This is true for historians as well. Anyone who has tried to study the history of exchange archivally, by examining ships’ logs and bills of lading for example, will immediately grasp the usefulness of artefacts. Lists of numbers may represent one facet of the trading experience (a narrow definition of value), but they leave much unsaid. Nor is the historian’s viewpoint disconnected from that of the consumer. Much of the way that an object’s value and information are assessed within the market, both by the sender and the receiver, is a function of time. When an object is novel within a certain context, it may attain value simply through its newness. But precisely because of that unfamiliarity, it may not successfully transmit useful knowledge. The elapse of time may bring understanding, but perhaps also disregard. Value and information thus have a dynamic relation to one another over time. Moving beyond the central fact of exchange, we might also consider structures that encourage and shape movement. Empire and tourism are arguably amongst the most important examples. Both are social systems that pave the way for objects and people to travel. They set things and people into motion, and determine their routes. Both obviously incorporate power relations. In the case of empire, one geographical locale exerts control over its colonies or ‘margins’, thus defining itself as a ‘centre’. Tourism is less clear-cut, and can involve a degree of mutuality (Koreans go to France, and vice versa). But within the experience of any given person, the touristic site is rendered into a curiosity, while ‘home’ is tacitly rendered normative. Designed objects can mediate this dynamic, amplifying or contesting the flow patterns of empire and tourism: from the classical fragments sold to Grand Tourists in the

8 Sarah Teasley, Giorgio Riello and Glenn Adamson

eighteenth century, to the ‘authentically’ crafted curios of the nineteenth, to the protest posters and T-shirts of today. Then there are design phenomena that incorporate the global within themselves. These are structured in the same geographically encompassing fashion that global design history itself aspires to, and are therefore unusually apt subjects for study. First, there are contexts that claim to represent the world objectively, such as exhibitions (notably the ‘world’s fairs’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and museums that aspire to a degree of comprehensiveness. Such institutions are attempts to grasp the world, and it is no surprise that historically they have been intimately intertwined with both empire and tourism. While the two would seem to be roughly analogous – the temporary and permanent versions of a single phenomenon – it is worth noting that exhibitions have tended to be more explicitly ideological, whereas museums cloak themselves in a neutrality or objectivity that is in fact a form of ‘path dependency’. If a one-off exhibition can nakedly serve the interests of its sponsors, a permanent collection must in some sense constantly reaffirm its own past premises. It takes on its own logic and life. But exhibitions and museums do have in common the effort to miniaturize or edit the world, so that it can be comprehended. In the process, as Dipti Bhagat argues in her study of South African participation in expositions, they ‘perform’ the prejudices and objectives of their creators. This explicitly global vision, which may be inspiring or dismaying (or both), makes exhibitions and museums ideal candidates for the study of the design historian. Without any claim to such objectivity, but equally explicit in their global ambition, are multinational corporations. In recent years these entities have achieved such prominence within discussions of globalization (and anti-globalization) that they sometimes seem to define the politics of the subject. In this book, relatively little attention is paid to the subject, except as a backdrop to more small-scale or localized design innovation (as in the chapters by Zimmermann, McNeil and Karakus). This was not intentional on the part of the editors, but it does suggest that the role of companies in determining the course of global design has been somewhat overplayed in popular accounts, and points to the persistent power of objects and personal contact. Nevertheless, there is no denying the power and pervasiveness of corporations, and the degree to which they have reconfigured design’s impact on culture. Design historians may contribute to an understanding of these complex and ever-changing entities in at least two areas. First, one might look at the way that corporations consciously deploy design, as Golec does in his contribution to the book. Branding, architecture, and even the dress and deportment of employees, might be analysed either in strategic terms, or alternatively in a deconstructivist mode, as chinks in the armour of frictionless capital. Second, the design historian might look comparatively at zones of corporate influence, studying local variations in consumption of supposedly all-pervasive companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Carrefour, Sony, or Disney. A final subject for global design history is the designer her- or himself. As discussed by Jilly Traganou and Lucia Allais, globetrotting architects – the likes of Zaha Hadid or Rem Koolhaas – have emerged as key cultural brokers for the early twenty-first

Introduction 9

century. Koolhaas in particular has made globalization both the subject and mechanism of his practice, writing on Lagos as a city of the future, and designing Beijing’s CCTV tower as an emblem of Chinese nationalism. Barker and Hall’s account documents the movement of young designers, a less ‘glamorous’ but equally salient example of designers’ travel. The history of individual practitioners who refuse to be pinned down in space is much older than the ‘superstar’ designer or travelling studio, though. Earlier models of transnational practice can be found in the early modern artists who hopped from court to court, offering their services; craftspeople working in the conditions of a diaspora; designers associated with the military; and couturiers, who began using internationalism as a fashionable calling card in the late nineteenth century. There is no doubt, though, that technology has increased the incidence and ease with which design practice becomes global. After all, even the most rudimentary web page is a global artefact.

Conclusion Global design history might profitably address many other subjects: the recycling of goods; the influence of television, film and websites on taste; the effect of chain stores in retail environments; and many others. Indeed, there are few subjects within design history that would not profit from a global view. Even the most insular design phenomenon takes its meaning partly from what it excludes. In this sense, the present book offers a range of approaches for analysing the history of design in a global context, not in a spirit of comprehensiveness, but in the hopes of spurring further work. The bibliography of global design history resources – archives, organizations, existing research and the like – included with this book is intended as a further springboard for such research. The book has a simple structure, based on the principle of scholarly exchange. We offer a series of short case studies by a range of specialist design historians, designers and scholars in related disciplines including anthropology, sociology, art and architectural history. The chronological range is wide, from the early modern period to the present day, and so too is the breadth of subject matter. Essays address the whole gamut of design, from relatively traditional areas such as fashion, architecture and products, to new and emerging fields such as interaction and system design. Each chapter is followed by a short response by a scholar with related (but not identical) expertise, intended to focus key themes, to situate the essay within existing scholarly discussion, and to invite further engagement on the part of the reader. In some cases, we have paired specialists in the same area of the world; more often we have brought together researchers working on similar issues from different geographical and sometimes disciplinary bases. The implication here is that global design history cannot be a solo affair. It requires collaboration. In assembling the book, we sought to include contributors who could reflect knowledgeably on the discipline, as well as the specifics of their chosen topic. This has inevitably and rather ironically led to a tilt towards regions where design history is particularly wellestablished as an academic discipline and area of scholarly research: Europe and

10 Sarah Teasley, Giorgio Riello and Glenn Adamson

North America. However, we have tried to reflect perspectives from other locations, and have consciously sought to achieve some breadth of geography in the book’s coverage – though we make no claims to even-handedness, much less comprehensiveness, in this respect. Despite the range and quality that we hope to have achieved in this book, global design history is a practice in its very infancy. And while we hope that anyone interested in design history, global history or design practice in a global context will find the volume useful, we are particularly excited for a response from the next generation of researchers and designers: students who are still forming their intellectual paths, and who might define their careers in other ways than area-specific expertise. The expectations that face these emerging researchers are high. Language study, methodological sophistication, and creative empirical research of a high standard are all absolute requirements. This poses real challenges, both to educators and students. We feel strongly however that the effort is not only worthwhile, but absolutely necessary. Since the 1990s, design history’s relevance within the humanities and social sciences has been based primarily on an interest in consumption studies, shared by historians, sociologists, economists, and anthropologists. All of these disciplines are now undergoing their own ‘global turns’. As was the case with consumption, design history has a crucial contribution to make in such a context. Design may be only one piece of the big puzzle of global history, but it connects other factors in a uniquely lateral way. Go-between; communicative sign; commodity; weapon; souvenir; tool: an artefact can be all of these things, and more. Design has always been a fluid, global affair. It is now time for historians to use our discipline to reflect this fact, and place our own voices in truly, responsibly global discussions.

1 THE GLOBAL RENAISSANCE Cross-cultural objects in the early modern period Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Luca Molà

In his advice book aimed at the gentleman, first published in 1546, the Italian friar and scholar Sabba da Castiglione outlines the ornaments suitable for the interior: Others furnish and adorn their rooms with tapestries and textiles from Flanders with figures, foliage and greenery; some with Turkish and Syrian carpets and bed covers; . . . some with ingeniously wrought leather hangings from Spain; and others with new, fantastic and bizarre, but ingenious things from the Levant or Germany . . . And all these ornaments I recommend and praise, because they sharpen one’s intellect, politeness, civility and courtesy.1 The international range of the furnishings listed is dazzling, and at odds with a notion of the Italian Renaissance object-scape as the quintessential expression of a predominant and self-contained culture. If we compare Sabba’s description with contemporary inventories and account books, we can see that his is not just an aspirational list compiled in the tradition of humanistic rhetoric, but an accurate reflection of current practice. As this text also makes clear, the display of foreign goods is not a purely aesthetic exercise, but an activity at the core of early modern self-fashioning strategies. What does ‘the Renaissance’ have to do with this globalized view of material culture and, in turn, what does material globalization have to do with current conceptualizations of ‘the Renaissance’?2 The ‘Global Renaissance’ is an ongoing research project aimed at exploring for the first time through objects, pictures and texts the impact that the European Renaissance had on the rest of the world and, in turn, how this period, generally presented as a quintessentially Western phenomenon, was in fact widely informed by cultures from around the globe. Spanning the centuries between 1300 and 1700, the project aims at setting European material culture against the global background of intensifying cultural and economic connections. It also questions traditional views

12 Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Luca Molà

of this period, dominated by narratives of the emergence of European nation states and a growing divide between ‘the West’ and the rest of the world.3 Instead, by looking at the relationship between Europe, the Islamic world, sub-Saharan Africa, India, China, Japan and America, it transcends narrow geographical boundaries and explores through material, visual and written culture how Renaissance Europe informed and responded to the rest of the world. Tapping into a growing interest by scholars in global connections, the project intends to offer a fresh perspective on the Renaissance. The notion of a ‘Global Renaissance’ is seemingly a paradox, although it is intriguing to observe, with a Jakob Burckhardt’s hat on, how many civilizations around the world – from the Ottomans to the Mughals, from the Italians to the Ming – experienced some kind of ‘efflorences’ between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries.4 It is not, however, the conventional meaning of ‘Renaissance’ as essentially a ‘movement’ limited to the sphere of high culture that we intend to explore.5 In this limited perspective, it would be undoubtedly absurd to suggest that the whole world experienced a process of cultural ‘rebirth’ closely comparable to that of Europe. Our approach, by contrast, aims to consider the implications that the revival of antiquity and the diffusion of humanism – with its positive appreciation for the classical notions of ‘magnificence’ and ‘splendour’ – had for the emergence of new models of consumption, at first among Italian elites and then throughout the continent, creating a distinctive Renaissance material culture that in various degrees informed all aspects of European societies.6 If we, therefore, understand the Renaissance as primarily an all-embracing phenomenon based on a distinctive and innovative way of using objects as social and cultural signifiers with an inner civilizing dynamic, then the process of global exchange and the complex system of interconnections that developed during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries would have enabled some aspects of the Renaissance, particularly those embedded within material culture, to have a genuinely global reach. It is thus not so far-fetched to assert that the cultural and material vitality of the Renaissance was not a ‘local’, if panEuropean, phenomenon, but instead the result of a network of impulses that went far beyond Europe or even the Middle East, encompassing China and the New World. Moreover, this approach will allow us to detect the development of an ecumenical visual and material language on a global scale, and the emergence of an international community of taste.7 The growing integration of global markets in the early modern period opened up new possibilities and provided a fundamental stimulus for the production in Europe of goods that were meant to cross cultural divides. Among the industrial artefacts with a global dimension, glass is certainly one of the most interesting and less studied. The skilled glassmakers of Murano were able to devise and produce a variety of different objects aimed at the growing Renaissance global market.8 If the full-size enamelled and bejewelled set of armour for parade made entirely of crystal glass and complete with a glass scimitar and saddle – based on an original metal armour brought from Syria – that Venetian merchants planned to commission from a famous workshop in Murano in 1512 remains a unique piece of inventiveness,9

The Global Renaissance 13

the production and exportation of vases and mosque lamps with Islamic inscriptions for the markets of Cairo, Damascus and Istanbul was a common occurrence. Pilgrims going to the Holy Land on board Venetian galleys mention them already in the late fifteenth century, and drawings with precise specifications and measures were sent to Murano by Venetian diplomats residing in the Ottoman Empire during the late sixteenth century.10 A much wider and truly global market was available for glass beads in various shapes and colours (in the documentary sources called rosette, smaltini, paternostrami, contarie, margaritine) that imitated precious stones or had multicoloured designs within them, and whose technology underwent a continuous evolution throughout the Renaissance. Indeed, Venetian artisans and merchants supplied Seville, Lisbon and Amsterdam with a wide range of beads that the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch traders afterwards exchanged for much more valuable products in the markets of Asia, Africa and America.11 According to a secret report written for the Grand Duke of Tuscany in the early 1590s, among the main export markets for Venetian beads, mirrors, and crystal objects in the shape of lions, ships or fountains were the Iberian peninsula and the Indies, a trade that was worth tens of thousands of ducats every year.12 Interested in the commercial possibilities that this information documented, the Florentines were soon able to attract Venetian artisans to Pisa, where, on commission from a Portuguese converso (former Jew belonging to the Sephardic community) merchant based in Antwerp, they started producing a peculiar type of round bead with a light blue-yellowish hue that imitated a Western African marble much in demand on the coastal markets of Angola.13 Silk fabrics, too, were one of the most important global commodities during the Renaissance, being highly appreciated and frequently craved by the elites and ‘middling sorts’ in all continents. A piece of brocaded silk velvet with a crimson colour produced in Venice around the middle of the sixteenth century provides us with one of the best examples of a ‘virtual’ Renaissance global object, which could have been made – and probably was made – by processing and assembling together raw and semi-finished materials coming from all the known corners of the world. Indeed, for heavy fabrics such as brocades, Venetians commonly employed silk threads originating in different parts of Asia, where local reelers – usually women – joined together smaller or greater numbers of cocoons’ filaments in order to obtain a thread with variable degrees of thickness. Caravans loaded with thick silk produced in the regions around the Caspian Sea arrived from Persia to the eastern Mediterranean shores, where they were joined by hundreds of parcels of thinner Syrian threads and then carried on board ships to Venice. Here the two different types of silks were mixed together to form the warp and weft of luxury textiles such as our brocaded velvet. The pigments employed for dyeing these silks in crimson – the most valuable and noble of all colours – had also for a long time been supplied by the Asian continent. In the early 1540s, however, a new red dye arrived for the first time in Venice from the New World and quickly conquered the greatest share of the market. This was Mexican cochineal, a material obtained from the parasites of a particular species of cactus that was produced in New Spain by native peasants

14 Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Luca Molà

under the control of Spanish colonial landowners, and then massively exported across the Atlantic to Europe with the annual Royal Fleet. Cochineal had the same chemical composition of traditional kermes but had a much higher colouring power and fastness, all qualities that made this dye immediately popular among silk cloth producers.14 The Asian silks dyed with American pigments, and treated with Turkish or Italian alum as mordent, were then enriched for the weaving of brocades with metal thread made with strips of beaten gold, which by the middle of the sixteenth century was still reaching Venice from the mines of sub-Saharan Africa thanks to the intermediation of Muslim and Portuguese merchants.15 Finally, all these global materials were processed and then woven by Venetian artisans into a brocade with a typical Renaissance design (in its turn mutuated and modified through the centuries from original Oriental and Middle Eastern flower patterns), using Italian know-how in combination with techniques that had originated in different parts of the world – velvet making, for instance, seems to have arrived in Italy in the early fourteenth century from China via Persia,16 while the application of cochineal to silk was first discovered by a Spanish immigrant to Mexico in 1537.17 The global trading connections that had acted as a centripetal force for the concentration in Venice of all these goods were afterwards converted into a centrifugal motion that disseminated Venetian silk fabrics for the consumption of elite customers across the globe. The complex unfolding of this process of visual, material and technological globalization can be explored in greater detail by looking at three types of nonEuropean commodities that participated in different ways to the creation within Europe of a shared object-scape: carpets, metalwork and ceramics. What happened to the look and meaning of these objects as they moved across cultures? Carpets provide a useful starting point in assessing the impact of global objects on Renaissance Europe. Generally purchased on the markets of Syria, Egypt or the Ottoman Empire, from the early fifteenth century carpets became a popular furnishing within wealthy Italian domestic interiors, where they were used to cover all kinds of surfaces, from tables to chests, from writing desks to day-beds (lettucci).18 However, in spite of their pervasiveness, they provide an intriguing example of resistance to naturalization, in terms of both manufacture and consumption. It is clear that although the European demand increased considerably during the course of the Renaissance, generally speaking carpets did not change significantly in design, shape, technique or other aspects of manufacture to fit Western requirements better. There is a sense, for example, that the range of different designs available was quite limited, prompting some Italian customers to specify exactly what type of carpets they did not want to purchase.19 Other methods of customization dear to the Italian market, such as the application of armorial devices, provide another indication of how reluctantly the carpets industry engaged with European demands. A letter from the Florentine consul in Constantinople, Carlo Baroncelli, to Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence in 1473 apologizes for the fact that the Turkish carpet that he is sending lacks the Medici arms because the manufacturing process of an armorial carpet is punishingly slow.20 A marked resistance to customization is also visible in the shapes available, which only rarely were intended specifically for Western

The Global Renaissance 15

furniture, as with table carpets made in Turkey or Egypt, with the cruciform design conceived especially to fit the high-legged tables of Western Europe (see Figure 1.1). The location and uses of carpets within European households seemingly confirm this picture of physical and semantic displacement. Not only did the carpets’ original placement on the floor not find much currency in Europe, where their status and value would demand a more prestigious location, but their meaning as objects closely associated with prayer was largely lost within secular Western environments. Even in the very rare instances in which Italian inventories retain an allusion to religious ritual, such as in the Squarciafico household in Genoa in 1567, where ‘nine praying carpets’ could be found, it is also clear from the carpets’ material surroundings that this was merely a reference to their design, and not a suggestion that the carpets would participate within devotional practices.21 On the whole, although carpets enjoyed a remarkable popularity during the Renaissance, the geographical and cultural disconnection between production and consumption meant that as a commodity they remained an object of unilateral exchange situated at the periphery of European Renaissance material culture, generating neither indigenous imitations nor other material responses. The process of interconnection becomes more dynamic with another type of global commodity that was highly appreciated by European consumers in the fifteenth century: Islamic damascened metalwork. Produced in Syria or Egypt in significant quantities by Islamic craftsmen, it included a wide variety of fine household objects ranging from inkstands to boxes, from fruit bowls to candlesticks. The network of production responsible for the manufacture of these objects is

FIGURE 1.1 Table

carpet, Turkey or Egypt, mid-16th century

Source: ©V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

16 Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Luca Molà

remarkably cross-cultural. The itinerary that we know was performed by the Molino ewer (see Figure 1.2) – an object owing its name to the Venetian family whose arms are inscribed on the lid – suggests an extraordinarily multilayered biography.22 If we look at the first stages of manufacture, the ewer would qualify as a Northern European object. Made in Germany or Flanders between 1450 and 1500, it was originally a serially-produced plain brass ewer bearing a characteristically late-gothic elongated shape and zoomorphic handle. If we look at its decoration it would qualify as Islamic, as this object would have been shipped from Northern Europe over to Syria or Egypt to be inlaid in silver by local Muslim craftsmen with elaborate geometric and vegetal Mamluk ornament. After this transformative decoration was

Ewer, brass engraved and damascened with silver with filling of black lacquer, possibly Flanders or Germany and probably decorated in Egypt or Syria, 1450–1500

FIGURE 1.2

Source: © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Global Renaissance 17

applied, the piece was then sent to Italy, where it would have been customized through the application of the family’s coat of arms. Therefore, when we take into account its customization and consumption, an Italian claim can be added to the chorus. We are thus looking at an object whose production and consumption is the direct result of an interconnected network of manufacture, trade and supply operating on a truly international scale. Its palimpsest-like identity is reflected in the naming of objects such as this within Renaissance written records. In his Venetia città nobilissima of 1581, Francesco Sansovino refers to them as ‘bronzi lavorati all’azimina’, which we can translate as ‘bronzes wrought in an Arabic fashion’.23 Within domestic inventories they are often listed as objects ‘alla damaschina’, hinting at their supposed provenance from Damascus. In the inventories of the Venetian community in Damascus, however, these objects acquire a more ethnic meaning, as they are often labelled as ‘alla morescha’, thus alluding to their Moorish origins.24 It is with ceramics, however, that the evidence for global matrixes at work in the early modern period is striking. Focusing on sixteenth-century Italian tin-glazed earthenware, generally known as maiolica, is enlightening. Maiolica is rightly perceived by scholarship as the quintessential Renaissance medium – in the conventional, ‘humanistic’ sense of the word – combining as it does a low intrinsic, monetary value with a high added value provided by its extraordinary variety and multiplicity of shapes, decorations and iconographic themes – what Richard Goldthwaite has termed ‘the value of culture’.25 Widely appreciated by the elites across Europe – from scholars to princes – because of its high intellectual cache, Italian maiolica embodied the Renaissance idea of the culturally charged artefact and was enthusiastically collected. Because of its unparalleled creative receptivity, maiolica can also be seen as an excellent indicator and agent of design transmission across the globe. If we look at the European production, one of the first examples of global ceramics is sixteenth-century maiolica made in the Ligurian city of Genoa, then a newly established centre of ceramic production. Most contemporary Italian maiolica was largely inspired by classical motifs, complying with a Western notion of disegno and sometimes aspiring to naturalism. Genoese maiolica was distinctive for its rejection of all of these visual conventions. Instead, relying almost exclusively on white-and-blue decoration, it imitated its contemporary Asian counterparts, either Turkish Iznikware or Ming porcelain.26 Indeed, in a seminal article on the culture of porcelain in world history, Robert Finlay charts the emergence in the sixteenth century of ‘global patterns of trade which fostered the recycling of cultural fantasies, the creation of hybrid wares, and the emergence of a common visual language’.27 Finlay’s analysis generates, as he admits, ‘a certain vertigo’ as he traces the global connections at the root of the success of ceramics worldwide. Being much cheaper than its Chinese counterpart, in the course of the sixteenth century Genoese maiolica flooded the markets worldwide. Distributed via Antwerp to Northern Europe, by 1550 it had also become prominent among glazed earthenware exported via Spain to the American market. Its appearance and popularity were coincident with the peaking of Genoese influence in Spain, a time when the

18 Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Luca Molà

bankers of Genoa repeatedly rescued the financially troubled Spanish monarchy and when Ligurians infiltrated all social levels of the Iberian peninsula. Archaeological excavations in Mexico have confirmed the popularity of Genoese pottery in the New World, where potsherds have been found in considerable quantities, and which are most often associated with late sixteenth-century Ming porcelains, coming into Mexico on annual galleons from Manila. It is therefore possible that ‘the connection between Chinese and European ceramics, usually believed to have been established through the Mediterranean world from the East, did in fact occur, via the Western hemisphere, in America’.28 Known locally as ‘porcelletta’ or ‘little porcelain’, Genoese maiolica obviously claimed a connection with its superior Chinese prototype. However, it was also rooted in the local production and often consumed in situ. The term ‘porcelletta’ is striking, because it is close to the more common ‘porcellana’, porcelain, but it is a diminutive expression, almost a term of endearment, evoking familiarity. It did not just refer to its design, but could also be used to refer to the white-and-blue colour scheme of these objects, as the expression ‘pinti color porceleta’ (‘painted of the colour of porcelain’), found in Ligurian potters’ workshops’ records, suggests.29 It is frequently found in Genoese interiors.30 This pottery, made ‘global’ by virtue of its design inspired by Turkish or Chinese models, was also ‘local’: sourced from a Ligurian workshop, perhaps even made by order, assimilated as a familiar object for use, and renamed accordingly. There is no pretence, obviously, that our investigation into the material aspects of this ‘Global Renaissance’ will substitute the current notions of that period held by cultural and art historians. But unlike other scholars, who consider the production, exchange and consumption of the objects we have been talking about as inhabiting ‘the margins of the Renaissance’ (coherently with a view of the phenomenon as a restricted and elitist ‘movement’ animated by a small group of humanists interested mainly in the Greek and Roman classics),31 we believe that a full understanding of the European Renaissance cannot be achieved without taking into consideration the complex processes of exchange, cross-fertilization and hybridization with other civilizations across the world. It is, therefore, the beginning of a progressively more globally integrated material culture that we want to explore, in the conviction that this process began much earlier than is generally thought, and that it was crucial in informing, and in many ways defining, what we today understand as ‘the Renaissance’. Since our research is just at the beginning, much still remains to be done. We would need to assess, for instance, the role of different cross-cultural agents – such as trading minorities or diplomats – in disseminating design patterns and suggesting new consumption habits; the ways in which technologies of production were acquired, adapted and transformed, and what were the implications and impacts for different material cultures locally; the shifting meanings and uses of objects according to the changing cultural and social milieux in which they moved; and also the conflicts and resistance that such movements created. These are no small tasks, such that only a globally-disseminated team of scholars with a multicultural range of

The Global Renaissance 19

specializations can dream of accomplishing them. But this is the challenge of modern scholarship: global questions require global enterprises.

Notes 1 Sabba da Castiglione (1561) Ricordi ovvero ammaestramenti, 1561, f. 118v: ‘Alcun’altri apparano et adornano le lor stanze di panno di razza et di celoni venuti di Fiandra, fatti à figure et à fogliami, et chi à verdure, et chi con tapeti et moschetti turcheschi et soriani . . . chi con corami ingegnosamente lavorati venuti di Spagna, et alcun’altri con cose nuove, fantastiche, et bizarre, ma ingegnose, venute di Levante ò d’Alemagna . . .; e tutti questi ornamenti ancora commendo et laudo, perche arguiscono ingegno, politezza, civiltà, et cortegiania . . .’ 2 On the current debate on the concept of the Renaissance see Luca Molà (2008) ‘Rinascimento’, in Marcello Fantoni and Amedeo Quondam (eds) (2008) Le parole che noi usiamo. Categorie storiografiche e interpretative dell’Europa moderna, Rome: Bulzoni, pp. 11–31. 3 For a reassessment of this view see Kenneth Pomeranz (2001) The Great Divergence: Europe, China and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press; and Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik (1999) The World that Trade Created: Culture, Society, and the World Economy, 1400–The Present, Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe. 4 For the concept of ‘efflorences’ see Jack Goldstone (2002) ‘Efflorences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the “Rise of the West” and the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of World History, 13, pp. 323–89. For the Renaissance seen in a global context see Jack Goody (2010) Renaissances: The One or the Many?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 5 See Peter Burke (2007) ‘Decentring the Renaissance: The Challenge of Postmodernism’, in Stephen J. Milner (ed.) At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 36–49. 6 Richard A. Goldthwaite (1987) ‘The Empire of Things: Consumer Demand in Renaissance Italy’, in Francis W. Kent and Patricia Simons (eds) Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 153–75; Idem (1993) Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300–1600, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press; Evelyn Welch (2002) ‘Public Magnificence and Private Display: Pontano’s De splendore and the Domestic Arts’, Journal of Design History, 15, pp. 211–27. 7 Robert Finlay (1998) ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, 9, pp. 141–87; Rosamond E. Mack (2000) Bazaar to Piazza. Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. 8 On the import of Venetian glass in China see Emily Byrne Curtis (2009) Glass Exchange Between Europe and China, 1550–1800: Diplomatic, Mercantile and Technological Interactions, Aldershot: Ashgate. 9 G. Dalla Santa (1916–17) ‘Commerci, vita privata e notizie politiche dei giorni della lega di Cambrai (da lettere del mercante veneziano Martino Merlini)’, Atti del Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 76, pp. 1566–68. 10 Deborah Howard (2000) Venice & The East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100–1500, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 11 Paolo Zecchin (2005) ‘La nascita delle conterie veneziane’, Journal of Glass Studies, 47, pp. 77–92. 12 Gino Corti (1973) ‘L’industria del vetro di Murano alla fine del secolo XVI in una relazione al Granduca di Toscana’, Studi Veneziani, 13, pp. 649–54. 13 Luigi Zecchin (1987) ‘“Conterie” e “contarie”’, in Luigi Zecchin, Vetro e vetrai di Murano: studi sulla storia del vetro, vol. 1, Venice: Arsenale, pp. 85–91.

20 Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Luca Molà

14 Luca Molà (2000) The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 55–137. 15 Ugo Tucci (1981) ‘Le emissioni monetarie di Venezia e i movimenti internazionali dell’oro’, in Idem, Mercanti, navi, monete nel Cinquecento veneziano, Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 275–316; Philip D. Curtin (1983) ‘Africa and the Wider Monetary World’, in John F. Richards (ed.) Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, pp. 231–68. 16 Sophie Desrosiers (2000) ‘Sur l’origine d’un tissu qui a participé à la fortune de Venise: le velours de soie’, in Luca Molà, Reinhold C. Mueller, and Claudio Zanier (eds), La seta in Italia dal Medioevo al Seicento. Dal baco al drappo, Venice: Marsilio, pp. 35–61. 17 Woodrow Borah (1943) Silk Raising in Colonial Mexico, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 10. 18 Donald King and David Sylvester (eds) (1983) The Eastern Carpet in the Western World, London: Arts Council of Great Britain; Serare Yetkin (1981) Historical Turkish Carpets, Istanbul: Türkiye is. Bankasi Cultural Publications; Jennifer Mary Wearden (2003) Oriental Carpets and their Structure: Highlights from the V&A Collection, London: V&A Publications; J. Mills (1983) ‘The Coming of the Carpet to the West’, in King and Sylvester (eds) Eastern Carpet, pp.10–23; Giovanni Curatola (1983) Oriental Carpets, London: Souvenir; Marco Spallanzani (2007) Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence, Florence: SPES. 19 Marco Spallanzani (2007) Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence, Florence: SPES, pp. 104–5, doc. 78. 20 Ibid., p. 105, doc. 80. 21 Archivio di Stato di Genova, Fondo Notai Antichi, 2501, 12 October 1567. 22 Anna Contadini (1999) ‘Artistic Contacts and Future Tasks’, in Charles Burnett and Anna Contadini (eds) Islam and the Italian Reinassance, Colloquia 5, The Warburg Institute, London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, pp. 1–65; Idem (2006) ‘Middle-Eastern Objects’, in Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (eds) At Home in Renaissance Italy, London: V&A Publications, pp. 308–21. 23 Francesco Sansovino (1581) Venetia città nobilissima, Venice, p. 142: ‘Le credentiere d’argento, et gli altri fornimenti di porcellane, di peltri, et di rami, ò bronzi lavorati all’azimina, sono senza fine’. 24 Francesco Bianchi and Deborah Howard (2003) ‘Life and Death in Damascus: The Material Culture of Venetians in the Syrian Capital in the Mid-Fifteenth Century’, Studi Veneziani, 46, pp. 233–300. 25 Richard Goldthwaite (1989) ‘The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42, pp. 1–32. 26 Federico Marzinot (1979) Ceramica e ceramisti di Liguria, Genova: Sagep; Idem (ed.) (1989) La ceramica, Genova; Carlo Varaldo (1994) ‘Maiolica ligure: contributo della ricerca archeologica alla conoscenza delle tipologie decorative del vasellame’, Albisola, 27, pp. 171–93. 27 Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art’, p. 146; John Carswell (1985) Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and its Impact on the Western World, Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Gallery and University of Chicago. 28 Florence C. Lister and Robert H. Lister (2003) ‘Ligurian Maiolica in Spanish America’, Atti XXVI Convegno Internazionale della Ceramica, Centro Ligure per la Storia della Ceramica, Albisola, pp. 311–20. 29 Anna Maria Rossetti (1995) ‘Ceramica a Savona ed Albisola nella seconda metà del Cinquecento: produzione e commercio’, in Atti XXV Convegno Internazionale della Ceramica, Centro Ligure per la Storia della Ceramica, Albisola, p. 161. 30 See for example Archivio di Stato di Genova, Fondo Notai Antichi, 2502, 14 May 1568. 31 Peter Burke (2005) ‘Renaissance Europe and the World’, in Jonathan Woolfson (ed.) Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 52–70.

RESPONSE Dana Leibsohn

Desire quickens trade, objects travel, and people reinvent meanings for things they own. From Florence to Lima, foreign artworks and exotic commodities were commissioned, bought, and sold. Yet how influential were these processes in early modernity, how much weight should these practices hold in our exhibitions and scholarship? “The Global Renaissance” argues that cross-cultural trade has not yet been given its due, at least not for the early modern period. Working from this premise, the research project directed by Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Luca Molà seeks to revise traditional concepts of the Renaissance in light of recent work on the history of consumption and world trade. Their work may be in its early days but their essay in this volume already suggests what is at stake in examining the mechanics, the aspirations, and the covetousness that drew Genoese maiolica and Tlaxcalan cochineal across the world. By casting the display of foreign goods as an “activity at the core of early modern self-fashioning strategies” Ajmar-Wollenheim and Molà set forth an ambitious challenge, asking how long-distance trade shaped the constituent elements of early modernity.1 Across the last decade, the global turn in art and humanities scholarship has produced fine work on visual culture and the history of globalization.2 This research has successfully complicated older understandings of cultural entanglement, especially models of core-periphery and colony-metropole. Yet there exists no consensus on what “the global” signifies in the context of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. The issue, of course, is not simply one of geography. As Craig Clunas recently remarked, “globalisation, at whatever period in history, has to be seen as something other than a new name for ‘the West and the Rest.’”3 He is no doubt correct. Yet is it possible to imagine a project on the early modern period wholly unfettered by this dichotomy? Even global perspectives that rely upon contrapuntal juxtaposition—in which Western Europe is no less and no more “a center” than,

22 Dana Leibsohn

say, Japan or Brazil—tend to privilege sites in “the East” along with those in “the West.” As outlined in this volume, “The Global Renaissance” engages these issues implicitly. Cities in Italy serve as a center of sorts, functioning as sites of both centripetal pull and centrifugal dispersion. Given the ambition to think anew the range and meaning of “the Renaissance,” this seems apt. At the same time, this vantage onto the global is unsettling, for it leaves essentially unresolved the historical role of objects created far from Italy and the people who traded in the economies and pleasures of such things. The easy response would be a turn toward inclusiveness (i.e., bringing more regions of the world into the story). To my eye, however, the problem is more intractable and it turns on how complex a vision of the global we are willing to sustain. Let me take one example. In 1609, Antonio de Morga, a colonial official serving the Spanish Crown in the Philippines, published an account of merchandise flowing into Manila from Southeast Asia and China.4 For many collectors and consumers in the early modern period, Manila would have been a distant and peripheral place. Yet the commodities de Morga described would not have been completely alien. Among the exotica that caught his eye were bundles of exquisite silks and cotton blankets, jewels and fruits, beasts of burden and finely crafted furniture. He also documented more modest things: nails, Chinese singing birds, and “gewgaws and ornaments of little value” that, in spite of (or perhaps because of) their cheapness, Spaniards found particularly delightful. In modern scholarship, de Morga’s account is usually read as an iconography of foreign goods. And it does indeed chart the sea of commodities that flowed into the Spanish Americas in the early seventeenth century (few of which survive). To stop there, however—that is, to read de Morga primarily as an inventory—is to miss the nuanced force of his work. For instance, when de Morga claims he will never have enough paper and ink to catalogue all the goods coming into Manila, his prose resonates with the topos of ineffability well honed in early modern travel writing and narratives of conquest, including those of Columbus and Cortés. De Morga’s writing also describes, and poignantly so, how the foreignness of Asia became constituent of, yet never fully assimilated into the culture and topography of, Spanish colonization. This anxiety, fueled by desires to make sense of (and profit from) the exotic developed in response to local conditions in Manila, but it would have resonated with residents and merchants in Amsterdam, Venice, Batavia and Damascus. It has become fashionable to regard the early modern world as one of connected histories.5 So what are we to make of de Morga? Admittedly, his work transpires far from any orthodox notion of “the Renaissance,” in both time and setting. Yet is his experience, sewn through as it is with tropes of wonder and excess, merely “another example” of early modern cosmopolitan taste? Is it anything more than ethnographic enrichment of a story already well known? The objects discussed by Ajmar-Wollheim and Molà highlight ideas and technologies that moved across cultural boundaries. By focusing upon historical origins

Response 23

and patterns of reinterpretation, “the Global Renaissance” shows how material objects result from and bear witness to complex practices of travel and exchange. And yet we know that the purchase of porcelain and silver, silk and glass would not, indeed could not, “mean the same thing” in Milan and Manila. Even at their origin points, in Jingdezhen (porcelain) and Zacatecas (silver), stable fields of economic and semiotic value did not exist. And so one issue that hovers at the margins of “the Global Renaissance” is how to account for distinct expressions of cosmopolitanism. Beyond this, conflict shaped the networks of early modern exchange. And this produced sites where no meeting of early modern minds or bodies could transpire. It may be tempting to leave such things aside. Yet I would argue that these regions and objects—these points of fissure and incommensurability—also have a productive role to play in “the Global Renaissance.” To pursue this would require a sense of “the global” that is more porous than unitary; it would also require a map of the world that gave pride of place, at least on occasion, to things that could never be shared. Why complicate things in this way? In part, it would allow “the Global Renaissance” to more fairly engage the range of lived experiences that took root in, and often defined, the early modern period. It would also enable Ajmar-Wollheim and Molà to address why connotations based on site of origin, so crucial to the allure of the foreign, were seemingly enduring for some materials, fluid for others.6 It is, of course, difficult to acknowledge that certain boundaries remained impassable. Yet the promise of Ajmar-Wollheim’s and Molà’s project stems from its very ambition to establish a more sophisticated understanding of “the global” within the context of early modern practice. “The Global Renaissance” will, of course, open our understandings of Western European traditions; it will be even more compelling, however, if it can also offer new perspectives onto how the foreign engaged the familiar, and why, for people of the early modern past, some forms of Otherness seemed easy to assimilate but, in fact, were not.

Notes 1

2

The intellectual and conceptual underpinnings of Renaissance thought and practice at work in “the Global Renaissance” is not a theme I highlight here, but see, for instance James Elkins and Robert Williams (eds) (2008) Renaissance Theory, London: Routledge, for others who have begun this conversation. Work in this vein includes Timothy Brook (2008) Vermeer’s Hat: the Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, New York: Bloomsbury Press; Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes (eds) (2008) Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Elizabeth Pilliod (eds) (2005) Time and Place: the Geohistory of Art, Aldershot: Ashgate; Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (eds) (2004) Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500–1800, London: V&A Publications; Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton (2000) Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West, Ithaca: Cornell University Press; and Jay Levenson (ed.) (2007) Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th centuries, Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

24 Dana Leibsohn

3 4 5

6

Craig Clunas, “All the Goods of the Eastern and Western Oceans . . . Contact, Exchange and Luxury in Ming China,” Paper delivered at the Folger Library, ‘Contact and Exchange: China and the West,’ Washington, DC, September 2009. Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, Mexico City, 1609. For an articulate argument on webs of interaction that bound the early modern world together, see, for instance, Luke Clossey (2006) “Merchants, Migrants, Missionaries and Globalization in the Early-Modern Pacific,” Journal of Global History 1, pp. 41–58, and for persuasive, yet more skeptical positions, see Frederick Cooper (2005) Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press; Ann Laura Stoler (2009) Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton: Princeton University Press; and Anna Tsing (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Given that no connotative field was fully coherent or unchanging, the “Chinese-ness” of porcelain nevertheless adhered to ceramics with more tenacity than did the “Americanness” of silver. For interesting discussions of objects and their signifying power related to site of origin, see Robert Finlay (1998) “The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History,” Journal of World History 9, pp. 141–87; Rosamond Mack (2000) Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600, Berkeley: University of California Press; and Byron Hamann (2010), “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver and Clay,” Art Bulletin 92, pp. 6–35.

2 GLOBAL DESIGN IN JINGDEZHEN Local production and global connections Anne Gerritsen

In 1685, a Jesuit missionary by the name of Louis Daniel le Comte (1655–1728) was sent to China.1 Le Comte originated from a noble Bordeaux family, and from the age of fifteen had devoted himself to the study of mathematics, physics and logic. His aim, as it was for so many others who joined the Society of Jesus, was to use his learning to support his missionary work. Le Comte and the five other Jesuit mathematicians selected for this venture brought with them superior knowledge across the sciences, including astronomy, physics and cartography. It was their impression that the Chinese were unlikely to ‘take a salutary spiritual potion unless it be seasoned with an intellectual flavoring’.2 After an horrendous journey, he arrived at the court in Beijing in 1688 and was sent by the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722) to the remote northern province of Shaanxi. He spent four years there, toiling in the wilderness and attempting to make converts and recording astronomical observations. The letters he wrote to members of the French court upon his return were published in two volumes in 1696 and 1697, and reached a wide audience throughout Europe.3 Le Comte’s understanding of China as a sinocentric, complex civilization, with large urban centres, an hierarchical structure of governance, and a meritocratic educational system continued to feed into European visions of the Chinese Empire throughout the eighteenth century.4 Le Comte wrote extensively on Chinese crafts: porcelain, but also lacquer, silk, paper, ink, and the casting of bells.5 Le Comte knew what interests were current amongst European consumers: ever since the first Dutch auction of Chinese porcelains obtained from the cargo of a captured Portuguese ship in the autumn of 1602, the demand for Chinese ceramics throughout Europe had been on the increase. Le Comte’s writings tapped into a wide European interest in the objects themselves and in the ways in which they were manufactured and designed in China. One of the things he noted was their ubiquity: ‘As for Porcelain’, he wrote, ‘it is such an ordinary moveable, that it is the Ornament of every House; the Tables, the

26 Anne Gerritsen

Side-boards, and every Kitchin is cumber’d with it, for they eat and drink out of it, it is their ordinary Vessel.’6 This is in sharp contrast, of course, with late seventeenthcentury European consumers of porcelain, for whom porcelain was no longer merely in the domain of royalty but still a ‘status-enhancing luxury and exotic object’.7 Le Comte goes on to describe three different kinds of porcelain: a yellow variety for imperial use; a grey variety with stripes; and finally blue-and-white, of which he writes: ‘Porcelain is white, with divers Figures of Flowers, Trees and Birds, which they paint in blue, just such as come hither into Europe: This is the commonest of all, and everybody uses it.’8 Blue-and-white was once despised by the Chinese connoisseurs. As Cao Zhao, whose fourteenth-century manual about the appreciation of arts and antiques entitled Essential Criteria of Antiques (Gegu yaolun) remained extremely influential for centuries, wrote: ‘There are also wares that have been decorated with a blue pattern under the glaze and some in five colors. Those with patterns are of the utmost vulgarity.’9 But popular taste had long moved on, and mass-produced blue-and-white wares from Jingdezhen had become commonplace throughout China and beyond. In Le Comte’s view, the ubiquity of blue-and-white porcelains implied a lesser value and a comparison with the earthenwares in ordinary usage in Europe: ‘But in respect of Glasses and Crystals’, he wrote, ‘as all Work is not equally beautiful, so amongst Porcelains some of them are but indifferent, and are not worth much more than our Earthen Ware.’ But he recognized that the evaluation of porcelains was a matter of aesthetic judgment: ‘Those that have Skill do not always agree in their Judgment they pass upon them; and I perceive that in China, as well as in Europe, Phancy bears a main stroke in the matter; yet it is granted by all hands, that four or five different things are to concur to make them compleat and perfect; the fineness of the Matter, the whiteness, the politeness, the painting, the designing of the Figures, and fashion of the Work.’10 Le Comte elaborates on this with a more detailed description of the different qualities the wares must have to be considered exquisite, but the emphasis is on the similarity he detects: the element of ‘phancy’ in judging matters of aesthetics, and the agreement he notes across the cultural divide on what makes fine porcelain. Le Comte then links the production of fine ceramics to the consumer, and the ways in which the consumers’ demand for quality and design are communicated to the manufacturer: There are still very fine ones made at this day; and I have seen at some Mandarins Houses whole Services that were superfine. But the European Merchants do no longer Trade with the good Workmen, and having no Skill in them themselves, they accept whatsoever the Chineses expose to Sale; for they vend them in the Indies. Besides, nobody takes care to furnish them with examples of Draughts, or to bespeak particular Pieces of Work before hand.11 We get an insight here into the ways in which this used to work: the merchants would come with order lists from their overlords back home, and with examples

Global design in Jingdezhen 27

and draughts to show the potters what was required. If that process ever worked well it was only for a short time in the first half of the seventeenth century, because by the time Le Comte wrote this down in 1697 that practice had been discontinued, and less discerning purchases were being made, no doubt a consequence of the huge demand for the wares back in Europe. In the next sentence, Le Comte shifts his attention to the two separate systems of porcelain manufacture in Jingdezhen: There is yet another Reason that makes the curious Porcelain so rare; The Emperor has constituted in the Province where the Manufacture chiefly is, a particular Mandarin, whose care it is to make choice of the fairest Vases for the Court; he buys them at a very reasonable rate, so that the Workmen being but ill paid, do not do their best, and are not willing to take any pains for that which will not enrich them. But should a private Man employ them, who would not spare for Cost and Charges, we should have at this day as curious Pieces of Workmanship, as those of the ancient Chineses.12 Throughout the Ming, porcelain manufacture in Jingdezhen had received imperial support and supervision, but private kilns, referred to as ‘popular kilns’ (min [jian] yao) had begun to produce wares in far greater numbers. Skilled craftsmen from this private ‘industry’ were co-opted to work in the official kilns in an attempt to fill the requisition quotas that were demanded by the imperial court.13 When imperial demand dropped, especially in the lead-up to the fall of the Ming in 1644, private enterprise flourished, especially when this coincided with a sharp increase in demand from overseas consumers. The differences between official kilns and private enterprises are well documented in the Chinese materials, but as these materials on the whole were produced by servants of the state, they sought to create the impression that the representatives of the imperial court were able to safeguard the highest quality throughout the manufacturing process. The documents describe how Jingdezhen-based representatives of the court selected the best firewood as it was delivered from the surrounding hills, controlled access to cobalt, fired smaller and more spacious loads, and demanded first choice from the finished wares. Le Comte looked at it differently. For him, it clearly was a matter of economic incentive to individual potters that guaranteed quality. I have indulged in this rather lengthy discussion of this short passage by Le Comte because it highlights a number of interesting issues. It fits rather neatly in a trend that David Porter discusses in his 2001 book Ideographia. Porter chronicles a trend in European writings about China that begins with seventeenth-century accounts by missionaries and travellers that reveal a sense of cultural superiority they assign to China, but gradually becomes subverted by an eighteenth-century cultural production that highlights the frivolity and licentiousness of Chinese design. Chinoiserie, in Porter’s understanding, is a ‘flattening out’ of European representations of China: the awesomeness of Confucian philosophy and the strict hierarchies of its system of governance of missionary accounts reduced to a pagoda on a teacup.14

28 Anne Gerritsen

FIGURE 2.1 Underglaze porcelain dish made in Jingdezhen c.1770. The landscape on this dish represents the traditional Chinese landscape theme, but recreated in Europe and transmitted to China to be reproduced on Chinese porcelain for export to Europe. The design became a staple of European chinoiserie and ‘rococo’ styles

Source: © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

That subversion was yet to come in Le Comte’s time, and addressed a far wider audience of consumers than the rather more serious readers of Le Comte’s Memoirs and Observations. Le Comte’s readers had very specific interests; they longed to understand the process of Chinese manufacture, the qualities of the different wares, their designs, as well as the economic aspects of the trade with Europeans. If we expect similarly broad-ranging interests in Chinese writings, we are, unfortunately, in for a disappointment. Chinese writings on ceramics, as I have discussed in more detail elsewhere, form a striking contrast with these European texts.15 Shaped by conventions of genre, Chinese texts represent ceramic production in very different, and highly fragmented, ways. One can find references to ceramics in the poetry of scholar-officials, in administrative manuals and route books for merchants, in compendia of local knowledge (known as local gazetteers or difangzhi) and in the detailed descriptions of the sites of manufacture contained within those compendia. But these texts only reveal fragments; only by combining these

Global design in Jingdezhen 29

fragments do we see the landscape of Chinese ceramics as a whole, and the global view, insofar as I can tell at this stage, remains largely elusive. Le Comte’s discussion of the ubiquity of blue-and-white wares in China only obliquely refers to the global appeal of blue-and-white. What had initially emerged in Yuan-dynasty Jingdezhen as vulgar decorations in blue on the thick, matt whiteness of the shufu wares, almost instantly took off as what Craig Clunas has referred to as the first ‘global brand’.16 The magnificent collections of Yuan and Ming wares from Jingdezhen held in the Ardabil shrine (in today’s Iran) and in the Topkapi Seray in Istanbul testify to the quantity and quality of the export of blue-and-whites for the Middle Eastern markets (see Figure 2.2).17

Early 15th-century large porcelain serving dish made in Jingdezhen for consumers in the Middle East. The rim is scalloped, and the central area is decorated with floral motifs, while the cavetto features large individual blossoms surrounded by smaller ones

FIGURE 2.2

Source: © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

30 Anne Gerritsen

That Jingdezhen blue-and-white also made its way to India we know from the arrival of the first porcelain in Europe: Vasco Da Gama (1460/9–1524) acquired a piece on his first visit to India in 1499 and delivered it to the King of Portugal upon his return. By 1520, the Portuguese were sending their demands of specific porcelain designs directly to the manufacturers in Jingdezhen.18 In India, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666) was known for his collection of Chinese ceramics, and Indian Muslim traders were amongst the most active distributors of Chinese ceramics throughout the Indian Ocean, even if Hindu prohibitions prevented porcelain from becoming widespread in India itself.19 From the early seventeenth century onwards, private kilns in Jingdezhen manufactured large quantities of porcelain specifically for the Dutch market.20 Maura Rinaldi’s study details the features and designs of this

FIGURE 2.3 Blue-and-white porcelain dish made in Jingdezhen between 1595 and 1625. These wares, commonly known as kraak porcelain, were mass produced, and thus within reach of a wide spectrum of European consumers. The Dutch referred to this type of bowl as a kraaikop (‘crow cup’), after the bird painted in the well of the cup

Source: © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Global design in Jingdezhen 31

so-called kraak porcelain that now graces not only Dutch collections of porcelain but also the dinner tables and interiors depicted in the paintings of the period.21 During the Tianqi (1621–27) and Chongzhen (1628–44) reign periods, wares produced in Jingdezhen were particularly sought after in the Japanese art market. They were not ‘imperial wares’, as effective control over local manufacture had radically diminished by the end of the Wanli reign (1573–1620). They were rather simple, spontaneous designs created at private kilns, quite possibly specifically for the Japanese consumers, who valued their unpretentiousness and assigned them central place in the newly-emerging forms of the tea-ceremony.22 And finally, as early as 1662, settlers in the American colonies ordered porcelain from China.23 The idea of Chinese potters in Jingdezhen producing ceramics in designs that could appeal to consumers in so many different cultural contexts is in itself extraordinary, but also raises the question about the transmission of design ideas across the globe. How exactly did manufacturers in Jingdezhen learn how to cater to such different tastes? Le Comte gives us a glimpse of this. As he said in 1697, ‘Nobody takes care to furnish them with examples of Draughts, or to bespeak particular Pieces of Work before hand.’24 The records of the VOC (Dutch East India Company, or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC for short) contain lists of specific demands for designs, colours and shapes, accompanied by haughty instructions not to bring back items that were not on the list. One year they sent a set of ‘complete welgebacken en geschilderde monsters van elke sort porcelijn als best gewilt sijn en daermede tot dies besorging, negotatie en andersint doet handelen’ (high-fired, painted models of each kind of porcelain most in demand [in Europe] to bring about their delivery, trade and the like).25 Unfortunately, not only did the potters in Delft struggle to complete the demand for models to the standards required, but the Chinese potters took far too long over the delivery, causing insurmountable problems for the VOC ships, and soon the Dutch merchants abandoned their lists of demands altogether. As Le Comte says, that decision had consequences for the quality of the merchandise, although by then quantity seems to have overtaken quality as the main concern for both manufacturers and merchants. The key to understanding the popularity of the blue-and-white wares probably lies in the ease of their adaptability. Changes in the design to accommodate tastes and fashions in diverse markets across the globe required no technological adjustment, and could be made by one individual responsible for applying the blue decorations, while the chain of people involved in the manufacturing process otherwise performed the same task. Whether the designs contained Dutch tulips, inscriptions in Arabic, or Chinese symbols of long life, the overall ‘brand’ of blue-and-white still remained clearly visible. Manufactured locally, blue-and-whites were and remain a design with global appeal.

Notes 1 Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey, ‘The Search for Souls in China: Le Comte’s Nouveaux Memoires’, in Glenn Ames and Ronald Love, eds, Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures: The

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20

21 22

French Experience in Asia, 1600–1700 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003): 231–47. Frey and Frey, ‘The Search for Souls’: 232. See, for example, the English translation of his text: Louis le Comte, Memoirs and Observations Typographical, Physical, Mathematical, Mechanical, Natural, Civil, and Ecclesiastical, Made in a Late Journey through the Empire of China, and Published in Several Letters Particularly Upon the Chinese Pottery and Varnishing, the Silk and Other Manufactures, the Pearl Fishing, the History of Plants and Animals, Description of Their Cities and Publick Works, Number of People, Their Language, Manners and Commerce, Their Habits, Oeconomy, and Government, the Philosophy of Confucius, the State of Christianity: With Many Other Curious and Useful Remarks (London: Benj. Tooke and Sam. Buckley, 1697). Voltaire, for example, drew heavily on Le Comte’s writings. See Frey and Frey, ‘The Search for Souls’: 238. Frey and Frey, ‘The Search for Souls’: 237. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations: 154. C.J.A. Jörg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982): 16. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations: 154–5. Cao Zhao, Ge gu yao lun, juan xia, 3b–4a. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations: 154–5. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations: 157. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations: 158. Wang Zongmu, comp., Jiangxisheng dazhi (Gazetteer of Jiangxi Province), Taibei, 1989, photolithographic reprint of 1597 edition, 7.17a. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Anne Gerritsen, ‘Fragments of a Global Past: Ceramics Manufacture in Song-Yuan-Ming Jingdezhen’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 52 (2009): 117–52. Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368–1644 (Reaktion Books, 2007). The Ardabil collection holds Song and Yuan Longquan wares, white wares and ‘shufu’ wares, as well as 37 Yuan dynasty blue-and-white wares from Jingdezhen. The most indepth study of the Ardabil collection is John Alexander Pope, Chinese Porcelains from the Ardebil Shrine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, 1956). The Topkapi collection includes 40 Yuan dynasty blue-and-white wares. See John Alexander Pope, Fourteenth-century Blue-and Whites: A Group of Chinese Porcelains in the Topkapu Sarayi Müzesi, Istanbul (Washington: Freer Gallery of Art, Occasional Papers, vol, 2, no. 1). Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History 9 (1998): 142. Hindu regulations specify the use of non-porous materials for the preparation and consumption of food. Despite the non-porous nature of porcelain, it was categorized with earthenware and stoneware as porous, and hence not adopted for culinary use. See Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art’: 158. Jörg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade: 15–21. Lothar Ledderose discusses the significant impact the Dutch merchants had in the early seventeenth century, precisely during the time when imperial orders for Jingdezhen porcelains dropped off. Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000): 88–97. Christiaan Jörg, ‘Chinese Porcelain for the Dutch in the Seventeenth Century: Trading Networks and Private Enterprise’, in Rosemary E. Scott, ed., The Porcelains of Jingdezhen (London: Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, 1993): 183–205. For more in-depth discussion of the circumstances that led to this appreciation in Japan, and the types of wares dating from this period found in Japan but nowhere else, see Colin Sheaf, ‘Chinese Ceramics and Japanese Tea Taste in the Late Ming Period’, in Scott, ed., The Porcelains of Jingdezhen: 165–82. Christiaan Jörg agrees that the wares of the 1620s

Global design in Jingdezhen 33

and 1630s were specifically created for use in the Japanese tea ceremonies: Jörg, ‘Chinese Porcelain’: 188–90. 23 David Howard, New York and the China Trade (New York: New York Historical Society, 1984): 61, quoted in William Sargent, ‘“China, a great variety”: Documenting Porcelains for the American Market’, in Scott, The Porcelains of Jingdezhen: 207. See also Jean Gordon Lee, Philadelphians and the China Trade, 1784–1844 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984). 24 Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations: 154 25 C.J.A. Jörg, ‘Porselein als Handelswaar: De porseleinhandel als onderdeel van de Chinahandel van de V.O.C., 1729–1794’, Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden University, 1978, p. 102.

RESPONSE Beverly Lemire

Anne Gerritsen introduces us to the processes and preoccupations of generations of observers of porcelain production, a hybrid population at the site of one of the most important global commodity flows in the early modern era. The community that sustained the production end of this phenomenon was positioned in one of the most dynamic manufacturing and trading regions in the world. Leonard Blussé termed Canton, the port that served Jingdezhen, a ‘visible’ city, it being one of the best-known and most iconic regional trading communities, supplying almost all parts of the world with its best-known product. The great current emanating from southern China washed over many regions. This extraordinary manufacturing and trading community augmented porcelain passions from coastal East Africa, through a wide swath of the Islamic worlds of the Middle East, Persia and Central Asia, as well as Southeast Asia. Europeans were latecomers to this porcelain passion, but by the seventeenth century were also enmeshed in this great exchange. Robert Finlay has observed: ‘[the surviving artefacts] yields the first and most extensive physical evidence for sustained cultural encounter on a global scale, perhaps even for indications of genuinely global culture’.1 As with Gerritsen, I find the materiality of this commodity flow particularly intriguing. K. N. Chaudhuri has drawn attention to what he calls the ‘transmission of culture’ through trade.2 This is, of course, a reciprocal evolving process that affects the community that sources the international commodities, like porcelain, as well as transforming the material vernacular of receiving populations. I have mentioned elsewhere my interest in the lexicons of design that were carried by these media as part of global commodity trade, both in textiles like Indian cotton and Chinese porcelain. Robert Finlay has written about the transformations in patterns that took place in Chinese porcelain as Islamic motifs were absorbed and reinterpreted. Indeed, Finlay claims that porcelain played a central role in cultural exchange in Eurasia: it was a prime material vehicle for the assimilation and transmission of artistic symbols, themes, and designs across vast distances.3

Response 35

The commonalities between Asian textiles and ceramics are numerous in terms of their global impact. But the feature I will mention most particularly is their capacity to transmit imagery. The production and circulation of designs are communicative acts. I would encourage an engagement with the meta-narratives of the history of design. And I think a closer attention to the comparative differences found in porcelain and cottons, for example, may lead to a better understanding of this history. Gerritsen opens up new questions about the chronology and mediating factors in the spread of blue-and-white porcelain, with the prospect in her future project of a more detailed understanding of the design flows and the relationships between the point of production and consumers across the globe. The ‘visibility’ of the city of Canton is largely a product of this extraordinary maritime trade. The surviving relics of this trade, in private collections and public museums, mirror the social impact of these commodities on the cultural and social practices of many societies. There is an interesting paradox in the inflexible brittle structure of porcelain and the malleable uses to which these goods were put, from tea ceremonies to wall décor, vessels for food and objects of collection or veneration. If ceramics had agency, as Alfred Gell has suggested for other objects,4 it was perhaps in the inspiration offered to individuals and communities willing or eager to amend their habits and integrate these objects into daily rituals. The translucence of the finest porcelain and the shapes themselves inspired such integration and so, too, did the infinitely variable design that came to define China’s wares. I am struck by the commonalities and differences in comparing porcelain to textiles. For unlike the textiles that flowed from Asia, also significant agents in the circulation of design, porcelain could not be physically altered in the hands of its new owners. Asian textiles were cut, stitched and remade in a multiplicity of local forms for dress or furnishings, all the while with the aim of showcasing the look of these fabrics in whatever locally appropriate shape was imposed. The malleability of porcelain for consumers came not in its structure but through the creative forms of social rituals it generated in receiving communities. These, in turn, through the network of merchant correspondents, led to evolutions of design. Would it be possible to tease out more precisely the shifting chronology of meanings that developed over time? Recognizing that literacy takes a range of forms aside from being lettered, should we consider more carefully the impact of these designs among a wide range of users, populations that may have been ‘illiterate’ in the formal sense, but steeped in symbolic meanings and the reading of signs of various sorts: botanic, craft, ceremonial, for example. It is interesting to note that listed among the personal effects of sailors who died in the first English East India Company voyage around 1603 were ‘cheyney dishes’.5 The attraction of these objects was not limited to the elite and values assigned to these objects were mutable. It cannot be coincidence that among the most important early modern global commodities, Indian cottons and Chinese porcelain both had the capacity to appeal to broad and heterogeneous markets, and both products boasted unique techniques of surface decoration. The malleability of the surface designs, as much as the physical

36 Beverly Lemire

characteristics of these porcelains and cottons, animated a visual exchange across cultures and languages that remains of exceptional importance.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

R. Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, 9 (1998), p. 143. K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘Trade as a Cultural Phenomenon’, in J. C. Johansen, E. L. Petersen and H. Stevnborg (eds), Clashes of Cultures: Essays in Honour of Niels Steensgaard, Odense, Odense University Press, 1992, p. 210. R. Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010, pp. 5–6. A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998. C. Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen, 1580–1603, Westport, CN, Greenwood Publishing, 2001, p. 96.

3 INDIAN COTTONS AND EUROPEAN FASHION, 1400–1800 John Styles

Introduction For a global design history that seeks to understand transcontinental similarities and differences, networks and flows, attention to fashion is indispensible. Since the seventeenth century, Europeans have repeatedly identified an absence of fashion in Asia as one of the fundamental distinctions between East and West. ‘The Cloaths of the Eastern People are no wise subject to Mode; they are always made after the same Fashion’, observed the French Huguenot traveller Sir John Chardin, who visited Persia in the late seventeenth century.1 Modern historians of material life in Europe before the nineteenth century have agreed. From Ferdinand Braudel to Neil McKendrick, they present fashion as a European peculiarity, an element in a broader pattern of European exceptionalism that accounts for the rise of the West.2 Recently, this view has been challenged. Fashion can, it is suggested, be observed not only in Europe, but in early-modern China, Japan and India, in some of its aspects at least.3 Clothing practices in early modern Asia were not necessarily inert and unchanging. At the same time, it has been argued that Asian goods made a decisive contribution to the origin and development of fashion in the West before 1800, overturning the conventional assumption that fashion’s origins were indigenous to Europe. It is this second revisionist argument that is the subject of this essay. The key external role in transforming early modern European fashion is accorded to Indian decorated cotton textiles. For Beverly Lemire, Indian cottons were ‘critical for new forms and formulations of fashion’.4 She argues that although the arrival of Indian decorated cotton textiles did not single-handedly initiate Western fashion, it reorientated fashion at a crucial early stage in its development from a phenomenon confined to a narrow elite into a self-perpetuating, dynamic force across society. They did this principally, it is argued, by transforming textile design. While ‘prior to the appearance of Indian printed cottons decorative patterning in textiles was the

38 John Styles

preserve of Europe’s wealthiest alone’,5 Indian cottons ‘were affordable, uniquely attractive, and made in the widest range of prices, unmatched by European manufactures’.6 This is a bold, ambitious argument, but it is a controversial one. It has, of course, long been acknowledged that cotton manufacture in the West was built on Indian foundations.7 Equally, it has been recognized that Lancashire’s industrial revolution of the later eighteenth century was inconceivable without the existence of a broadbased domestic market for cotton textiles, especially a fashion-sensitive market for decorated cottons. Nevertheless, previous studies have tended to suggest that imported Indian cottons followed rather than initiated Western fashion. Audrey Douglas, for example, in a much-quoted article, emphasizes the way the English East India Company exploited pre-existing developments in fashion in England.8 To date, the English experience has been central to this controversy. This is partly because it was England that hosted the late eighteenth century Industrial Revolution in which cotton textiles figured so prominently. It is also because the archives of the English East India Company and the pamphlet debates its activities provoked have provided such accessible and fruitful sources for historical research. To evaluate the different arguments, we therefore need to take some measure of the world of early modern English textiles in which Indian cottons intervened. To take that measure, this essay assesses the early modern English market for textiles, from 1500 to 1750, from two perspectives. First, it considers the contribution to fashion and innovation made by different kinds of textiles. Second, it considers fashion and innovation specifically in terms of applied decoration, whether realized by means of weaving, embroidery, painting, or printing.

Textiles in early modern England: imports, fashion and innovation Between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries England underwent a long drawn-out transformation that saw a peripheral and relatively unsophisticated European economy transformed into the manufacturing workshop for the world. A country that in the later Middle Ages exported mainly raw materials, especially wool, and subsequently semi-finished goods, especially unfinished woollen cloth, was transformed into one whose exports consisted principally of high-quality, finished manufactures. As the number and variety of English manufactured products grew, imports came to consist less and less of finished manufactured goods and more and more of the raw materials from which English products were made. This transformation extended over several centuries. Much of it involved the more or less direct replacement of manufactures that had previously been imported by goods produced in England. Often, however, import substitution was associated with the development of new processes and new products appropriate to the native resource endowment and the native market. Thus, in the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a whole swathe of new metallurgical, glass and ceramic processes saw charcoal replaced with coal and coke as their principal heat

Indian cottons and European fashion, 1400–1800 39

source.9 As far as products are concerned, sober English lead glass was substituted for light, decorated Venetian glass; new kinds of Staffordshire stoneware for German salt glaze; London-made silver teapots for Chinese teapots in porcelain or red Yixing stoneware. Two aspects of this process of import substitution need particular emphasis. First, the imports concerned came predominantly from continental Europe, not Asia. Second, the trend was already well-established before the onset of direct trade between England and south and east Asia at the start of the seventeenth century. English consumers’ receptivity to novelty in material things long predated the first arrival of Indian cottons. Historians of the later Middle Ages have taught us that the material culture of the bulk of the English population before the sixteenth century was far from immutable.10 The later Middle Ages witnessed important changes in the character of, for example, clothing and ceramics that extended well beyond the social elite. In the sixteenth century, innovation in consumer goods was sometimes intense.11 Novelty had intrinsic attractions for many consumers, even though they had to be balanced against other imperatives – in particular consumers’ attachment to established tastes and their rulers’ investment in notions of hierarchy, order and stability, which extended to the material world. The successes and failures of the East India Company’s marketing of Indian cottons in England in the seventeenth century need to be understood against this background of widespread and broad-based innovation, often involving imports or import substitution, which engaged consumers far beyond the royal court, the nobility and the gentry. In textiles, what is most striking about the period from the start of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century is not the radical discontinuity represented by the introduction of Indian decorated cottons, but the extent to which that innovation was consistent with broader developments in the English textile market. The period witnessed a tide of novelty in decorated fabrics made from a range of materials, including wool, linen and silk, and employing a range of techniques, including weaving, embroidery and painting. This was underway well before the establishment of the East India Company in 1600. In particular, a rapid expansion in the market for lighter, more colourful and more highly patterned cloths, both for clothing and for furnishing, can be observed in fabrics made from combed wool, from silk and from combinations of the two. As with Indian decorated cottons, these fabrics were often cheaper than those that preceded them and were subject to rapid fashion change, in a way that contemporaries perceived as novel. Like Indian cottons, many of these textiles, especially the silks, were imported. Others, like the light Norwich worsted stuffs made principally from combed wool, owed much to the arrival of immigrant craftspeople. Much of this search for novelty in textile design was driven by fashion in clothing. Dress fashions in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not turn exclusively on the characteristics of the fabrics worn – tailoring and accessorizing were also crucial – but fabrics were important. In the early seventeenth century there are frequent references to ‘stuffs’ and ‘satins’ made from silk or worsted. It was around these fabrics that fashion in wealthy women’s clothing revolved, not Indian cottons.

40 John Styles

Moreover, changing dress fashions were not confined to the rich; the patterned worsted stuffs produced at Norwich and elsewhere were worn by wider sections of the population. Decorative patterning in textiles was not the preserve of a tiny, exclusive elite. The early modern fashion cycle in textiles like the stuffs and satins did not, of course, originate in England. Insofar as we can trace its genealogy, it leads back to the fine silks that began to be made in Italy in the later Middle Ages under the influence of imports from the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Mediterranean. Italian-made silks came to be characterized by a cycle of ever-changing innovation in pattern and design. Lisa Monnas has usefully summarized these changes, observing how these changing fashions were driven by bitter rivalry over export markets between the different silk-manufacturing city-states – Lucca, Florence, Genoa, Venice. Each city-state sustained distinct specialities, yet each endlessly pirated the others’ designs and each endeavoured to secure a competitive advantage by generating fashionable novelty in design.12 By the mid-fifteenth century, concludes Luca Molà, competitive import substitution was encouraged by city governments in order to free the state from dependence on foreign goods and provide export opportunities.13 Novelty was crucial. The Venetian ambassador to the French court explained in 1546 that the lighter silks made by the Tuscans and the Genoese were more successful in France than the heavy, costlier Venetian product, ‘because it bored them to wear the same clothing for too long’.14 Here we have in prototype the kind of inter-state competition in fashion that would become a distinctive element of the Western European state system as a whole in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.15 Its most dramatic refinement in the course of the seventeenth century arose not as a result of Asian imports, but from the French move to annual and seasonal shifts in the design of the woven silks made at Lyons for fashionable women’s outer garments, probably at the instigation of Louis XIV’s ministers in the 1670s.16 The Directors of the English East India Company were quick to appreciate the significance of this innovation, but they neither initiated it nor applied it to their trade in decorated cottons. In 1681, they wrote to their Bengal factors requiring ‘that in all flowred Silkes, you Change y fashion and flower as much as you can every yeare, for English Ladies and they say ye french and other Europeans will give twice as much for a new thing not seen in Europe before though worse, than they will give for a better Silk of ye same fashion worn ye former yeare’. 17 These instructions arose from their attempt to develop a new trade in woven silks from Bengal to compete directly with European silks. Late seventeenth-century orders to Surat and Madras for painted and printed cottons did not ask for annual changes in design in this way. Nevertheless, it is often argued that by the last three decades of the seventeenth century, painted Indian cottons were playing a crucial role in the system of interstate competition in textiles and fashion, with the East India companies acting as proxies on behalf of the various competing European states. Indeed this belief is central to the whole idea of a late seventeenth-century European ‘calico craze’, to

Indian cottons and European fashion, 1400–1800 41

which states felt obliged to respond with a variety of incentives, regulations and prohibitions. There is no doubt that in England, at least, huge quantities of Indian cotton textiles of many different kinds came to be imported by the East India Companies during the last three decades of the seventeenth century, although their significance needs to be qualified in two ways. First, we should remember that, throughout the seventeenth century, cloth with sophisticated painted or printed decoration comprised only a small minority element in a trade in cotton piece goods that included vast quantities of plain fabrics, dyed and undyed. Second, we should bear in mind that by no means all the Company’s imports of textiles were destined for English consumers. Vast quantities of cloth were re-exported to continental Europe, to Africa and increasingly to the Americas.18 It was asserted repeatedly by those paid to write in opposition to these imports on behalf of domestic woollen and silk manufacturers that Indian cottons were enthusiastically taken up as dress materials by rich and poor alike, threatening the livelihoods of those who made a living from the manufacture of other textiles in England.19 However, a very different picture of the English market for Indian cottons emerges from the evidence of trials for theft at the Old Bailey, the principal criminal court for London. It challenges the notion that Indian cottons enjoyed a sudden, overwhelming popularity as fashionable dress fabrics in the late seventeenth century, elbowing aside other textiles. In England, the gown was a key garment for women’s fashion at every social level, the largest and most expensive decorated item in most women’s wardrobes. Yet evidence for widespread ownership of gowns made from Indian painted and printed fabrics before 1700 is lacking. Out of 285 cases in the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1699 involving stolen gowns, only two mentioned gowns made from cotton fabrics. By contrast, at least 62 cases involved gowns made from silk and 40 cases involved gowns made from various kinds of worsted stuff.20 If the number of stolen gowns in Indian fabrics in the Old Bailey Proceedings was tiny, it was not because Indian cottons were absent. In the same decades there were 76 mentions of muslins, mainly plain white and used for various head-cloths and neck-cloths, although they always comprised only a minority of such items. Calicoes, a few painted or printed, also appeared, though less frequently. They were mentioned in 47 cases, used for a variety of items of clothing, including aprons, hoods, handkerchiefs, petticoats, shirts, and children’s frocks, but especially for furnishings, in particular curtains, quilts and pillow cases. Evidently Indian cottons made some inroads during the later decades of the seventeenth century in the English markets for furnishings (especially calicoes) and for small clothing accessories (especially muslins). Yet the trial records before 1700 show little evidence of English or European-made light textiles being eclipsed by Indian-made decorated cottons in these or other markets. It would not be until the middle of the eighteenth century that fabrics patterned employing Indian-derived techniques would begin to outpace silks and worsteds in the market for women’s gowns. In the long run, the flexibility and cheapness of printing with these techniques won out, democratizing the naturalistic, botanical

42 John Styles

designs so fashionable in vastly more expensive woven silks. But by then it was linens and linen-cotton mixes woven and printed in England that did the outpacing, not cottons painted or printed in India.21 Significantly, the Old Bailey trials indicate that, even in the era of the calico craze, calicoes enjoyed their greatest success in the market for furnishings, which were not at the cutting edge of annual and seasonal fashions. Where Indian fabrics undoubtedly did make a dramatic impact was in igniting an explosion of economic pamphleteering, lavishly funded by rival mercantile interests. The calico craze emerges less as a transformation in consumers’ choices, engineered by a flood of cheap, colourful Asian imports, than as a political phenomenon generated by the mutual suspicion of a number of wealthy trading and manufacturing interests, each accustomed to support from the state and each struggling to secure it for its own advantage in a context of virulent competition between the major European states.

Indian decorated cottons and English textile design The evidence of the Old Bailey does not, therefore, support the argument that the arrival of large quantities of Indian decorated cottons in England suddenly, towards the end of the seventeenth century, unleashed an entirely new kind of popular fashion. Nevertheless, the possibility remains that Indian cottons fundamentally changed Western fashion by transforming its design idioms. To address this issue, two questions need to be answered. What did Indian decorated cottons look like? When did they become sufficiently familiar to influence textile design in the West? New products do not automatically find a market. The first task for those who introduce a new product is to configure it for the consumer in a way that makes it comprehensible and attractive. From the 1610s, the East India Company’s London Directors began to develop a market in England for fine Indian decorated cottons for use as table and bed linens, wall hangings and other household furnishings, but the volume of such imports appears to have remained small before 1660. One of the key limitations here was design. Before the middle of the seventeenth century, the Company imported ready-made cottons which had been painted, printed, or embroidered according to the requirements of Indian and other Asian consumers. These designs had only a limited appeal in England, beyond their value as novel curiosities. The crucial change came in 1643, when the Directors began to require the factors in India to change the designs on the cloth to accord with English taste. ‘Those [quilts] which hereafter you shall send we desire may be with more white ground, and the flowers and branch to be in colours in the middle of the quilt as the painter pleases, whereas now most part of your quilts come with sad red grounds which are not so well accepted here.’ 22 In 1662 the Directors went one step beyond verbal design instructions and began to send sample patterns for chintz, probably on paper, from London to India for the Indian workers to copy or adapt. In 1669 the procedure was extended to quilts and hangings.

Indian cottons and European fashion, 1400–1800 43

This should not surprise us. The Portuguese, the first Europeans to sail directly to India and the dominant European presence in the subcontinent before 1600, were already commissioning Indian cotton textiles decorated according to European tastes in the sixteenth century.23 From the 1660s it became a normal English East India Company practice to send patterns from London to determine the design of the quilts that had been the main form of Indian decorated textiles sold in England in the first half of the seventeenth century and the chintzes that enjoyed success in the second half of the century. This was a system of manufacture in which London remained the principal arbiter and source of design. It is curious, then, that the design of English decorative textiles is often said to have been transformed in the seventeenth century by the impact of Indian design ideas, transmitted through the medium of the Indian textiles decorated with botanical designs imported by the East India Company.24 The seventeenth century certainly saw a proliferation of English-made textiles, embroidered, woven, painted and eventually printed, that paralleled in their patterns the look of Indian decorated cottons. But the English attachment to applied botanical decoration on textiles was very long standing, dating back to the high Middle Ages. It was reflected in the wide range of textile designs an earlier generation of scholars referred to when they talked of the ‘English love of flowers’.25 It was evident in the popularity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of textiles patterned with a wide range of botanical forms, from formal large pattern repeats to sinuous arabesques and isolated motifs. It was with good reason, then, that in the course of the seventeenth century the East India Company brought to England Indian decorative textiles with elaborate botanical patterns. But if, as we have seen, those patterns were sent out from London, in what sense, if any, were they Indian? As John Irwin pointed out half a century ago, in furnishing fabrics at least, the two-dimensional forms and motifs employed on textiles imported from India that came to be perceived in England as Indian came, in fact, to India from England. Moreover, they derived principally not from Indian visual ideas, but rather from a combination of European and Chinese forms and motifs.26 Indeed, Irwin argued that the tree of life design so often associated with Indian textiles is not obviously Indian in origin, owing more to the tree of life in the biblical Garden of Eden. Its use in English embroidery pre-dated the arrival of large numbers of Indian textiles.27 This should not surprise us. These visual ideas were already in circulation in England before Indian decorative textiles arrived in any quantities, not just as finished textiles but also in the form of Chinoiserie botanical motifs that circulated as design drawings on paper. The number of Indian textiles actually present in England before 1600 was so tiny that it is difficult to imagine they had much direct influence on textile design. As Beverly Lemire has shown, calicoes, almost certainly Indian, were present in Southampton on the south coast of England in the mid-sixteenth century.28 However, their numbers were tiny. Moreover, calicoes do not appear to have spread much. In Mark Overton’s systematic compilation of goods from 17,000 probate inventories from Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire and Worcestershire covering the years 1550 to 1750, there are no sixteenth-century references whatsoever to calico. The

44 John Styles

Indian fabric first appears in 1624, when a Worcestershire gentleman’s inventory included a blue calico tablecloth.29 John Irwin concluded that ‘Europe was attracted to Indian decorative textiles on account of their cheapness and technical excellence (especially their fast and brilliant dye-colours), not their qualities of design.’ 30 The success of Indian decorative textiles in the English market illustrates a process of successful product innovation, but one that depended on a significant redefinition of the design of the product. Late seventeenth-century Indian chintzes with their elaborate botanical motifs in vivid colours may have retained the allure of the exotic for their English owners, but the range of patterns and motifs they employed often had more to do with European constructions of the exotic than with Indian visual culture.

Conclusion It is not the purpose of this paper to minimize the long-term impact, economic and cultural, of Indian cotton textiles in the West. It simply asks us to acknowledge that the successes enjoyed by the Company’s trade in decorated textiles resulted from its capacity to cater to trends towards a wider range of lighter and more colourful fabrics already well established in the growing English market for decorated textiles. Indian cottons did not create these trends, however much they re-enforced and benefited from them. If we accept this to be the case, then the East India Company’s trade in cotton textiles can hardly be said to have had the key role in transforming fashion in the period before 1750. Insofar as we need to assign that role, it should probably be accorded to the political economy of the Western European state system. The reluctance of many early modern European states to see competitors gain a decisive advantage in manufacturing has often been noted, especially in historians’ debates over the concept of mercantilism, but the importance of this stance for design and fashion has received less attention.31 It can be observed in action initially in the limited context of the late Medieval Italian city-states, but subsequently across early modern Western Europe as a whole. To emphasize the importance of inter-state competition for the rise of fashion in early modern Europe is not to deny recent findings that the populations of some parts of early modern India, China, or Japan enjoyed roughly equivalent standards of living to those prevailing in the West. Nor is it to dispute the view that fashion (in some senses, at least) existed in the world beyond Europe. Nevertheless, the implication of this paper for debates on early modern globalization in design and fashion is that Western Europe was different in crucially important respects. In that sense, its findings have more in common with Philip T. Hoffman’s recent argument for the distinctiveness of the early modern European state system than with the case for broad equivalencies across parts of Eurasia made by Kenneth Pomeranz and John Darwin.32

Indian cottons and European fashion, 1400–1800 45

Notes 1 J. Chardin, Sir John Chardin’s Travels in Persia, London, 1720, vol. 2, p. 177. 2 F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century: the Structures of Everyday Life, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 312–13; N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of EighteenthCentury England, London, Europa, 1982, pp. 36–42. 3 For a recent overview, with numerous references, see C.M. Belfanti, ‘Was fashion a European invention?’ Journal of Global History, 3 (2008), pp. 419–43. 4 B. Lemire, ‘Revising the historical narrative: India, Europe and the cotton trade, c. 1300–1800’, in G. Riello and P. Parthasarathi (eds), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, Oxford, Oxford University Press and Pasold Research Fund, 2009, p. 222. 5 B. Lemire and G. Riello, ‘East and West: Textiles and fashion in early modern Europe’, Journal of Social History, 41 (2008), pp. 887 and 906. 6 Lemire, ‘Revising the historical narrative’, p. 222. 7 A.P. Wadsworth and J. de L. Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1931, ch. 6. 8 A.W. Douglas, ‘Cotton textiles in England: The East India Company’s attempt to exploit developments in fashion 1660–1721’, The Journal of British Studies, 8 (1969), p. 43. 9 J. Harris, Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1992. 10 See, for example, the essays in D. Gaimster and P. Stamper (eds), The Age of Transition: The Archaeology of English Culture 1400–1600, Oxford, Oxbow, 1997. 11 J. Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England, Oxford, Clarendon, 1978. 12 L. Monnas, Merchants, Princes and Painters: Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings, 1300–1550, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 19–20, 17. 13 L. Molà, ‘States and crafts: relocating technical skills in Renaissance Italy’, in M. O’Malley and E. Welch (eds), The Material Renaissance, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2008, pp. 133–53. 14 Quoted in Monnas, Merchants, Princes and Painters, p. 6. 15 C. Poni, ‘Fashion as flexible production: the strategies of the Lyon silk merchants in the eighteenth century’, in C. Sabel and J. Zeitlin (eds), World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 37–74; M. Sonenscher, ‘Fashion’s empire: trade and power in early 18th century France’, in R. Fox and A. Turner (eds), Luxury Trades and Consumerism in Ancien Regime Paris: Studies in the History of the Skilled Workforce, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998, pp. 231–54. 16 P. Thornton, Baroque and Rococo Silks, London, Faber and Faber, 1965, pp. 20–1; Poni, ‘Fashion as flexible production’, pp. 69–70. 17 H.H. Dodwell (ed.), Records of Fort St George: Despatches from England, 1680–1682, Madras, Government Press, 1914, p. 51 (London to Hughly, 20 May 1681). 18 K.N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: A Study of an Early Joint Stock Company, 1600–1640, London, Cape, 1965, p. 199; J. Styles, ‘Product innovation in early modern London,’ Past and Present, 168 (2000), p. 133. 19 See, for example, John Pollexfen, A Discourse of Trade and Coyn, London, 1700, p. 99. 20 Old Bailey Proceedings online: www.oldbaileyonline.org. 21 John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England, London, Yale University Press, 2007, ch. 7. 22 Quoted J. Irwin, ‘Origins of the “Oriental Style” in English decorative art’, Burlington Magazine, 97 (1955), p. 109. 23 R. Crill (1999) Indian Embroidery, London, V&A Publications, p. 8. 24 B. Lemire, ‘Domesticating the exotic: floral culture and the East India calico trade with England, c. 1600–1900’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 1 (2003), pp. 65–85. 25 For examples from both sides of the Atlantic see G.F. Wingfield Digby, Elizabethan

46 John Styles

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Embroidery, London, Faber, 1963, p. 36; C. Bateman Faraday, European and American Carpets and Rugs, Grand Rapids, MI, The Dean-Hicks Company, 1929, p. 141. Irwin, ‘Origins of the “Oriental Style”’, p. 109. A. Morrall and M. Watt (eds), English Embroidery From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580–1700: ‘Twixt Art and Nature, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2009, p. 272. Lemire, ‘Domesticating the exotic’, pp. 67–8. My thanks to Mark Overton, University of Exeter, for providing access to his data. J. Irwin, ‘Indian textile trade in the seventeenth century: iv. foreign influences’, Journal of Indian Textile History, 4 (1959), p. 57. Michael Sonenscher’s ‘Fashion’s empire’ and Carlo Poni’s ‘Fashion as flexible production’ are important exceptions. P.T. Hoffman, ‘Prices, the military revolution, and Western Europe’s comparative advantage in violence’, Economic History Review, 64, S1 (2011), pp. 39–59; K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000; J. Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405, Oxford, Allen Lane, 2007.

RESPONSE Prasannan Parthasarathi

John Styles has written a deeply learned and deeply considered paper on Indian cottons and English textiles in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He does not shy away from challenging conventional wisdoms and he elegantly places the introduction of Indian cottons into England into a longer sweep of time than is usually the case, which yields a number of new insights and thoughtful suggestions for further research. Styles makes two major arguments in his paper. First, he argues that the adoption of cottons was part of longer-term shifts in textile tastes in England and that the taking up of the new fibre was a far slower process than many historians have argued. The calico craze of the late seventeenth century, in other words, did not represent a sudden break and a sharp taking up of cotton goods. As he puts it: ‘The evidence of trials for theft at the Old Bailey . . . challenges that notion that Indian cottons enjoyed a sudden, overwhelming popularity . . . in the late seventeenth century.’ Second, he argues that Indian designs did not transform English design because much of the Indian painted and embroidered cloth sold in England from the midseventeenth century was based on English patterns: ‘The range of patterns and motifs Indians employed often had more to do with European constructions of the exotic than with Indian visual culture.’ In the conclusion to his paper, Styles develops some of the implications of the above two points. If the trade in Indian cotton textiles did not play a key role in initiating fashion-driven consumerism or consumer revolution then what did? He suggests that that role should be ‘accorded to the political economy of the Western European state system’, which was a highly competitive one and although not much recognized, design and fashion were arenas for political competition. In these respects Western Europe was unique and differed from prosperous parts of Asia, for instance. While this final conclusion is a provocative one, Styles does not really fill it out so I will limit my comments to the two major points made in the body of the paper.

48 Prasannan Parthasarathi

First, placing the history of cottons in England in a longer-term framework is extremely enlightening. While others, including Beverly Lemire, have argued that the appeal of Indian cottons was part of shifts in textile tastes that began before the seventeenth century, Styles quite rightly notes that it took many decades for cotton to displace its competitors. I have no interest in rescuing the concept of the ‘calico craze’, but I would like to point to two decisive developments in the late seventeenth century that shaped the fortunes of cotton for several decades. First, the much greater increase of cotton imports to Europe in that period revealed the great potential that the fibre possessed and its protean nature. From the late seventeenth century, that is, from the decades of the calico craze, European manufacturers began to experiment on a larger scale than ever before with cotton manufacture, beginning with printing the cloth, but then turning to spinning and weaving. Despite the slow expansion of cotton consumption, interest in cotton manufacturing was sparked. When seen from the perspective of manufacturing, to understand cotton’s appeal we also require a technical analysis of the potentials of that material as opposed to wool, silk, linen, and other potential substitutes, especially when it came to absorbing dyes, and creating appealing and complex plays of colour and shading. Another set of difficult questions arises from the fact that Indian cottons were not really cheaper than all other European textiles, despite long repetition of this claim, which raises important questions about what cotton was competing against in England as well as elsewhere in Europe. Second, the late seventeenth century, and the clamour over Indian goods, put into place restrictions on imports of Indian cottons across Europe that were to remain in force until the nineteenth century. While these restrictions probably contributed to the slow adoption of cotton goods by English consumers, they also made it possible for cotton to be manufactured in England itself. Therefore, even if the calico craze was the product of the pamphleteer imagination, it had real and profound political and economic consequences. Turning to the English roots of Indian textile designs, I am in agreement with Styles’ central points. Instead, I would like to consider the language that is used in talking about the provenance of designs and the one-sidedness of the discussion stemming from the fact that too little is known about design in the subcontinent itself and the ways in which Indian cottons were used and infused with meaning in that ancient home of cotton cloth. On language, I propose that we no longer speak of English or Indian textile design. Instead, let us speak of textile design in England and in India (actually, not India either, but regions of the subcontinent). Styles suggests that the designs that appealed to English consumers were complex hybrid products. They were based on patterns that the East India Company sent to Gujarat and the Coromandel coast, but there was a great deal of room for local merchants and cloth painters and printers to interpret and impart these patterns on to cloth. In this process, pre-existing design elements (flowers, trees, and others that may be seen in pre-seventeenth century Gujarati and South Indian textiles) as well as designs that were demanded in West

Response 49

and Southeast Asia and East Africa influenced the construction of the final product for England. Such hybridity of design no doubt shaped the cloth that was consumed within the Indian subcontinent itself. John Irwin in his article ‘Origins of the “Oriental Style”’ reports that ‘India, quite independent of Europe, had its own period of chinoiserie, or indulgence in the “Chinese taste.”’1 In a similar fashion, the encounter with European ideas, designs and art forms undoubtedly created for Indian consumption all sorts of hybrid products. While the research in textile designs for Indian markets in the period from 1500 to 1800 is still in its early stages, such hybridity may be identified in the realm of music. One example is Muthuswami Dikshitar, who is considered to be one of the three great composers in classical South Indian music. Dikshitar was born near Thanjavur in 1775 and as a young man resided for several years near the British city of Madras, where he absorbed European musical forms, ranging from Irish folk songs to marching band music. As a consequence of this encounter, he composed some thirty devotional songs that drew upon European tunes for the music with Sanskrit lyrics that he wrote. One such example drew upon God Save the King, which no doubt was played routinely at Fort St. George. The piece, Santatam Pahimam, set to the music of God Save The King, may be heard at: http://www.kanniks.com/ vismaya_tracks.htm. Much as Dikshitar combined the South Indian and the English for local listeners, it is not far-fetched to imagine that textile artisans did the same as they drew upon a repertoire of forms, some local, some regional, some European, to create textiles for local consumers. These were not South Indian designs, but designs for South Indians that amalgamated diverse influences (along these lines, painted cloths modelled on the European tree of life were exported from the Coromandel coast to Southeast Asia in the eighteenth century). Of course, this is all quite speculative at this point, but it suggests the tremendous potential for a global design history. To embark upon such a project for cotton textiles, however, requires research on the Indian cottons that were consumed in the subcontinent. Until then, the empirical base for rethinking design is entirely one-sided.

Note 1

J. Irwin, ‘Origins of the “Oriental Style” in English Decorative Art’, Burlington Magazine, 97 (1955), p. 111.

4 IMPORT SUBSTITUTION, INNOVATION AND THE TEA CEREMONY IN FIFTEENTHAND SIXTEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN Christine M. E. Guth

Chanoyu, commonly known in the Anglophone world as the “tea ceremony,” was characterized by its most famous sixteenth-century practitioner Sen no Rikyû (1522–91) as nothing more than “boiling water for tea.” Yet like much writing on tea, such statements hide the true nature of a cultural practice that since the fifteenth century has been a driving force behind the production and consumption of both imported and domestic luxury goods in Japan. While stoneware and porcelain vessels from China and Korea predominate, ceramics from the Ryûkyû Islands, Vietnam, Thailand, and even Holland have also been used in preparing ritual tea. Chanoyu has been written about extensively from the perspectives of art history, anthropology, religion, and politics but less attention has been given to its socio-economic implications within the framework of a design history. This paper examines the culture of tea from the perspective of import substitution and innovation. Import substitution, as Maxine Berg has defined it, refers to the replacement of like with like, a luxury article that becomes too scarce or too costly being replaced by a domestic product that simulates its appearance, but not its mode of manufacture.1 The development of japanning in eighteenth-century Britain in response to the demand for Japanese lacquer typifies this model. But here I want to complicate the notion of import substitution, first, by suggesting how it might involve the replacement of like with unlike, and, second, by considering the processes through which these innovative goods are validated, in turn generating new imports and domestic substitutes that may come to assume the same luxury status as the articles they replaced. Tea, as many scholars now refer to chanoyu, is basically a form of ritual hospitality whose paraphernalia assumes high symbolic and economic value beyond its practical functions as utensils for preparing and serving.2 The implements essential to any gathering include an iron kettle to heat water, a bamboo ladle to transfer it to the ceramic bowl from which the guest drinks, a small ceramic or lacquer caddy for

Import substitution in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan 51

holding the powdered tea, a slender bamboo scoop for transferring the powder from container to bowl, a whisk for whipping the emulsion of water and tea, and fresh and waste water containers. In the period under discussion, ownership of a large tea leaf storage jar was also deemed indispensable to tea practice. Social tea drinking first arose among the ruling warrior and aristocratic elite in the late fifteenth century, later expanding to merchants, for whom it became a culturally legitimizing practice. It was codified and popularized among men and women of all social classes over the course of the Tokugawa period (1615–1868) by three schools of tea, Urasenke, Omote senke, and Mushanokôji senke, and their offshoots, all founded by the great-grandsons of the teamaster Sen no Rikyû. As a franchise system with branches throughout Japan and abroad, these three tea schools continue today to provide instruction in the proper practice of chanoyu around the world. They also oversee and certify the production of branded ceramic, lacquer, and bamboo tea utensils in prescribed forms and styles by ten hereditary families of craftsmen that trace their origins to the late sixteenth century. At the outset, tea was limited principally to members of the socio-political circles of the Ashikaga military rulers, and gatherings were the occasions for lavish, competitive displays of their collections of Chinese art treasures. These included Southern Song (1127–1279) and Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) ink paintings, calligraphy by Zen monks, as well as stoneware, porcelain and lacquer utensils for preparing and serving tea. Finely potted celadons and stonewares with deep brown glazes known as temmoku in Japan (Jian ware in Chinese) were especially sought after since there were no domestically-produced works of comparable refinement.3 Porcelain manufacture did not begin in Japan until the early seventeenth century, and in the fifteenth century only a few kilns in the Seto and Mino regions (modern day Aichi and Gifu Prefectures) had the technology to produce glazed wares. Vessels emulating the shapes and surface effects of sought-after Chinese imports were first made in the Seto region during the thirteenth century for aristocrats, temples and shrines. These kilns later shifted production to cater to demand for tea caddies with temmoku-like glazes closely modeled on Chinese imports. The tradition that Katô Shirozaemon, a potter who had traveled to China in 1223 with the Zen monk Dôgen, founded the Seto kilns, suggests that this development involved some form of technology transfer.4 Import substitution was tied to the growth of tea consumption both as ritual and as part of everyday life among all levels of society. (The green tea that gained popularity in Japan was picked, heated, then dried in sealed containers; unlike Chinese or European teas it was not allowed to ferment.) When tea drinking was confined to the elite, the dried leaves were stored in lugged jars imported from China or Southeast Asia that the military rulers sent to tea plantations in the spring to be filled and sealed for delivery in the autumn. These are commonly known as Luzon jars since they were trans-shipped to Japan via the Philippines (see Figure 4.1).5 The large tea jar, with its brocade cap and decorative cords, was displayed in the decorative alcove of the tearoom as part of the ritual held upon its arrival. Both the cost of such imported vessels and the aesthetic discourses that

52 Christine M. E. Guth

developed around them testify to their material and symbolic value. The luxury status of the container guaranteed the quality of its contents. Sixteenth-century sources testify to the extraordinary value of Chinese tea caddies and tea leaf jars. Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), who was in Japan twice between 1579 and 1592, wrote of “a small earthenware caddy for which, in all truth, we would have no other use than to put it in a bird’s cage as a drinking trough; nevertheless he [the king of Bungo] had paid 9,000 silver taels (or about 14,00 ducats) for it.”6 Sen no Rikyû, in a letter written about the same time, mentions a price of fifty pieces of gold for one antique Chinese tea leaf jar. Since one gold piece bought about 10,620 liters of rice, the cost of this vessel was equivalent to some 540,000 liters of rice.7

FIGURE 4.1

Luzon tea leaf storage jar, 16th century

Source: © Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer F1900.22

Import substitution in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan 53

The expansion of the market, combined with the disruption of international trade owing to the Onin and Bunmei Wars (1467–87) put pressure on the supply of such imported containers, precipitating the adoption of utilitarian domestic jars that farmers used for storing seeds and grain and to hold water. Unlike the refined imports from China, these vessels from rural kilns in Shigaraki and Bizen near modern-day Kyoto and Okayama were coarsely potted with awkward, often sagging forms made with clay pitted with sand and pebbles (see Figure 4.2). Their surfaces were further marked by the accidental effects of burnt straw or vitrified wood-ash from the firing process. Tea distributors and merchants especially favored those from Shigaraki kilns because these were conveniently located near Uji, a region whose tea plantations saw a surge in production in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.8

FIGURE 4.2

Shigaraki tea leaf storage jar, 1400–1500. Museum no: FE 201984

Source: © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

54 Christine M. E. Guth

The use of such local wares was not entirely new, but previously had been limited to the storage and distribution of low grade tea. To reposition them as containers for ceremonial tea, merchants, who were becoming increasingly active in chanoyu, re-presented these rustic vessels in terms that linked them to a repudiation of the excessive luxury of their imported counterparts. This rationalization of domestic vessels of inferior materials and craftsmanship gave merchants the moral high ground vis-à-vis the military elite. At the same time, their lower cost in relation to imports made it possible for an increasing number of aspiring commoners to take up the practice of tea. The names of Murata Jukô (1422/3–1502), Takenoo Jôô (1502–55) and Sen no Rikyû, monk-teamasters who were themselves of merchant background, are touchstones in the formulation of the rhetoric of rustic poverty and imperfection known as wabi that validated domestic wares in moral and aesthetic terms.9 To understand this process, however, requires looking beneath the kind of anecdote and myth prevalent in orthodox texts about tea, a mode of writing history that conceals its own method. It also requires careful interpretation of writings by, or authorized by, the heirs to the lineages of tea instruction and practice founded by Sen no Rikyû’s three grandsons. The Zen monk Murata Jukô is said to have “discovered” rustic wares from Shigaraki and Bizen, and encouraged their adoption as part of a critique of shogunal excess; yet he is known to have formed a large personal collection of Chinese ceramics himself. He also is said to have served as teamaster to the Ashikaga Shogun Yoshimasa, a tradition more likely to have been promoted after his death to lend legitimacy to what was still a contested taste in tea wares. To Jukô is also attributed the invention of a new-style tearoom of reduced size and simple décor, known as sôan, or “thatched hut.” While this too is likely apochryphal, there is no doubt that the advent of the sôan dates to his lifetime.10 This space dramatically restricted both the number of guests and articles that could be displayed. The Letter of the Heart [Kokoro no fumi], that Jukô wrote to a disciple, is the most reliable source of information about his position in the transformation in taste and practice occurring in the late fifteenth century. In it, he advocates the judicious use of domestic wares to complement imports, elsewhere analogizing this to “tying a fine steed to a thatched hut.” In other words, just as we may better appreciate the quality of a fine horse when we see it next to a rough dwelling, so too the rough dwelling becomes more visually interesting by the contrast. This recognition of the mutually constitutive relationship between luxury imports and their rustic substitutes is reinforced by his declaration that it was essential to “dissolve the boundaries between imported and domestic wares.”11 Examination of patterns of usage during the sixteenth century, well documented in the diaries kept by merchant teamen, suggests that the boundaries between imported and domestic wares were in fact dissolving. Although unglazed Shigaraki and Bizen stonewares may be contrasted with so-called Luzon jars, they have much in common with unglazed low-fire wares that were also being imported from South-East Asia. As the ceramics scholar Louise Cort has observed, these prestigious

Import substitution in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan 55

imports likely contributed to the validation of local unglazed wares.12 Of particular note in this respect is a type of bulbous, low-fire, unglazed jar with a repeated cord pattern around its circumference that became fashionable in tea circles in the midsixteenth century. This type of vessel came to be known in Japan as imogashira, or potato head.13 Shigaraki potters were so successful in imitating these “potato head” jars that nineteenth-century collectors were warned: “Among pieces called Shigaraki are mixed many pieces made in Luzon [the Philippines]. All those that make the sound ‘kin-kin’ when tapped are not from our country but from China or the South Pacific.”14 Recent observations by the ceramics scholar Hiroko Nishida throw further light on the complex dynamics of the domestic and international trade in tea ceramics. She has remarked that in the absence of excavated examples on the Korean peninsula, Ido wares are likely to have been made as tea bowls expressly for the market in Japan, where large numbers have survived.15 Traditional scholarship, however, holds that Ido ware bowls were originally produced in Korea as common rice bowls, and subsequently “discovered” and repurposed by Japanese tea practitioners. Such narratives strategically elevate the discriminating eye of the collector while effacing the contributions of the maker. By the same token they symbolically appropriate and redefine Korean bowls in the same manner as the Shigaraki and Bizen jars purportedly “discovered” by Murata Jukô. If Nishida is correct, rustic Japanese wares that were first adopted as low-cost substitutes for luxury imports from China were the catalyst for the production of new imports from the Korean peninsula that similarly embodied the ideals of poverty and imperfection. In this way, as Marina Bianchi has argued in her study “Taste for Novelty and Novel Tastes”: “a novel characteristic may carry novelty much farther and start a chain of change that involves all the other interacting goods . . . And the new good is never completely new.”16 Growing demand for tea ceramics also fueled new domestic production. Mortars (suribachi) are among the daily wares that teamasters are said to have “discovered” and repurposed for use as water containers in tea. Later, Bizen and Shigaraki potters began to make vessels that self-consciously simulated them. The late sixteenth-century fresh water container from Bizen illustrated in Figure 4.3 is a case in point. It reproduces the shape of a mortar with broad base and inverted conical walls and interior combing for grinding soybeans, sesame seeds, and making sauces. However, it has been deliberately distorted to make its appearance more interesting.17 This spectacularization, often in defiance of functionality, that distinguishes new designs from their recycled counterparts went hand in hand with the development of a new aesthetic vocabulary that legitimated and in turn helped to popularize this new style. Today this water container is presented as a unique masterpiece, but excavations in Kyoto have revealed that vessels of this type were not uncommon. The discovery of hordes of imported and domestic wabi-type ceramics in Kyoto’s sixteenth-century shopping district testifies to the surge in domestic and imported production and consumption following Nobunaga and Hideyoshi’s policies to promote commerce and crafts in this city.18 How did these radical innovations in ceramics gain acceptance? Discovery, as Marina Bianchi has argued “is not reducible to chance or search. Discovery is wholly

56 Christine M. E. Guth

FIGURE 4.3

Bizen fresh water jar, c.1590–1605, stoneware with natural ash glaze

Source: © Freer Gallery of Art and Sackler Museum, F1998.17

due to the explorer’s ability to take advantage of existing opportunities in ways that are not yet explored, to his or her abilities to detect new and gainful options.”19 Low cost and availability were no doubt huge incentives for the initial adoption of domestic ceramics for tea, but there were also other equally significant aspects to this process. The widespread repurposing of Shigaraki and Bizen wares and production of new rustic style wares in Japan and Korea would not have succeeded without the development of the ideology of wabi. Its historical emergence in the sixteenth century to valorize austerity and imperfection as aesthetic ideals is inextricably entwined with the growth of a consumer society and the attendant competition for cultural authority between increasingly prosperous merchants and warriors. The new moral economy of tea promoted under the banner of wabi austerity was nothing less than a radical ideology of consumption. Although informed by poetic theory and Zen Buddhism, wabi should also be recognized as an example of the symbolic inversion of values that in the language of Bourdieu could be called “ostentatious poverty.” Luxury is central to its meaning but is disguised by being presented in the form of its denial. The “distinction” accrued from wabi is predicated on knowing its coded meaning. A critique of Sen no Rikyû by one of his contemporaries throws light on this symbolic inversion: In [tea] objects he liked, [Rikyû] declared good points bad and bought them for mean prices. In vessels he disdained, [Rikyû] declared bad points good and

Import substitution in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan 57

bought them at high price. He called new old and old new. No he made yes, false he made genuine.20 What is at stake here is not good or bad taste but economics. Skillful manipulation of the aesthetic discourse of wabi gave merchant teamen control over the market they created by their “discoveries.” The taste for rustic austerity did not arise spontaneously or catch on immediately among all tea practitioners. It appealed to commoners on the political margins, because it was a contested, even subversive, discourse that symbolically undermined the cultural authority of the elite. To be a true wabi teaman, declared Sen no Rikyû’s contemporary, Yamanoue Sôji, one need not own even one luxury article from China, but simply “incorporate the qualities of resolution, creativity and skill.” Yet in the same passage, the author also acknowledges that one who owns a Chinese import and “who can judge the value of things” is also a “master.”21 As this makes clear, the novelty of wabi taste was dependent on the esteem in which familiar luxury imports were held. Like the modern subculture styles analyzed by Dick Hebdige, wabi might be characterized as “a compromise solution between contradictory needs: the need to create and express autonomy and difference from parents . . . and the need to maintain the parental identifications.”22 The rise of wabi taste in tea utensils came about in response to particular historical circumstances. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not only marked by political instability but also by an erosion of traditional markers of social distinction. As the practice of tea became a mark of civility, the mastery of its etiquette and the ability to manipulate the cultural codes attendant on the selection and display of tea utensils became associated with sociocultural and political power.23 The discriminating eye and creativity required to build a fine collection of tea utensils afforded opportunities for merchants to develop individual social identities. This underlies the many “discovery” narratives in tea modeled by Jukô, Jôô and Rikyû. In addition, the practice of chanoyu enabled men of different social backgrounds to safely meet and establish networks that brought access to knowledge and business opportunities well beyond the confines of the tearoom. Wabi did not, as is commonly assumed, imply a complete renunciation of imported luxuries, merely moderation—a reduced number of articles used and displayed being dictated by the small room where tea gatherings were held. Combining Japanese rusticity with Chinese refinement, however, created a relational aesthetics in which moderation was offset by the expanded opportunities of diversification. As a result, by fostering new materials, forms and styles of utensils, wabi paradoxically increased consumption. Tea adepts were encouraged to invent their own personal ensembles for each tea gathering by mixing and matching colorful Chinese porcelains with more sober domestic ceramics. In the sixteenth century, the visual discernment and inventiveness required to mix and match, a process known as toriawase, became the defining characteristic of the most admired men of tea.24 The innovations associated with import substitution in the context of chanoyu are thus situated at the intersection of a variety of discourses. These involve individual and local

58 Christine M. E. Guth

economic, ideological, and institutional factors, but they must also take into account the larger geographies of which ceramics production and consumption in Japan were an inextricable part.

Notes 1 Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global Origins of British Consumer Goods,” Past and Present 182 (2004): 85–112. 2 Basic studies include Tea in Japan, edited by Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989; Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History, and Practice, edited by Morgan Pitelka. London: RoutledgeCurzon 2003; and Morgan Pitelka, Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005. For a good discussion of the period under consideration informed by Bourdieu see Dale Slusser, “The Transformation of Tea Practice in Sixteenth-Century Japan,” in Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History, and Practice, pp. 39–60. 3 On Jian wares see Robert D. Mowry, Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feathers: Chinese Brown and Black-glazed Ceramics, 400–1400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1996. 4 Louise Allison Cort, Seto and Mino Ceramics: Japanese Collections in the Freer Gallery of Art. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, 1992, pp. 56–60. 5 On tea jars, see Tokugawa Yoshinobu, “Chatsubo,” in Chadô shûkin, vol.10. Chadôgu: hanaire, chaire, chatsubo. Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1986, pp. 161–72. 6 They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640, compiled and annotated by Michael Cooper. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965, p. 261. 7 Louise Allison Cort, “Shopping for Pots in Momoyama Japan,” in Japanese Tea Culture: Art History and Practice, p. 65. 8 Louise Allison Cort, Shigaraki: Potters’ Valley. Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2001, pp. 105–10. 9 On wabi see Koshira Haga, “The Wabi Aesthetic through the Ages,” translated and adapted by Martin Collcutt, in Tea in Japan, pp. 195–229. 10 The earliest surviving example of a reduced size tearoom is in the Tôgudô sub-temple of Yoshimasa’s Silver Pavilion, thought to date to circa 1480. See Fumio Hashimoto, Architecture in the Shoin Style: Japanese Feudal Residences, translated and adapted by H. Mack Horton. Tokyo & New York: Kodansha International, 1981, pp. 55–8. 11 The myths surrounding Jukô, his place in tea history, and aesthetic philosophy are well discussed in Wind in the Pines: Classic Writings of the Way of Tea as a Buddhist Path, compiled and edited by Dennis Hirota. Fremont, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1995, pp. 63–80. For cited passages from his writings on tethering a horse and on dissolution of boundaries, see pp. 70 and 67. 12 Cort,”Shopping for Pots in Momoyama Japan,” in Japanese Tea Culture, p. 75. 13 This designation is now assumed to be strictly humorous, but potatoes were a valuable crop newly introduced to Japan through Portuguese traders, so it may have had different connotations at that time. 14 Cited in Cort, Shigaraki: Potter’s Valley, p. 133. 15 Takeshi Watanabe, “From Korea to Japan and Back again: One Hundred Years of Japanese Tea Culture through Five Bowls, 1550–1650,” in Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 2007: Japanese Art at Yale. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery 2007, p. 84 citing Hiroko Nishida, Kanzô chawan hyakusen. Tokyo: Nezu Bijutsukan, 1994, p. vi. 16 Marina Bianchi, “Taste for Novelty and Novel Tastes: The Role of Human Agency in Consumption,” in The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice. Marina Bianchi (ed.) Routledge 1998, p. 67. 17 For a detailed discussion of this work, see Beyond the Legacy: Anniversary Acquisitions for the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, edited by Thomas Lawton and Thomas W. Lentz. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1998, pp. 289–92.

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18 These discoveries are the basis for Cort’s “Shopping for Pots in Momoyama Japan.” 19 Bianchi, “Taste for Novelty and Novel Tastes: The Role of Human Agency in Consumption,” pp. 3–4. 20 Mary Elizabeth Berry, The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, p. 242. 21 Cited in Paul Varley and George Elison, “The Culture of Tea; from its Origins to Sen no Rikyû,” in Warlords Artists and Commoners: Japan in the Sixteenth Century, edited by George Elison and Bardwell L. Smith. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981, pp. 204–5. 22 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style. Routledge, 2007, p. 77. 23 On this subject see Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2005. 24 Christine M. E. Guth, Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle. Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 64–8.

RESPONSE Maxine Berg

Christine Guth’s fine essay on Japanese tea culture introduces three key points connecting her subject to the social-economic history of global trade and cultural interaction. These are import substitution, concepts of luxury and consumption, and the role of merchants and mercantile cultures. Guth argues that the import substitution model developed for Europe was about the substitution of like by like, a simulation of appearance but not of mode of production. She wishes to complicate the concept of import substitution by including the substitution of like by unlike, and the validation of new goods as luxuries. Her discussion of these import substitutes in the case of Japanese tea culture provides a fascinating case study of this import substitution, but is Japan’s story so very different from Europe’s? As David Hume put it, ‘Our own steel and iron are like the gold and silver of the Indies’.1 Europeans substituted not just production processes, but materials, and in the process created product innovation. Gold might be imitated by ormolu or even bronze, the sparkle of diamonds provided by cut steel, silver plate might match the appearance of luxury silver. But common domestic materials were also developed into new products which acquired fashion and taste, and became world products in their own turn: refined earthenware a modern advance on porcelain; lead glass crystal the base of a whole range of new products never envisaged by Venetian glass craftsmen; silver plate more malleable and flexible could produce more refined and variable products. Enamels and japanned metal goods were not imitation domestic substitutes, but new products which also had important markets in China and India. The key to the success of these products was design, taste and fashion, and above all the novelty and modernity of their use of materials and production processes. Is the case of Japanese tea wares distinctive? What we see in this case is not a new production process, or innovative technologies to use domestic materials, but instead a new use and validation of once common domestic utensils. In turn, the new luxury status acquired by these objects came to affect the type of products imported. The

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intermediary for this process was a distinctive domestic tea culture in Japan, created and sustained by merchants. That tea culture, as Guth sets out, developed wabi, an aesthetic of simplicity over ostentation, of appreciation of rustic imperfection alongside the refined quality of imported goods. Guth demonstrates the development of the tea culture over the course of the later fifteenth to seventeenth centuries encompassing periods of substitution for imported Chinese ceramics through to one of mixing the rough and the smooth, the refined and the unsophisticated, the personal narrative of imperfection with the refined perfection of the ceremony. She turns Jukô’s emphasis on ‘dissolving the boundaries between imported and domestic ware’ into analysis of a new phase of import substitution with unglazed low-fired wares imitating Japanese unglazed wares exported to Japan from Southeast Asia and Korea. Guth identifies the early role played by merchant tea men. They cultivated wabi and used it to control their markets. Mastery of the tea ceremony as a mark of civility signified social and political power, and merchants turned the aesthetics of choice of tea implements into individual social identities. Pushing her argument further, we might also see the potential impact of this mercantile culture on the global market in ceramics especially from the seventeenth century. In Tokugawa Japan trade expanded and wealth grew in the newly settled conditions. New wealthy groups within a rapidly urbanizing Japanese society developed different interpretations and styles of the tea ceremony. This more widespread practice of the tea ceremony entailed a commercial culture of collecting the utensils and vessels used in the tea ceremony and kaiseki or simple meal which preceded it. At the heart of the tea ceremony was a showing of the valued tea articles and rehearsing their history. As Guth shows, these articles combined imported Chinese porcelains with domestic and even imported rough wares, ones which were highly individual, invested with personal associations and hugely valued. Leading tea masters had large personal collections from which they selected pieces for each ceremony. Japanese tea masters prized quality wares exhibiting unsophisticated and individual characteristics. Some of the imported porcelain objects were Korean and some Chinese; there was also a substantial amount of Jingdezhen export ware that was used in serving the meal that preceded the tea.2 Tea and ceramics merchants engaged in a significant ceramics trade with Chinese merchants developing a whole range of private kilns in Jingdezhen over the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century. The Chinese exported 23 per cent of their porcelain output to Japan over the period 1602–44, and 14 per cent in 1645–61.3 What the Chinese private kilns did over a crucial period of four decades was to provide export-quality wares, many in small quantities, and specifically designed from patterns and correspondence provided by merchants servicing the different schools of tea ceremony. What this required was a response to an aesthetic of diversity, with some schools preferring more showy wares, others appreciating an understated taste. A diversity of shapes and utensils was required to meet the different protocols of the socially-diverse but large sectors of new wealth in Edo and other Japanese cities. The development of such export ware for the Japanese market also

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drew on the innovative response of private kilns to new domestic markets created by the later Ming literati seeking high quality goods to confirm status, but goods which also conveyed contemporary fashion and politics.4 We can ask what impact this Chinese–Japanese trade in ceramics, deeply influenced by the developing protocols of the tea ceremony, had on the newly developing Chinese–European ceramics trade. Did the experience Chinese merchants and private producers drew on to meet the highly specific demands of the Japanese market contribute to their facility in adapting to the distinctive designs and shapes of a newly developing Dutch and European market?5 Can the Japanese tea ceremony be lifted out of its isolated history of distinctive connoisseurship to be connected to wider global processes of ceramics production and exchange?

Notes 1 2

3 4

5

David Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, [1752] in David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, Liberty Classics, 1985). p. 264. Colin D. Sheaf, ‘Chinese Ceramics and Japanese Tea Taste in the Late Ming Period’, in Rosemary E. Scott, The Porcelains of Jingdezhen, Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia No. 16 (London, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, 1992) pp. 165–83, esp. 176–9. C. Ho, ‘The Ceramic Trade in Asia 1602–82’, in A.J.H. Latham, H. Kawakatsu, eds, Japanese Industrialization and the Asian Economy (London, 1994), pp. 37–8. See Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things. Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991); Clunas, Art in China (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 133–48; Robert Batchelor, ‘On the Movement of Porcelains’, in John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds, Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford, Berg, 2006), pp. 95–121, esp. p.104. Christiaan J. A. Jörg, ‘Porcelain for the Dutch in the Seventeenth Century: Trading Networks and Private Enterprise’, in Rosemary E. Scott, The Porcelains of Jingdezhen, Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia No. 16 (London, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, 1992) p. 189; Margaret Medley, The Chinese Potter, third edition (Oxford, Phaidon Press, 1989), pp. 229–32.

5 THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE FASHION CITY Christopher Breward

The history of Western fashion is closely related to the history of urban life.1 As cultural geographer David Gilbert has claimed, this complex relationship underpins contemporary understandings of global fashion as a system orchestrated around a shifting network of world cities, particularly Paris, New York, London, Milan and Tokyo, but also incorporating (at various times) Moscow, Vienna, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Kuwait City, Cape Town, Barcelona, Antwerp, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Stockholm and many others. The hierarchy of these locations, Gilbert suggests, has to be understood through a history which places fashion at the intersection of key cultural and economic processes that shaped the urban order. These included the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century, the economic and symbolic workings of European imperialism, the growing American engagement with European fashion (specifically via the medium of Hollywood film) and the emergence of a distinctively fashion-focused promotional industry (advertising and magazines, fashion weeks and runway presentations) centred on a few key urban centres.2 This chapter looks to one crucial moment in this development (the latter half of the nineteenth century) that witnessed the consolidation of the idea of the city as a pivotal location in the global organisation of both colonial and sartorial relationships with long-term consequences for the directions taken by a globalised fashion industry in subsequent eras.

The pre-history of fashion cities The first modern centres of fashion production, distribution and display prospered because of the concurrent existence of clusters of highly-skilled clothing producers; local and international markets for the trading and dissemination of raw materials, finished goods and printed representations of them; and the proximity of magnificent court cultures where the promotion of luxury was a social and moral necessity.

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These three factors were often interdependent, echoing fashion’s generic character as an amalgamation of the forces of production, distribution and consumption. But the emphasis and effect differed from city to city, leading to local distinctions and wider competition. Thus the rising dominance of Burgundian, Venetian and Spanish sartorial styles in formations of early modern European taste reflected those moments during which their respective courts (and their host cities) enjoyed unchallenged political, economic and military influence. In fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Venice, Florence, Madrid, Paris, Bruges and London, fine textiles and clothes were as significant an indicator of civic power as the streets, squares, guildhalls and palaces that signified heightened metropolitan status in architectural terms. Furthermore, such sites offered spaces where crowds might congregate, classes of people intermingle, and individuals compete for attention through the modishness of their attire. To be fashionable was to be urban and vice versa. By the late seventeenth century the dual systems of mercantile trade and courtly display had produced a convergence. Paris emerged as the prime centre of urban fashionability and the first of fashion’s world cities. The nearby court of the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV utilised the power of fashion for dynastic and nationalistic propaganda. As Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis’ most powerful statesman, remarked, ‘fashion is to France what the gold mines of Peru are to Spain’. Royal sponsorship of French textile, ceramic, metal and furniture manufactures as substitutes for Spanish and Italian luxury imports, and the spectacular consolidation of the King’s household at Versailles as a carefully managed symbol of absolutism, strengthened the idea of French fashion as a vehicle for control and promotion. Ambitious courtiers and subjects were kept in check by a complex system of sartorial regulations, and foreign competitors were awed into submission by the staging of ostentatious fashionable consumption, both personal and ceremonial.3 The labour which lay behind this emphasis on the creation of fashionable personae, lifestyles and happenings was located in Paris and underpinned the transformation of France’s economy and international profile. Unsurprisingly, the thousands of weavers, embroiderers, tailors, dressmakers and milliners employed in the service of the court at Versailles were also able to establish themselves as an alternative source of fashion knowledge, materials and techniques to local clientele. The demi-monde of wealthy courtesans and actresses at home in the city, the rising Parisian bourgeoisie and increasing numbers of overseas and provincial visitors formed a new audience for their goods, and a new conduit for trends that operated independently of those trickling down from the monarchy. By the middle of the eighteenth century Parisian tastes, freed from the restrictions of official practice, were also attracting the attention of a younger aristocratic generation. After 1715, Louis XV’s circle chose to embrace the chic urbanity of metropolitan modes over fossilised court ceremony. It was in this context that the Paris-based purveyor of fashion gained a new role and prominence in the system of Paris fashion.4 The complicated guild regulations which governed the production of Paris fashion in the eighteenth century (preceding the equally severe edicts of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in the twentieth century) threw up discrete categories

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of producer, most notably the maitresses couturieres (responsible for the cutting-out and construction of the basic garment) and the marchandes de modes (who supplied trimmings and had more influence over fashion directions). One of the latter, Rose Bertin of the rue Saint-Honoré, was dressmaker to Marie Antoinette; her reputation as a domineering dictator of ancien régime style arguably formed the prototype from which later constructions of the Parisian fashion designer developed. Like several of her successors, from Charles Worth in the 1870s to Coco Chanel in the 1930s and Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s, her expertise lay in a masterful juxtaposing of existing elements sourced from the city’s rich supply of exquisitely crafted products, the ability to flatter and anticipate the tastes of her elite clients, and a driving selfpromotional force.

Paris: capital of the nineteenth century? The characterisation of Bertin and her successors as part artist, part impresario underlines the continuing importance of the personality of the couturier to enduring ideas of Paris as premier fashion city. But the gradual development of the physical city further contributed to the creation of a powerful myth of Parisian prestige, endorsed in countless tourist guidebooks and subsequent representations of what Walter Benjamin would come to call the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’. From the 1860s to 1914 Paris itself was transformed into the ‘City of Light’: a global object of desire and a cipher for high-end consumption.5 Bertin’s world had been located in a rarefied domain of small gilded showrooms and prestigious made-to-measure workrooms which over the decades expanded to incorporate the rue Richelieu and the rue de la Paix. By the 1850s the neighbouring Palais Royal housed a less-refined, but no less opulent, collection of ready-made fashion goods for visiting tourists and wealthy locals hungry for the latest ‘look’. In contrast, the rue Saint-Denis, with its new and luxurious department stores, was associated with the respectable but stylish purchases of the middle classes; its pavements were equally crowded. Despite their different atmospheres, these districts held in common a blind belief in the global supremacy of Parisian fashion, and a scattering of tenants whose trading names had become synonymous with that same phenomenon.6 Alongside Worth, couturiers including Doucet and Paquin produced products and ideas that signified elegance and modernity throughout Europe, its colonies and the Americas. Yet, by the late nineteenth century the seemingly undisputed domination of Paris as first city of fashion was coming under threat from other versions in Europe and beyond. London, by this time enjoying economic and political world prominence, could also boast an established reputation as the ‘home’ of gentleman’s tailoring: the ‘man’s city’ whose Savile Row-inspired elegance stood in opposition to the French capital’s association with glamorous femininity.7 In Berlin, Barcelona, Brussels and Vienna, café society and the promotion of artistic bohemianism offered alternative interpretations of fashionable urbanity, premised on aesthetic avant-gardism and social experimentation.8 And in the United States the fashion retail and manufacturing innovations of Chicago and New York showed the potential for a more

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democratic understanding of fashion as a commercial endeavour, synonymous with America’s youthful metropolitan centres and their expanding populations.9

Fashion cities in the Age of Empire To some extent, all of these established and emergent cities of fashion were linked through the ties of international diplomacy, trade, and labour and reflected a broader colonial context. Their rise coincided with the circulation of widely-recognised symbolic codes for the luxurious, the ‘primitive’, and the ‘exotic’ which reflected fashion capitals’ function as nodal points of an imperialist geography of consumerist supply and demand, where the fashionable goods in production, on show, or in use, conformed to respected hierarchies of taste. Such values could be seen at play in the imaginative uses made of ‘orientalist’ displays in European and American department stores, or the manner in which the perfect craft and visual flair of elite metropolitan fashions were celebrated as ‘art’ in the new magazines. These distinctions were naturalised as part of the fabric of Western ‘civilisation’, demonstrating the merits of the ‘sophisticated’ beauty of urban fashion in the developed world in vivid contrast to the ‘savage’ simplicity of clothing in subordinated non-urban societies. Immigrant communities, whose presence was also an important contribution to the establishment of modern fashion cities, together with those who resided in the colonies of European empires, provided the labour necessary for the production and distribution of city-specific fashions, and often provided the sources of inspiration for the latest lucrative trends (this can be seen, for example, in the translation of the South Asian ‘boteh’ motif into the Paisley shawl craze that hit Europe from the 1840s).10 Local and seasonal patterns of migration and exchange between cities and their rural hinterlands also ensured that fashion capitals in the Industrial Age maintained their reputation as magnetic centres, attracting manpower and wealth, and generating creativity. By the fin de siècle, fashion had thus established itself as one of the currencies by which cities distinguished themselves and competed against each other. The production and consumption of particular genres and styles of fashionable goods sat alongside the promotion of state architecture, the cult of the international exhibition, the imposition of grand street plans and the rise of international tourism as a mechanism for engendering a higher profile in the Western consumer’s imagination. A more immediate motivation for those involved in such promotion was greater prosperity in the clothing and advertising trades. By the 1920s and 1930s the influence of an American engagement with European fashion (and vice versa) via the instruments of a new mass culture had also become a defining factor in the forging of a popular concept of the fashion city, though often through recourse to nostalgic tropes of metropolitan life created in the previous century. Hollywood film directors and Fifth Avenue magazine editors branded an enduring image of Paris as the eternally elegant city of fashionably-dressed eroticism on global consumer consciousness, while New York attained a screen identity as the dynamic and futuristic domain of slick and snappy acquisitiveness that it has subsequently found

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hard to shed.11 In this dream-like vision of fashion’s complementary centres, London featured either as a bastion of tradition and conservatism, or as a gothic nightmare of fog-shrouded alleyways and hansom cabs. What is fascinating is the manner in which such stereotyping still endures in the language and imagery of late twentiethand twenty-first-century fashion industry rhetoric: the extravagance of a Dior couture collection still evokes the sensual overload of a Proustian courtesan’s boudoir; successful television and film franchises such as Sex and the City, with their obvious reliance on commodity-fetishism and materialist values, have been taken as an unproblematic representation of Manhattan mores; and the provocative sexuality of a Vivienne Westwood or the late Alexander McQueen show draw non-ironic comparisons with Victorian melodrama and the world of ‘Jack the Ripper’.12

Nineteenth-century fashion cities and late modernity Where the nineteenth-century conceptualisation of the world fashion city was focused on improving infrastructural foundations and establishing representational ideas as part of the broader promotion of cosmopolitan ideals, more recently the identity of the fashion city has been increasingly bound up with the evolution of modern fashion as a universal and aspirational cipher whose meanings extend far beyond the production of luxury clothing.13 From the 1950s, a more finely graded ranking of fashion’s key centres has echoed the relative fortunes of national and increasingly international fashion-based industries, and caused the mantle ‘fashion city’ to be deployed more self-consciously as a form of protectionism, as a promotional tool, or a mechanism for re-branding and regeneration.14 Looking forward, the nature of the fashion city looks set to change again as the system of ‘fast fashion’, with its reliance on far-flung sites of production, disrupts the traditional relationship between time, place and fashion creativity. Similarly the rise of Internet fashion portals such as the Worth Global Style Network has made the seasonal display of collections in a few key ‘fashion weeks’ less relevant when journalists and retailers can identify emerging trends instantaneously online. The specific atmosphere and accrued traditions of established fashion centres appear to dissolve in the virtual world of the Web. Such developments have also opened up spaces in which other cities, notably Shanghai, Mumbai and Sao Paulo, have been able to challenge the hegemony of Paris, London, New York, Milan and Tokyo, cities whose claims for international fashion prominence were consolidated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a post-colonial twenty-first century it is precisely those places that formerly supplied aesthetic inspiration or manpower to the centres of an older fashion empire that are emerging as competitive sites for the production of new products and ideas. For contemporary Chinese, Indian or Brazilian designers, entrepreneurs and consumers, the idea of Paris, London or Milan as the sole generators and guardians of fashion innovation carries far less power than it might have done to previous generations. What seems less likely though is the demise of the nineteenth-century idea of the fashion city as a crucial component of the concept and structural organisation

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of fashion more generally. Contemporary sartorial commodities by necessity operate in a globally-understood ‘realm of values’. The design and media creatives in the most successful and long-standing fashion cities have always understood this, seeking to project their particular sense of life and culture onto the rest of the world’s markets in a responsive and fluid manner. The differentiated and often stereotypical fashion imagery of Paris, London and New York is now not entirely fixed in its geographical specificity, even though its validity and meaning partly lie in a real industrial history, architectural landscape and cultural heritage inherited from at least a hundred years before. It is precisely the flexible nature of fashion city values rooted in a longer historical trajectory that endows the modern fashion order with the continuing capacity to create and challenge social, material and aesthetic realities across the globe.

Notes 1 See C. Breward and D. Gilbert (eds), Fashion’s World Cities, Oxford: Berg, 2006. 2 D. Gilbert, ‘Urban Outfitting: The City and the Spaces of Fashion Culture’, in S. Bruzzi and P. Church-Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 15. 3 See V. Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 4 See D. Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 5 See D. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, London: Routledge, 2003. And C. Jones, Paris, Biography of a City, London: Penguin, 2006. 6 P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 7 See C. Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. C. Breward, Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis, Oxford: Berg, 2004. C. Breward, E. Ehrman and C. Evans, The London Look, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 8 See R. Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art 1850–1930, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004. 9 See N. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. And M. Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 10 See E. Paulicelli and H. Clark (eds), The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity and Globalisation, London: Routledge, 2009. J. Potvin (ed.), The Places and Spaces of Fashion, London: Routledge, 2009. And R. Ross, Clothing: A Global History, London: Polity, 2008. 11 See R. Arnold, The American Look: Fashion, Sportswear and the Image of Women in 1930s and 1940s New York, London: I.B.Tauris, 2009. 12 See C. Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, London: Yale University Press, 2003. 13 See I. Loschek, When Clothes Become Fashion: Design and Innovation Systems, Oxford: Berg, 2009. 14 See D. Gilbert, ‘From Paris to Shanghai: The Changing Geographies of Fashion’s World Cities’, in Breward and Gilbert (eds), Fashion’s World Cities, pp. 3–32.

RESPONSE Simona Segre Reinach

The genesis of fashion cities is a fascinating story, as Christopher Breward shows. This is not only because from the historical point of view it is interesting to follow the development of the cities which have made their names in this way, identifying geographies and hierarchies, rises and (momentary) falls, power struggles and new aesthetics. This has undoubtedly happened, and still happens. In his introductory essay to Fashion’s World Cities, David Gilbert, for example, underlines that today Asia is the place where aesthetics are most seductive and forms most attractive, with that admixture of kawaii (cuteness) and cynicism which appears so irresistible to us in the West. But it is not only this. What Chris Breward points out to us is a transition from a situation in which culture and power made a “fashion city”, to a new situation in which fashion itself – with its specific culture – makes cities emerge. This is not an insignificant matter. On the contrary, it may modify the very relationship between fashion and urban life. In the history of fashion cities, Breward writes, increasingly specialised producers may be identified. There were markets – local and international – in which products were traded and splendid courts where the search for luxury took on the urgency of a moral duty. In this period there were many cities, or rather, city courts, vying with each other and carrying out design competition. The travellers moving from one court to another contributed to spreading and making interesting and desirable the various styles characterising the courts of Burgundy, Venice and Spain. In the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Venice, Florence, Madrid, Paris, Bruges and London displayed their strength and power in architecture and city planning, but also in the precious fabrics they were able to produce. We all know that from the late seventeenth century and with Louis XIV, Paris took its place as the first true fashion city. The relationship between Paris and fashion was so close that it has lasted till our times. The competition between Paris and London came later and was enacted on a different front, that of male elegance, that is, in a way

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almost a negation of fashion, because fashion and women remained for a long time, at least until the years following the Second World War, an inseparable couple, as strong as that of fashion and Paris. With the success of Paris the rise of the urban bourgeoisie also began, with its demi-monde becoming the true addressee of fashion and its most skilful interpreter. In this context flourished the first great theories on fashion which stressed distinction and its practices. Paris became the ville lumière. The lights of the city constituted the stage for fashion and in this sense what was not fashion was considered as dark, habitual, reassuring, and at times even boring. While fashion signified light, fatal attraction, adventure and risk. Nothing illustrates better the relationship between fashion and urban spirit than Murnau’s celebrated film Aurora (1927). The protagonist, a good, rough, vital peasant married to a fine country lass with blond plaits, becomes involved with and sexually enslaved by a self-possessed city woman, dressed in the latest Paris fashion, a cigarette between her lips, who comes to the village on ‘holiday’. The cities are fashion and signify fashion. The process has been a long one and has settled down over the years: Paris, London, New York, Milan and Tokyo continue to broadcast their styles, although often reduced to stereotypes. But, as Breward underlines, ‘what is fascinating, is the manner in which such stereotyping still endures in the language and imagery of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fashion industry rhetoric: where the extravagance of a Dior couture collection still evokes the sensual overload of a Proustian courtesan’s boudoir’. The strength of these stereotypes is based on the growth of the cosmopolitan city – with its architecture, its food, streets and urban life – and at the same time of its fashion, made up of art, trade and industry. The materiality of fashion thus fits into the city culture, strengthening and enhancing it. Each city has its own fashion, which is characterised in terms of product and style. The turnabout to which Chris Breward refers happened after the 1950s, when the identity of fashion cities became more closely entwined with that of the development of fashion itself. I would say that it was with the emergence of Milan, the prêt-à-porter city, in the 1980s, that this change underwent a further acceleration. The relationship between fashion and city also started to change from then on. Not only have other cities more and more swiftly been added to the ‘historical’ list – Paris, New York, London, Milan, Tokyo, Antwerp, Stockholm, Shanghai, etc. – but as Breward writes, the traditional relationship between time, place and creativity has also changed, due to the relocation and globalisation of markets. The dematerialisation which follows, that is, the separation between industry and creativity, has changed its traditional rhythms. Time and materiality, the historical origins of fashion cities, have been significantly affected by this change. The cities made use of fashion and in turn fashion has used the cities. Not just fast fashion, but also fast cities. Like pop-up stores, pop-up cities have come into the limelight, to then give way or flank, more or less at the same time, more or less virtually, others and others again. Alongside more traditional processes – and despite being increasingly less tied to an industry as they are characterised by varied types of manufactures, fashion schools

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and other servic activities – unprecedented forms of affirmation of the new cities of fashion may be identified. They are all still to be studied. By becoming the language of contemporaneousness, fashion is the simplest and most effective communication system, but it is also increasingly more articulate and institutional. And it is fashion today, in its turn determined by subtle but complex globalised trajectories, which identifies the cities to be illuminated, and not vice versa.

6 PERFORMING WHITE SOUTH AFRICAN IDENTITY THROUGH INTERNATIONAL AND EMPIRE EXHIBITIONS Dipti Bhagat

Preparing for South Africa’s display at the 1924–25 British Empire Exhibition in Wembley, London, the Chairman of the South African British Empire Exhibition Committee exchanged with his organisational secretary extensive correspondence about their intentions for the South African pavilion. Of the myriad discussions concerning the display, one letter considered the merits of a performance of black South Africans. The Chairman wrote to his Secretary: In the British Empire Exhibition, the greatest novelty will be the greatest attraction. South Africa should achieve that distinction . . . a party of picked Zulus to give their native war dance . . . say 2 or 3 times a day for a limited period, should take the place by storm.1 The organisational secretary of the British Empire Exhibition Committee replied: . . . South Africa is rapidly becoming a country of advanced civilisation and considerable culture. Too long, perhaps, the subcontinent . . . has been pictured as a ‘Dark Continent’ and as a land of Niggers . . . Allowing for the picturesqueness and the unusualness of the spectacle, is it a feature of South African life upon which we desire to put an emphasis?2 To the Chairman, a ‘Zulu war dance’ (ingoma) for Wembley had seemed apt. The British Empire Exhibition was to be spectacular – even carnivalseque. Popular imperialism would serve as a triumphalist antidote to the recent trauma of the Great War, and internal uncertainties about Britain’s global supremacy that had emerged since the end of the nineteenth century. The British Empire Exhibition of 1924–25 attempted to further Britain’s recovery through its Empire.

Performing white South African identity 73

Keen to compete with the rest of the Empire at Wembley, the South African committee proposed a crowd-pulling spectacle. Ingoma dancers would have appealed to a British audience, not wholly unfamiliar with this kind of performance of black South Africans, who had previously been displayed in nineteenth-century international exhibitions. In this essay, I consider the decision not to stage such a performance in the context of competing imperial and national identities that informed South Africa’s displays at the International and Empire Exhibitions. I argue that the power of these spectacular designed events, and their illumination of national and of imperial identities, can be understood more clearly when they are seen as performative. The concept of performativity has been invoked by Judith Butler3 and feminist theorists to frame gender and sexual politics,4 and by Homi Bhabha5 and other cultural theorists to understand the formulation of ethnic identities and ‘nation-ness’.6 Butler’s work seeks to denaturalise sex and gender, and disalign heteronormative sex, gender and desire. She suggests that women and men learn to perform established forms of gender, and that through routinised performance – that is, re-citing and reiterating gender norms – gender comes to appear natural. Butler draws this concept from linguistic theory: ‘if a word . . . might be said to do a thing, then it appears that the word not only signifies a thing, but that this signification will also be the enactment of the thing. It seems here that the meaning of a performative act is to be found in the apparent coincidence of signifying and enacting’.7 ‘Doing’ discourse ‘consists in a reiteration of norms that precede, constrain and exceed the performer’.8 Discourse may be diverse and contradictory, but it always makes things happen. This is how it is powerful. The concept of performativity helps us to understand discursive phenomena (including design) differently. For example, we might observe that performative reiterations are not merely copies of an unchanging same, but citations of established norms, each of which may have its own particular effect. Conversely, there is the possibility for disruption when repetition fails. Discourses may be contradictory, identity may be done differently.9 Butler’s core argument is that identities are constructed in and through action; they do not exist prior to such actions or performances. It is this idea that provides a critical tool for understanding and unfixing dominant identities. So the sense of nation-ness and identity is not seen as a pre-existing essence based upon geographic location; it is, rather, the effect of narrative reiterations. Deploying the concept of the performative beyond Butler’s investigation of gendered bodies, I argue that Empire Exhibitions in general, and South Africa’s performances at these events in particular, made ‘Empire’ and ‘South Africa’ happen. I also extend the performative to understand the spaces of display, images, objects, and people (as images and objects) as ‘brought into being through performance and as a performative articulation of power’.10 In the rest of this essay, I will outline the contested nature of the Dominion of South Africa under the aegis of the British Empire. I go on to illuminate the Empire Exhibitions as moments for exploring South African identity, difference and power relations. I highlight in particular South Africa’s exhibitionary efforts to articulate distinction and self-determination within

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Empire through exhibitions in Britain and in South Africa, and the ways in which these performances were underpinned by the racialisation of black subjects and (by reflection) white South African subjectivity.

Colonial nationalism: negotiating the local and the global South Africa was formed as a self-governing Dominion within the British Empire after the South African War of 1899–1902. Nineteenth-century political, economic and ethnic tensions between Boer (later Afrikaner) and British erupted in war at the close of the century. After the conflict, South Africa embarked upon a process of state formation dedicated to ameliorating British/Boer tensions and to articulating and securing a shared idea of white supremacy. Richard Jebb, the British champion of Dominion self-determination in the early twentieth century,11 recommended that Briton and Boer transcend their ‘tribal racialism’ in favour of their shared ‘Teutonic’ origins for the sake of national union. Bi-lingualism (of English and Dutch, and subsequently English and Afrikaans) was formally instituted at Union in 1910. However, the fragility of this bi-partisanship was evident, not least in the acceleration of a separate Afrikaner ethnic identity. Beinart describes South Africa at the end of the 1920s as characterised by ‘an Afrikaner-based, but relatively broad settler nationalism’.12 Nevertheless, the will to a bi-partisan nation would continue until the resounding victory of the Afrikaner National Party in 1948. Jebb also urged South Africans to take up the ‘imperialism of the white man’s burden’, and to address the deeper reality of ‘the native, the only racial question to darken the future of South Africa’.13 In fact, colonial nationalists had already assumed this burden: by the end of the nineteenth century the most productive land was secured exclusively for white settlers. The Union of the Boer and British colonies in 1910 also established an absolute political disenfranchisement of South Africa’s indigenous population. An armoury of legislation followed that excluded black South Africans from national belonging.14 With these measures, white South Africa performed the ultimate ‘colonial nationalism’, deploying locally-devised legislation for the occlusion and repression of black subjects. Jebb encouraged such local nationalism, arguing that ‘national self-respect’15 must move beyond its derivation from European development. His thinking embodied what Schreuder and Eddy have described as ‘a transitional phase in the relationship between periphery and metropole, between colonial society and metropolitan state’.16 Jebb’s own term for this phase was colonial nationalism. Colonial nationalism was about a ‘conditional’ expression of distinctive local interests and sentiments; its contingency arose out of ‘the dialectical relationship with the founding of imperial [British] power’.17 In Jebb’s own conception in 1905, the global and the local were not in conflict; they were mutually constitutive.

Exhibiting white South Africa on the imperial stage South Africa’s exhibitionary performances in the latter half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century demonstrate a developing hybridity of ‘from-

Performing white South African identity 75

Europe-but-significantly-South-African’.18 Negotiating national and empire-wide circuits of ideas, images, objects and people, these events articulated what Doreen Massey has called a global sense of place.19 They connected both South Africa and Britain with a wider national and imperial belonging, invoking both real and imagined geographies. South Africa, as the Cape colony and Natal, had first been presented at the 1851 and 1862 International Exhibitions. Both events promoted the merits of empire and sought to encourage the idea of empire as nation, not least to ensure Britons would defend their territories.20 The Great Exhibition of 1851 had inaugurated nineteenth-century display categories of Raw Materials, Machinery, Manufactures, and Fine Art as a map of ascending linear progress. Objects were rendered meaningful beyond themselves, performing their own hierarchies. Colonial possessions were represented exclusively by displays of raw materials, with Britain and Europe filling the putatively more civilised categories. Within this market-led taxonomy, where self-presentation was the privilege of economic strength and settled European progress, the young Cape colony promoted its viability to Britain as a source of raw materials, which were converted into works of art and show articles. It was also presented as suitable for emigration and further colonial development. Through inclusion at the Great Exhibition, objects that originated from South Africa effected the colony’s imperial belonging. The Cape was also ‘Europeanised’; its indigenous population was minimally displayed, in contrast to West African settlements, whose ethnographic displays emphasised the exoticism of their indigenous populations. Britain’s second showcase in 1862 reiterated the rhetoric of the industry of all nations; settler colonies were once again claimed as replicas of the imperial centre. The Cape, however, failed to raise enough funds locally to support its bid for London. Though the popular press in the Cape reframed its absence as local pride, ‘to stay [rather] than go with a poverty-stricken appearance’, its absence was viewed by Britain as a lapse in imperial loyalty.21 Natal, a separate colony of the future South Africa did manage a small display of a young settlement fêted for being modelled on British lifestyles, while an invitation to the Boer republics to exhibit was rejected. Thus, the process of participation was itself productive of imperial identity. Britain’s commitment to empire was reiterated once again in the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition. The Empire was celebrated in the context of international imperial rivalry and domestic anxieties centred on the ‘moral and social decay in the metropolis’.22 The solution lay in emigration, not from centre to periphery, but as a translocation within the larger space of the nation-empire. The opposition between centre and periphery was dissolved through the imagined union of the two.23 The South Kensington exhibition site was richly fashioned as imperial and global, not least through the traces of preceding international events, which had occurred there. Within this empire-universal, South Africa showed increasing selfdetermination. Previously the Cape and Natal had occupied only the raw material section of the British display, but now South Africa reiterated the same exhibitionary taxonomies in its own coherent display, showing its raw materials alongside machinery, manufactures, and examples of skilled artisanship in diamond cutting and

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photography. The display emphasised the industriousness of white settlement, again seeking to occlude South Africa’s indigenous people.24 Nevertheless, the inclusion of a number of black South Africans – labourers working the diamond mining model on display – dominated visitor reports and popular press coverage of the South African court. These images drew on established stereotypes that racialised colonial subjects and (tacitly) the European self, primitivising black South Africans as exotic even as they were used as cheap labour.25 In South Africa’s final outing in London, at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–25, its ascendant self-determination exerted a centrifugal impetus, even if it was still contained within the bounds of a centripetal empire-universal. From its location to its display, the South African exhibit contested Wembley’s universalising ideal. The Union of South Africa was located at the very edge of the site, outside of a central loop that gathered the Dominions and India together with palaces of imperial industry and engineering. South Africa’s Cape Dutch-style pavilion performed a reiteration of European/South African hybridity, resisting the event’s universalising designs while still expressing an affinity with the colonial heritage of empire. While ‘palaces’ of the Empire’s other white Dominions exemplified a stolid neoclassicsm reminiscent of the architecture of imperial London, South Africa’s pavilion was housed in the ubiquitous gables and restful stoep (veranda) of the Cape Dutch style. While the British press seemed charmed by the building’s unique appearance, South Africa’s Anglophile press was derisive. For the Natal Witness,26 Canada’s magnificent palace and Australia’s stately pavilion far overshadowed South Africa’s

FIGURE 6.1

View of the Cape Dutch exterior (1), British Empire Exhibition, 1925

Source: South African Railways and Harbours Magazine, December 1925

Performing white South African identity 77

‘Elongated Cottage with 3 Gables’. Nevertheless, the ‘cottage’ had good pedigree. Its consulting architect, Herbert Baker, had been the key advocate of the rustic domesticity of the old Cape homesteads as an authentic South African vernacular. His Arts and Crafts sensibilities led him to idealise these functional colonial homes, their whitewashed surfaces gleaming in a sun-drenched landscape.27 Such architecture was derived from European forms, but it was crafted out of and onto the local South African landscape. While the whitewashed gables had once signalled occupation in an alien landscape, by the 1920s the Cape Dutch style reiterated ‘the epitome of lasting settlement’.28 As a vernacular style, Cape Dutch was also rooted in a landscape of political memory: it signified and effected the bi-partisan white belonging of early Dutch and British settlement. The pavilion also reiterated a policy of ‘South Africa first’29 throughout its interior display programme. While Britain’s plans for the Exhibition sought to promote the profits of inter-empire trade, South Africa actively advertised its pavilion to form new trade and investment partnerships with the USA and continental Europe.30 Set against other Dominions’ spectacular displays, South Africa’s lines and piles of specimens, dominated by the Union’s primary industries of gold and diamond mining and agriculture, were not very diverting.31 Yet the message was clear: this was a land of serious-minded and successful white commerce. So no ingoma dancers ‘stormed’ Wembley. Rather, black South Africans were both ideologically and materially represented alongside flora and fauna of the museum’s display within the pavilion.32 Here, a display of ‘ethnographic specimens’ received serious attention from popular and anthropological press.33 Such

FIGURE 6.2

View of the Cape Dutch exterior (2), British Empire Exhibition, 1925

Source: South African Railways and Harbours Magazine, December 1925

78 Dipti Bhagat

publications as MAN (1924) paid keen attention to the ethnographically classified ‘photographic studies’ of black South Africans in rural backgrounds wearing full, uncompromised ‘traditional’ dress.34 The Chairman and organising secretary provided a British audience not with a spectacle of blackness, but rather with a detailed ethnological study which enacted South Africa’s own growing anthropological expertise, focused on locally oriented research.35

Performing white South Africa on a national stage South Africa’s exhibitionary citations of empire-national hybridity were most complex when the Empire Exhibition was located in South Africa itself. In 1936 Johannesburg hosted the Empire as a celebration of its own fifty-year jubilee. The city’s mine-camp-to-metropolis story framed the rest of South Africa and the Empire on display.36 Exhibition participants – from elsewhere in the Empire, and regions across South Africa – were directed to order their displays to demonstrate progress in the preceding fifty years. An alternative taxonomy for display performatively reconstituted the hierarchy of metropole-periphery that had previously relegated South Africa’s displays to the mutually exclusive categories of raw materials and ethnography. Johannesburg now performed as a young, modern, capitalist, white nation that, if risen from the dirt of the mine-camp, was distinctively South African, and not European. The modish Art Deco design of the exhibition visually connected the event beyond the Empire, into a larger circuit of global design that included Paris, New York and Chicago.37 Yet the distinctive picture of a young, modern, white South Africa in 1936 was itself disrupted and inscribed by an increasingly anti-Empire, ‘Afrikaner nation’, which sought a new consolidation of white, Afrikaner racial identity. Moments of disruptive performance drew attention to the fissures in bi-partisan white nationhood. All Afrikaner medium schools refused to sing God save the King during the Exhibition’s joint school choir event, while in another part of the exhibition, the Federation of the Afrikaans Cultural Association exhibited their model for a proposed monument to the Voortrekkers (pioneer settlers) who had once escaped British jurisdiction.38 This project, planned for the environs of Pretoria, promised a different white nation, oriented inwardly and away from Empire. In this context, performances by black South Africans were complex and varied. Established codes of black performance – as labourers, accessories to industrial displays,39 spectacular dances (ingoma and others)40 or as exotic, ‘near extinct races’ (Khoisan people in particular)41 – were all deployed, as were new roles such as theatre performers and jazz musicians.42 But black South Africans were also present at the exhibition as visitors,43 and as journalists: middle class and communist, all metropolitan men.44 As the very nature of South Africa’s mass spectacles presumed universalising stories, such inclusivity produced a multi-layered space effected through particularised, destabilised, and alternative identities. Thinking about this exhibitionary history in relation to performativity enables us to understand white South African identity as invented and imagined, not ‘homo-

Performing white South African identity 79

genous, stable, essential and unified’.45 White South Africa was an unfixed, unfinished process. The constellation of imperial exhibitions can be understood as discrete moments when the invention of this white South Africa can be ‘caught redhanded, not inventing the facts [of its identity], per se, but inventing the authority from which they derive their meaning and weight’.46 South Africa’s exhibitionary performances momentarily fixed meaning in extraordinary displays that were visual, material, peopled and spatial all at once. Composed for one event, these performances were dismantled, and reiterated or re-displayed to refashion South Africa at another event. To the conception of performativity, we might add the metaphor of choreography47 – a term that conveys well the fact that reiterations are always more than continuous replicas of the same motifs. Like a dance that must be reconstituted for each performance, these exhibitions were a process of constant reinvention: a routinising, undoing and upsetting of the codes and conventions of white South African identity.

Notes 1 Letter from William Hoy to A. H. Tatlow, 22 May, 1922, National Archives of South Africa (NASA), SAS, 176, G4/4/29. 2 Tatlow’s response to Hoy, 8 July, 1922, NASA, SAS, 176, G4/4/29. 3 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London, 1990; and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Routledge, London, 1993; J. Butler, ‘Burning Acts – Injurious Speech’, in A. Parker and E. Kokofsky Sedgewick, eds, Performativity and Performance, Routledge, London, 1995, pp. 197–227. 4 A. Parker and E. Kokofsky Sedgewick, eds, Performativity and Performance, Routledge, London, 1995. 5 H. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, Routledge, London, 1990; and The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994. 6 E. Diamond, ed., Performance and Cultural Politics, Routledge, London, 1996; J. Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity and Exile, Duke University Press, Durham, 1999; A. M. Fortier, ‘Performativity and Belonging’ in Vicky Bell, ed., Performativity and Belonging, Sage, London, 1999, pp. 41–64. 7 J. Butler, ‘Burning Acts – Injurious Speech’ in A. Parker and E. Kokofsky Sedgewick, eds, Performativity and Performance, Routledge, London, 1995, p. 198. 8 J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 234. 9 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London, 1990, see p. 25. Also N. Gregson and G. Rose, ‘Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities and Subjectivities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 18, 2000, pp. 433–452. 10 N. Gregson and G. Rose, ‘Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities and Subjectivities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 18, 2000, p. 434. 11 R. Jebb, Studies in Colonial Nationalism, Edward Arnold, London, 1905. 12 W. Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, p. 110. 13 R. Jebb, Studies in Colonial Nationalism, Edward Arnold, London, 1905, p. 131. 14 Including the Land Act of 1913, which marked the first systematic policy of inequitable land distribution, the Urban Areas Act of 1924, Native’s Land and Trust Act of 1936. After the 1948 Afrikaner National Party’s electoral victory, these earlier enforcements fused with the vision of Grand Apartheid.

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15 J. D. B. Miller, Richad Jebb and the Problem of Empire, Athlone Press, London, 1956, p. 12. 16 J. Eddy and D. Schreuder, eds, The Rise of Colonial Nationalism: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa First Assert their Nationalities, 1880–1914, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 5. 17 J. Eddy and D. Schreuder, eds, The Rise of Colonial Nationalism: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa First Assert their Nationalities, 1880–1914, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 5. 18 P. Merrington, ‘Pageantry and Primitivism: Dorothea Fairbridge and the “Aesthetics of Union”’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1995, pp. 643–656; and D. Bhagat, ‘Art Deco in South Africa’, in T. Benton, C. Benton and G. Wood, eds, Art Deco 1910–1939, V&A Publications, London, 2003, pp. 418–426. 19 D. Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, Marxism Today, June 1991, pp. 24–29. 20 P. Greenhalgh, Emphemeral Vistas, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988, p. 53. 21 Cape Monthly Magazine, Vol. IX, 1862, p. 63. 22 F. Driver and D. Gilbert, ‘“Heart of Empire?” Landscape, Space and Performance in Imperial London’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 16, 1998, p. 25. 23 B. Schwarz, ‘The Expansion and Contraction of England,’ in B. Schwarz, ed., The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 3. 24 Cape Times, 12 October, 1885, p. 7. 25 Tropes of display of the black subject at Empire Exhibitions have been explored widely, e.g. P. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988; A. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994; Yaël Simpson Fletcher, ‘“Capital of the Colonies”: Real and Imagined Boundaries between Metropole and Empire in 1920s Marseilles’, in F. Driver and D. Gilbert, eds, Imperial Cities, Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 136–154. 26 The Natal Witness, 14 July, 1923. 27 H. Baker, ‘The Architectural Needs of South Africa’, The State, May 1909, p. 519. The State, published in South Africa between 1907 and 1912, regularly featured essays celebrating great Cape Dutch homesteads. 28 P. Merrington, ‘Pageantry and Primitivism: Dorothea Fairbridge and the “Aesthetics of Union”’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1995, p. 647. 29 The South African, 26 April, 1924, p. 5. 30 Exhibition pamphlet advertising South Africa’s global (beyond Empire) trade routes, NASA, GG 2094 70/242. 31 ‘Report by the British Empire Exhibition Committee’, November 1924, NASA, PM 1/2/133, PM 44/00. 32 ‘A variety of scenery and interest’ were represented: species of plant and animal and ‘every type of mankind’, the latter category exclusively reserved for non-European (non-white) people. Draft foreword to the official catalogue for South Africa 1924, NASA, PM 1/2/133, PM 44/00. 33 Such as the South African Railways and Harbours Magazine, August, 1924, pp. 776–777. 34 H. J. Braunholtz, ‘Ethnographical Exhibition in the South African Pavilion, British Empire Exhibition’, MAN, Vol. 24, September 1924, pp. 129–132. 35 S. Dubow, Illicit Union: Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannsburg, 1995, p. 13. 36 As reported in The African World, 2 March, 1935, p. 229. 37 See D. Bhagat, ‘Art Deco in South Africa’, in T. Benton, C. Benton and G. Wood, eds, Art Deco 1910–1939, V&A Publications, London, 2003, pp. 418–426. 38 The Cape Argus, 3 October, 1936. 39 For example, the South African Iron and Steel Corporation display also included Venda ironsmiths working at traditional smithing methods, The Star, 17 September, 1936. 40 For example as part of the Exhibition’s Pageant of South Africa, The Star, 12 November, 1936.

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41 Khoisan people were displayed in the ‘Bushman Enclosure’, The Star, 15 November, 1936. 42 The Star, 13 June, 1936; also D. Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre, Raven Press, Johannesburg, 1985. 43 Memo, ‘Facilities for Natives Visiting the Empire Exhibition at Johannesburg’, reveals limitations of and restrictions imposed on black Exhibition visitors, NASA, NYS 9580 338/400. 44 The weekly, The Bantu World, included black middle-class journalists; Umsebenzi (The South African Worker) included criticism of Empire by members of the predominantly black South African Communist Party; see C. Coe, ‘Histories of Empire, Nation and City: Four Interpretations of the Empire Exhibition, Johannesburg, 1936’, Folklore Forum, Vol. 32, 1/2, 2001. 45 J. Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity and Exile, Duke University Press, Durham, 1999, p. 24. 46 Della Pollock, ‘Making History Go’, in D. Pollock, ed., Exceptional Spaces: Essays in History and Performance, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1998, p. 23. 47 Catherine Nash, ‘Performativity in Practice: Some Recent Work in Cultural Geography’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2000, pp. 653–644.

RESPONSE Angus Lockyer

Industrial, imperial and international exhibitions are now a well-trafficked medium through which historians and others ply their trade. Robert Rydell’s early work All the World’s a Fair (1984), about American expositions, was soon followed by Timothy Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt (1988) and Paul Greenhalgh’s Ephemeral Vistas (1990).1 These texts set the course for what will soon be a quarter of a century of papers, articles and monographs elaborating the theme and chronicling its variations. In many respects, however, not much has changed. Exhibitions, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, are still seen to have rehearsed the dominant tropes of industry, empire, and their successors. They are still understood to have done their work through a modern logic of representation, with its attendant binary codes of tradition/modernity and self/other. And they are still often analyzed in terms of identity. I agree with Dipti Bhagat that it is useful to remind ourselves of Butler’s insistence that identities are not given but made. The story of South Africa at the exhibition underlines the extent to which any attempt to portray the self—or characterize the other—is contingent, fractured and fleeting. Identity conceived in this way is conditional, based upon anxious reiteration, but never guaranteed. How better to invent one’s own authority than to craft an architectural vernacular in London? How predictable, too, was the derision with which this was greeted back home. But I also wonder how far style was identified with nation even on the site itself. Is the familiar vocabulary of identity sufficient to capture either the accident-prone relay of coherent selves or the complexity and confusion of the exhibition as a whole? Part of the problem is familiar and general. How does one translate the fourdimensional broadband of an exhibition site into the one-way channel of academic prose? The demands of the latter tend to encourage a recourse to the clarity of a language that specifies discrete cause and effect—who did what to whom and how— and with whose terms, no less important, we are by now comfortable if not quite

Response 83

in agreement: imagined identities, racialized subjects and the rest. But while such bird’s-eye clarity may help to distinguish something that might have happened at exhibitions, it seems to hover at some distance from the event itself. Does this language capture enough of an exhibition? Is it an adequate description of such an event’s operation? And above all, perhaps, how can one ground the claims of such a language given the limits of the archive? The easiest thing to access is of course the exhibition itself, that is, where particular objects (and people) were placed, how they were framed and what they looked like. The regulated spaces of exhibition displays marked a clear distinction between viewer and viewed. Together with the general schemata by which exhibits are governed—classifications, zones, exhibiting guidelines—it therefore becomes possible to suggest the various stories the exhibits might have told. In the metropolis, of course, the narrative possibilities for even white colonies were somewhat confined. More interesting perhaps is what happened back in Johannesburg in 1936, where home-field advantage allowed a proliferation of performances, suggesting that South Africa goes at least two ways, out of Europe and into the global. Bhagat emphasizes that it is difficult to subordinate everything at the exhibition to a single narrative. But I am not finally convinced that narrative itself is the way to account for what was exhibited and what happened at the exhibition. This hesitation is linked, first, to an uncertainty about why exhibits take the form that they do. Here, it seems important to move below schemata and story and explore—ant-like?—the local circuits from which particular exhibits emerge. (This is also the place where one can most clearly see design at work in exhibitions and where exhibitions may have the most to contribute to an account of global design.) Such an account probably needs more space than the limits of a volume such as this allow, but the occasional glimpses of these circuits are intriguing, for example as they inform South African participation at Wembley in 1924/5. At the most general level, exhibitions during this period were still as much about commercial possibilities as about national branding. Thus the South African exhibit in 1924/5 was about attracting trade and investment. We can guess that the Cape Dutch style not only signifies “white belonging” but also reassures potential partners about the security of their investments. How is this commercial imperative connected to the proposed display of black South Africans? It would be useful to know if the various exhibits were indeed subordinated to a governing vision, intent on producing a unified narrative, or if they were only loosely coordinated, produced in the first instance by makers following distinct scripts. The supply of exhibits also had to be calibrated to the likely demand. Here, the Chairman’s emphasis on novelty points to an acute awareness of the logic that informs the visual economy of exhibitions. Before you can tell your audience a story, you need to attract their attention. It is not clear, of course, that they will remain attentive long enough for the story to be told, nor that novelty is necessarily the best medium through which to articulate a considered narrative of national achievement. In this case, the Secretary’s caution seems to have won out, although it is not clear to what effect. But here, as often, is where the study of exhibitions meets the limits

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of the archive. The thin gruel of press comment notwithstanding, we know very little about how many people saw particular exhibits, how long they stayed or what they thought. The elusiveness of reception is frustrating, but it also perhaps suggests that we need to move beyond the comfortable consensus of the last twenty-five years. National distinction has long been one of the organizing principles for exhibitions in general, but it only tells us so much about why exhibits take the form that they do, and little about whether or not exhibitions do in fact prompt the kind of identification that such narratives might suggest. We can trace, however hesitantly, the production and presentation of particular exhibits, calibrated to but not entirely restricted by the national. This might provide an opportunity to gauge the way in which, for example, South African spectacle was designed to meet the demand of the likely or desired visitor, both within each exhibition and as the market evolved over time. Here, perhaps, it might be useful to move away from the somewhat static language of identity, however performative or fragmented, to the more dynamic metaphors of production and exchange. Design, after all, is a process. And exhibitions, too, change over time.

Note 1

Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (April, 1989), pp. 217–236; and Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).

7 ‘FROM THE FAR CORNERS’ Telephones, globalization, and the production of locality in the 1920s Michael J. Golec

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. (Benjamin 1968b: 256)

Document Historians of technology and of designed objects have studied all manner of textual documents in order to mine their resources. Advertisements, journals, magazines, booklets, and brochures have been crucial to this enterprise. Significantly, documents of this kind—what genetic critics call, “solidified ephemera”—can account for behaviors compatible with new technologies. For the historian, all sorts of printed materials provide maps of a sort for how it was that an audience interacted with new technologies.1 While instructional manuals are an obvious choice for the study of an interfacing with technologies, marketing materials can provide greater insight into how new technologies and designed objects were integrated into everyday life beyond their mere function. From the Far Corners of the Earth is one such document (see Figure 7.1). Published by the Bell Telephone and American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) subsidiary Western Electric in 1927, the promotional booklet introduced its audience to the manufacture of the telephone within the framework of global industrial expansion. It did so under the guise of introducing its readers to the global flow of raw materials and the geography of labor as both contributed to the manufacture of Western Electric telephones. The introduction, with a pedagogical flourish, explained (p. i):2 If reading these pages helps you discover anew some of the many interesting places in your country or in foreign lands, if it helps you learn more

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about strange people and their strange customs, you will be well repaid for the time spent looking at the pictures and reading the message that this book brings to you.

FIGURE 7.1

From the Far Corners of the Earth. Promotional booklet front cover

Source: Published by the Bell Telephone and American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) subsidiary Western Electric in 1927

Telephones, globalization and locality in the 1920s 87

Of the many telephone discourses that circulated throughout the early twentieth century—the call that connected lovers, the technology that relieved isolation, the tool that was a convenience, and the network that streamlined business—overcoming distance was implicit in every Bell and Western Electric communication. What made From the Far Corners of the Earth unique, however, was that it introduced its readers to the all-pervasive issue of distance in the guise of the Other residing within a framework of global industrial expansion. Thus, much like the telephone with all its concrete qualities, the booklet From the Far Corners of the Earth, as a “document of civilization,” was likewise an active agent in the construction of the global telephone network. Whether or not From the Far Corners of the Earth is a “document of barbarism”— that is, both the dissolution of civilization and acts of cruelty, both of which are not mutually exclusive—remains to be seen. Yet, a study of the mapping of the distribution of resources and the manufacture of the telephone can reveal the discursive grounds for civilization-building. “Civilization” is often embodied in major literary and artistic forms of expression. Conversely, the degradation of civilization is revealed in its minor forms, in advertising and marketing for example. No doubt, a minor literature or art contributes to the unmaking of a major literature or art. In the 1920s, the minor literature of global expansion and use of worldwide material and labor resources drew on the hegemonic discourse of the managerial class. From the Far Corners of the Earth is an example of minor literature, a term that I borrow from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It would be far from accurate to claim that From the Far Corners of the Earth had any literary pretensions in the traditional sense of the term. Yet, it is not too far of a stretch to designate advertising and marketing as constituting a minor literature, since many aspiring authors went into copywriting for advertising agencies as a way of making ends meet. Take F. Scott Fitzgerald working for a New York firm in the late teens, for example. Also, the growing dominance of the language of advertising caused Walter Benjamin to wonder in “One Way Street” (1928), “But when shall we write books like catalogues?” (Benjamin [1928] 1996: 457). For Benjamin, “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards” were better suited to the habits of his time than the “pretentious, universal gesture of the book” (Benjamin [1928] 1996: 444). In 1927, the language of telephone marketing was a highly specialized language with a circumscribed audience; advertisements through the 1920s focused almost exclusively on businessmen and their offices (Fischer 1988). “[M]inor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 18). At every move, however, the language of telephone advertising and marketing sought to expand its audience through material intensities, always overdetermining expected outcomes in the hopes of affecting new habit formations. Therefore, as an instance of the language of advertising and marketing, From the Far Corners of the Earth met the criteria for a minor literature in that its combined visual and linguistic representations were always “deterritorialized” because always seeking to conquer new territories.

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The minor literary character of From the Far Corners of the Earth is not found in its meanings, as if I could draw a straight line from signifier to signified, but, rather, registers as its affects, its intensities. This is what I refer to as localization, which I mean in the sense of relationships over ontologies and situations over essences.3 The title of the booklet itself referred to this very method in its appeal to gathering and ordering resources, to drawing together, to centralization—to location. The booklet intensified the global in its localization of the far away. This is, then, not the story of the manufacture of the telephone connected to a worldwide labor force; it is its instantiation—its immanence—in booklet form. In so doing, From the Far Corners of the Earth built up a local world, a world made apparent in the combined oddities of its textual and visual discourses.4 Interacting with the booklet meant coming face to face with an object that was both the beginning of a set of events in the promotion of global telecommunications and was at the end of a process of global mediators, taking up what Saskia Sassen has identified as the internationalization of production sites through foreign investment (Sassen 1998).

Enlargement The enlargement of American standing and interconnection with the wider world was depicted and discussed in a 1929 advertisement for the Bell System. The ad claimed, “The United States is building a new civilization. The telephone is an indispensable element in it. The Bell System is building ahead of the growth of this civilization.” Advanced technologies of communication were thought to have farreaching implications for the growth of the nation, both at home and abroad. But what were the vicissitudes of this new civilization? One result was that the general use of the telephone “enables each personality to extend itself without regard to distance,” as the ad pointed out. It was the Bell spin-off AT&T in collaboration with Western Electric that advanced “universal telephone service” for all citizens of the United States through the manufacture and marketing of specialized equipment. As Mara Mills has remarked, “The increasingly automated global telephone network grew over the twentieth century into the most complex machine in existence” (Mills 2006: 1). The utility of the telephone, however, was greater than its mere instrumental availability. The extension of the self—from me right here to you way out there—was a leading idea guiding the discourse on telephony in the early part of the twentieth century. The discourse ranged from bridging great gaps brought on by temporary and long-term travel, permanent cross-country moves, and the ongoing expansion of the geography of family and friends. “Modern conditions,” as an AT&T booklet from 1910 reported, “have brought about the need for what might be called a long distance telephone organization of the family.” The cover illustration underscored the nature of long distance telephonic organization in its representation of a chain of callers who recede into the background. By gathering voices from near and far, communications technology mitigated challenges to social relations between family and friends under modern conditions. As the same booklet advised, “The family

Telephones, globalization and locality in the 1920s 89

with the best realization of the telephone’s possibilities enjoys the greatest peace of mind.” In regards to sociability, the telephone has been praised for bridging the distances across the land and across social strata (Kern 1983). The act of bridging introduced a heightened awareness of conversational processes as a two-party exchange, foregrounding the sociality of communication (Hopper 1992). The global implications of social connectivity and “peace of mind” were later represented in an AT&T brochure from the 1930s, which asked, “What price would you put on a hundred words exchanged by separated lovers?” The accompanying illustration mapped a global information pathway of romantic connections made across great stretches of land and water. For consumers of telephone services, the real value of the telephone exceeded its mere technology if measured by feelings of longing for connection made all the more acute by distance. Where ads and brochures gauged the extension of telephone services in terms of human-to-human community building, articles on the subject focused on immediacy, efficiency, and control. In an article published in Public Service Management, J. D. Ellsworth took the measure of telephonic expansion when he stated (1926: 6): “The telephone has not only grown faster than the country, but it has helped the country grow. In an era of great business enterprise it has given to businessmen a wider scope of influence and action than has ever before been known.” Just two years later, the president of AT&T, Walter Gifford, claimed in his address to the Conference of Major Industries (1928: 2): “Today, an individual located practically anywhere in the United States has at his command day and night—Sundays and holidays included—instrumentalities for immediate intercommunication with almost any one anywhere in the civilized world.” Being that his audience was made up of American industrialists, Gifford’s address emphasized the efficiency and the instrumentality of the telephone. He observed that the telephone positioned the individual within a network of communication nodes, a position that initiated a web of communicative possibilities. The world—19 million telephones in the United States and seven million overseas—was just a phone call away. While connections were not really immediate—cross-country connections took up to five minutes and cross continent connections took quite a bit longer—the reach of the telephone, according to Gifford, was such that it networked the globe.5 In between Ellsworth’s article (1926) and Gifford’s speech (1928), transoceanic telephone service was established in 1927 through a joint venture between AT&T and the British Post Office. While AT&T restricted its foreign interests under pressure from the U.S. Justice Department, the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) bought out and acquired cable, telegraph, and telephone companies from around the world, thereby expanding and maintaining U.S. telecommunications interests across the globe (Headrick 1991: 201–202). Vice President of ITT M. C. Rorty promoted the value of the impact of global telecommunications on international relations when he wrote: “freights are the gasoline of international trade and electrical communications are its spark plugs” (Rorty 1930: 50). With an increase in imports of raw materials into the United States after the First World War there was the perception of an increased need for organizing

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and monitoring international transactions. While radiotelegraph networks had previously linked global trade markets, the telephone was marketed as a service that factored “in the subsequent development of trade and transportation and perhaps more importantly,” as Rorty observed, “in the development of those friendly and wholesome understandings between nations [. . .]” (Rorty 1930: 47). Yet, it was not merely the case that the telephone facilitated agreeable relations between nations. Indeed, the manufacture of the telephone—its technology—required that such relations must persist so as to continue growth. In May 1934, a Bell Telephone ad articulated the extension of and realignment with existing spatial limitations: “Many business men are discovering that their activities need no longer be limited to former boundaries. They are reaching out by telephone into new fields . . . developing new markets . . . finding new and unsuspected ways to make and save money.”

Intensities The above cluster of marketing and planning discourses do not fall into the typical categories of literary work. Their collection is intended to describe, however briefly, a network of terms that circulated in public throughout the first thirty plus years of the twentieth century. Again, the terms were: • • • • • •

modern conditions long-distance organization extension and deployment wider scope of influence command day and night boundlessness.

Within this constellation of conditions, organizations, extensions, influences, commands, and boundaries lay a document that mapped these terms as new territories in the enlargement of American standing. The spread of Western cultural assets and the growth of Western civilization precipitated global reterritorializations. These shifts were the result of a counter-flow of deterritorializations (in a reconfiguration of boundaries) and the importation of raw materials to manufacture the telephone. The material contingencies of the booklet registered the interior and the exterior deployment of these discourses, how they were embedded in the graphic-material form of From the Far Corners of the Earth and in the conditions of its handling. The booklet situated its reader within a geographical and cultural network where, as the introduction explained (p. i), “you will find yourself going into the hills of Pennsylvania, the treasure laden Rocky Mountains, the Klondike, and far away India and Malaysia.” A fifty-percent screen-tone illustration of laborers descending a steep incline further supported the participatory implications of the text. From the very start, images and words organized in the booklet’s typographic and graphic

Telephones, globalization and locality in the 1920s 91

composition triggered the local intensities specific to paging through From the Far Corners of the Earth. Wedges and frames, lines and blocks, frames and borders all established boundaries only to mark a series of transgressions (see Figure 7.1). On the cover, a wedge of bodies bears down on the left-foot heel of a Chinese laborer, it just touching the lower border of the illustration. The march of a global workforce and the upward angled toes of the wedge’s lead figure follow two paths. One maintains a space or frozen moment apart from the space of paging. The other path that flows from the outwardly directed foot breaks into the space beyond the cover. Everything at this point hinges on an almost unnoticeable but empirically verifiable moment. Setting off a local intensity, a path of flight emanates from that toe, breaking the graphic constraints of the border-frame of the illustration. Is this unimpeded movement? Are the laborers free to disperse according to their own needs? The node of intensification suggests otherwise. The illustration of the laborer and his interlocking partners serves only to direct the attention of the reader to the telephone that occupies the middle ground of the illustration. Positioned so as to appear to be at some considerable distance from the foreground, the telephone towers over the crowd, indicating the dominant role of telecommunications in the organization of the flow of global capital. The drawing of the telephone counters the frozen momentum of the wedge, its sudden flatness embodying the circulatory network of telecommunications. Its presence registers the extended scope of its graphic representation across all forms of print media. The image of the oversized telephone was common to a number of AT&T advertisements and marketing materials in the 1920s and 1930s. A world populated by telephones invited and re-enacted scenes already established and circulated throughout the world. Images of businessmen with phone “at hand” extended the worldwide reach of the American managerial class. After all, it is his reach and thus extension of power that matters the most. And the cover acknowledges the reach of the man with the telephone in its representation of collective labor that is ready-to-hand. As an instance of local intensity, he takes hold of both phone and labor with one efficient, telemetric movement of his hand. Only from this location—apart from the wedge of bodies—could he trigger a “process of many steps” that resulted in the automatic succession of standardized operations, that were rarely if ever made visible.6 Despite the cover illustration’s attempt to picture international labor and sites of production and to promote their connection to the reader of the booklet, the image of a global coalition is disrupted by the idiosyncrasies of the title font and a gaping space between “From” and “the.” The hand-lettered bold face is reminiscent of posters and signs, maintaining the hand-drawn oddities of the tradition. The heaviness of the letters, in combination with the quirky wedge bars that lay perpendicular to the stems on “F” and “E” and the circles in place of the loops on “r”s, conflict with the easy flow of intertwined bodies below. And, in order to justify all three lines of text, the layout man opened an “em” space between the two words, leaving an awkward and far too loose measure to the first line. No doubt, this is an

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oversight, yet its “sensory appearance” (as de Man would say) marks what is overlooked. As if to mitigate this oddity, the gap aligns vertically with the image of the oversized candlestick model telephone in the middle ground of the illustration. The hieroglyphic calculus of the telephone and the hovering blank presence acknowledges the invisible networks of real human labor triggered by telecommunications. The saturated black material interstice in the typographic composition of the title implied that the locale of the telephone as the source of telecommunications was remote from the resources and activities portrayed within the pages of the booklet. Such invisibilities and breaches were marked not only on the cover, but also in the very text that promised to account for rarely glimpsed instances of production in descriptions of “how these raw materials are brought to seaports or shipping points and transported from place to place.” In The Story of Silk in Your Telephone (see Figure 7.2) we see two phases of alienated labor according to the classical Marxist definition: e.g., that modern factory workers do not recognize themselves in things produced by the factory. An abrupt movement of the manager’s hand in the United States triggers a process of many steps including picking leaves, feeding and tending to silkworms, unwinding silk from cocoons, and spinning silk thread. Each step culminates in the production of “silk threads wrapped around the current-carrying wires” installed in telephones manufactured by Western Electric. Distance further exaggerates the dilemma where objects were once animated by their proximity to humans either through direct contact (labor) or through ritual (fetish) but are now animated by other objects and mechanization of mass production. While the American workers on the right-hand page may have been geographically closer to the hand that triggered their actions, both they and the Japanese workers on the facing left-hand page were, however immeasurable, set at a distance from the products of their labor. The almost imperceptible line that delineates recto and verso, a by-product of saddle stitched binding, creates a border between resources and production, between the far and the not so far, between the strange and the not so strange, and between the pre-industrial and the industrial. It is at the site of a break or a conflict that the transition from the vertical orientation of the page to the vertical movement across pages locates the transpositions in the shipping of resources from across the globe to a centralized location in the United States. Along the centerfold of the booklet, a threshold opens up in the “strife brought into the rift” (Heidegger 2001: 61.)7 Yet the booklet appears as if there was no conflict; it produces a locality where opposites belong to each other. And yet the material rifts in the booklet delineate the opposition of measure and boundary, of extension and limit, and of local and global into a common outline displayed in the layout of From the Far Corners of the Earth.

Major What is major about From the Far Corners of the Earth? The booklet is no mere document, its data translated into historical account while its materiality is ignored

Telephones, globalization and locality in the 1920s 93

FIGURE 7.2

The Story of Silk in Your Telephone. Excerpt from a promotional booklet

Source: From the Far Corners of the Earth, Chicago, Western Electric, 1927

or discounted. As a text, however, it is a minor literature where text and image combine to open up new territories of experience, however circumscribed the experience might be. The booklet intensified the global in its localization of the far away, in its gathering of material and discursive resources into a modest marketing booklet. In its localizations, From the Far Corners of the Earth complicates attempts at constructing a totalizing image of global cooperation. The prominence of wedges and frames, lines and blocks, frames and borders is challenged by breaks and flights, leaving open the question: What violence, trauma, and dispossession resist representation in the making of a global industrial perspective? Indeed, as Benjamin (1968b: 256) remarked, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Notes 1 2

On genetic criticism, see the special issue “Draft” in Yale French Studies 89 (1996). As Mara Mills observes, Bell Telephone’s intercommunications technologies were in no small part derived from the company’s ties to National Geographic magazine. Bell was a co-founder of the National Geographic Society, and he was its president from 1896 to 1904. National Geographic sponsored AT&T’s “Voice Voyages” series (1916). And, in making maps available to businesses, the society and the magazine greatly contributed to the extension of American corporate interests. It is not too far-fetched to presume that From the Far Corners of the Earth borrowed its educational tone from National Geographic magazine. More work needs to be done on this topic. Mara Mills’ personal

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3 4

5

6

7

communications with author, spring 2007. My thanks to Mara for her willingness to share materials from the AT&T archives. On this approach to the history of technology, see Sigfried Giedion, who wrote, “The meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships. That is why the writing of history has less to do with facts as such than with relations” (Giedion 1948: 2). It is worth noting that these irregularities are not apparent in the telephone itself. A study of the materiality of the telephone-object discursively framed, therefore, would hardly reveal any additional knowledge other than constituting it as a materialization of discourse. This study of From the Far Corners of the Earth as an instance of a minor literature, however, foregrounds material oddities of discourse—or of the booklet in what the reader reads and sees. The combination of familial and erotic love with bureaucratic organizational concerns made up the official language of telephone marketing in the first thirty plus years of the twentieth century. A “wider scope of influence” either of business or personal life appealed to what psychologists of advertising labeled the public’s “interest incentives.” As Walter Dill Scott put it, “Any object or proposition will secure our attention that is in some way related to our hopes and fears, our ambitions and prejudices, our conduct or attitudes” (Scott 1913: 45). Scott advised advertisers to play up clichés so as to reflect the overriding concerns of the public, to play on both fear and hope. Such was the ubiquitous standing of advertisements that they easily achieved the order of “secular iconography” (Marchand 1985: 272). Thus, the idea and image of extending one’s reach, of forming bonds, and of existing within a network dominated the discourse on the telephone. Illustration is a minor art. It is minor in the way that William Ivins describes the print, whose important role is too easily ignored unless we “begin to think of them as exactly repeatable pictorial statements or communications” (Ivins 1953: 3). It is the other side of the class struggle in the discord between major or advanced art and (minor) kitsch, as Clement Greenberg would have said. Illustration is not, however, meant as a substitute for art, rather, it is a deterritorialization of art in its mechanical flight from humanist bondage. If Greenberg saw kitsch as a debasement of advanced art, then kitsch corresponds to a paranoiac transcendental law that prohibits illustration from entering into the canon of great works of Western art (Greenberg 1939). Illustration has worked to transgress this law ever since the rise of mechanical reproducibility and the demise of aura (Benjamin 1968a). On a superb analysis of illustration and mechanical reproduction, see Beegan 2007. The spine of a book is a hinge; it is a breaking and a joining, as Derrida remarks on in Of Grammatology. See Derrida 1976: 65.

RESPONSE Anne Balsamo

I read Michael Golec’s essay as a partial cultural analysis of an emergent technology. The reason I say that it is a partial analysis is that a fuller cultural analysis would need to also take into account several issues that Golec does not address (and couldn’t given the limits of time): the object-status of the telephone during the historical period he focuses on; the production practices that govern its manufacture at the time; the consumption habits of those who actually used the device (or bought it for other people to use); and the regulations that formed the conditions for the development of the telephone industry (Hall, 1997). Having said that though, I must assert that what he does focus on in his essay is a critically important aspect of creating an account of the cultural implications of an emergent technology: the role that representations play in the construction of meaning of (what was in the 1920s) a relatively new technological form. What he reads in the From the Far Corners of the Earth promotional brochure is a popular narrativization of the preferred meaning of the telephone as a new information device. Several noted scholars, including Erving Goffman and Judith Williamson, have asserted the important role of advertisements in the cultural work of technological myth-making, thus I appreciate Golec’s attention to the ephemera that circulated along with the device itself as a way to gain “insight into how new technologies and designed objects were integrated into everyday life beyond their mere function” (Golec, p. 85). Where Golec draws on insights from Benjamin and Deleuze and Guattari I might turn to James Carey and even Marshall McLuhan to illuminate the way in which advertising and marketing representations of the telephone (as in the From the Far Corners of the Earth piece) became important elements in the cultural construction not only of the telephone as domestic communication device, but also more broadly of a particular American attitude about the relationship between technology and national identity. As Carolyn Marvin (1988) describes in her book, When Old Technologies Were New, demonstration spectacles and world fairs were popular means at the turn of

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the twentieth century by which new technological devices were mythologized as objects of cultural significance. By the 1950s, Marshall McLuhan, in his typical polemical style, claimed that advertising was the premier art form of the twentieth century. His book The Mechanical Bride (1951)—which is subtitled “the folklore of industrial man”—examined more than two dozen popular advertisements for a wide range of technological products. Thus Golec is in good company when he reads in the AT&T promotional brochure elements that express the key dimensions of what was then an emergent cultural sensibility whose central concerns focused on the meaning of the telephone as 1) a symbol of the modern condition, 2) the infrastructure for long-distance organization, 3) the means for the extension and deployment of business services, 4) effecting the erasure of day and night, and 5) the promotion of a sense of boundlessness in the possibilities of business expansion. As Golec points out, the work of this brochure is to put in circulation a set of meanings about the object that have little relation to its built form or its conditions of production. Claims such as those that circulated in the AT&T brochures actually echo those made about the telegraph and the railroad fifty years earlier. These claims rehearsed the arc of an abiding American dream that linked technology, democracy, and national identity. As noted historian of communication James Carey writes: The United States was, to flirt with more deterministic language, the product of literacy, cheap paper, rapid and inexpensive transportation, and the mechanical reproduction of words—the capacity, in short, to transport not only people but a complex culture and civilization from one place to another, indeed between places that were radically dissimilar in geography, social conditions, economy, and very often climate. (Carey, 1989: 2–3) For Carey, the telegraph effectively eliminated geography within the American imaginary and by doing so it helped inculcate a sense of American identity. In Carey’s reading, the telegraph was more than a communication device, it served as the infrastructure that delivered democracy to the far-flung reaches of a relatively young nation. Golec picks up this thread of an argument about the cultural work of early communication technologies when he rightly suggests in his reading of the From the Far Corners of the Earth document that “it introduced its readers to the allpervasive issue of distances in the guise of the Other residing with a framework of global industrial expansion” (p. 87). The telephone was in this sense a technology of (national) identity formation not in that it delivered democracy (as Carey argues was the case for the telegraph), but rather that it delivered the sense of the global “Other” to American telephone users. Golec notes how the brochure described the creation of a sense of Self on the part of the American user who was enjoined to learn more about “strange people and their strange customs.” By projecting strangeness onto the figure of the global Other, this story about the telephone positioned the American reader as a member of a tribe familiar to one another. The

Response 97

differences among Americans (and there were many ethnic, racial, and economic distinctions in play in the 1920s) were effectively erased and displaced onto the global Other. This, as we know, is one of the founding epistemological conditions for the architecture of colonialism. What is in fact revealed in Golec’s close reading of the AT&T brochure is a moment when the representational work of a technology marketing piece was also doing significant work to shore up an emergent ideology of American industrial expansionism and colonization. In doing so, Golec demonstrates clearly the inextricable relationship between the marketing of technologies and the reproduction of dominant culture. That the marketing of this technology was a highly designed effort, also demonstrates the way in which design functions as a technology of cultural reproduction.

8 THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE DEUTSCHER WERKBUND Design reform, industrial policy, and German foreign policy, 1907–1914 John V. Maciuika

What role did the German Imperial government and individual states play in the development of early twentieth-century modern German design culture?1 A twentieth-century historiographical tradition in architectural history and design history suggests hardly any at all.2 Yet in the opening years of the twentieth century, the Prussian Ministry of Commerce and Trade emerged as an unexpected sponsor of path-breaking modernist design principles through its economic development policies. Operating at the point where economic development, design aesthetics, and educational reform converged, the Prussian Commerce Ministry institutionalized a veritable catalogue of modernist design doctrines between 1903 and 1907 through the reform of its top three dozen schools for arts, crafts, and trades, or Kunstgewerbe- und Handwerkerschulen. Overseen by the government architect and Prussian civil service veteran Hermann Muthesius, the Commerce Ministry’s reforms transmuted the values of the British Arts and Crafts movement into the techniques of proto-industrial design at state schools from Aachen in the west to Königsberg in the east, and from Flensburg by the North Sea to Breslau in Silesia.3 The reforms fulfilled a mandate issued by Muthesius’s superior in the Prussian government, Commerce Minister Theodor Möller. Minister Möller explicitly sought to train a new generation of artisans, building trades workers, and other members of Prussia’s traditional “old” Mittelstand for service to a modern consumer economy.4 By conferring upon artisans what it called “the advantages enjoyed by large enterprise,” the Commerce Ministry hoped to revolutionize the design and production of Germany’s applied arts goods and boost the country’s competitive position in international markets. At the same time, the Commerce Ministry sought to overhaul a nineteenth-century German reputation for exporting products that one government official, reporting from the German section of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, had notoriously labeled “cheap and bad.”5

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It would be erroneous to claim that the Prussian Ministry of Commerce was the only state institution exploring new directions in arts, crafts, and trades in the early twentieth century. On the contrary, the German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, Hessen, Weimar, and Saxony all witnessed highly individualized private and public design reform efforts which, taken together, led to the formation of the Deutscher Werkbund in October of 1907. Prior to the First World War, the Werkbund, a private, non-profit middle-class association for design reform, was far and away the most advanced organization for the promotion of fresh approaches to design across Germany. Uniting a diverse group of artists, craftsmen, architects, manufacturers, entrepreneurs, cultural critics, and government officials, the Werkbund, according to one of its early slogans, furnished multiple platforms for the “improvement of German production through artistic intervention.” Between 1907 and 1912, leading Werkbund figures met frequently to debate how business, the applied arts, and industry could best reform and modernize German production, distribution, and consumption. Beginning in 1912, however, and in a development that is less well documented and understood, the Werkbund began aggressively building a foreign network in tune with changes taking place in the landscape of German industrial and foreign policy. This was not simply a “normal” or predictable phase in the growth of a private, non-profit association, however. It was the full-fledged mobilization of the Werkbund by forces in government for the purpose of the global commercial expansion of the Wilhelmine Empire. More than a century after the creation of the Werkbund in 1907, a legacy of disciplinary divisions into art history, design history, German history, German studies, etc. has bequeathed scholars with a series of more or less aesthetically oriented accounts of the famous “Werkbund debates” of 1914. This well-known conflict pitted backers of Hermann Muthesius, who forcefully promoted the “making of industrial types” (Typisierung) as the new focus of Werkbund industries’ activities, against the supporters of Henry van de Velde, an artist, designer, and passionate defender of “artistic individualism.” Indeed, events surrounding the 1914 debate are sufficiently murky that even its participants at the time admitted to some confusion about the nuances of the various positions. The achievement of clarity requires a fairly deep understanding of the organization, its leading players, and the historical context in order to make sense of the debate.6 By contrast, and for the history of modern architecture during most of the twentieth century, the pitting of “individualists” against the “backers of industrial types” was at the core of a modernist teleology in which, supposedly, standardization and an accompanying tendency toward machined abstraction were the inevitable results of the progress of industrial culture. Individualist artist-designers with roots in such heavily ornamented styles as Art Nouveau, this argument implied, were merely out of date and doomed to fade from the scene of international developments. Just how widespread this sentiment was can be seen through the fact that even such vociferous critics of the Werkbund as the Viennese architect Adolf Loos helped further the anti-ornamental attitudes of early twentieth-century designers

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with his landmark essay, “Ornament and Crime,” itself the subject of recent critical re-evaluation by scholars.7 But regardless of current re-evaluations of this important era for German and worldwide design developments, the Werkbund debate on the eve of World War I has remained a signal event for artistic upheavals that later manifested themselves in the Weimar Bauhaus and the International Style. German historians, for their part, have taken note of the Werkbund mainly from an internal, organizational point of view. As a result, for example, when the historian Joan Campbell published her classic study of the Werkbund in 1978, the so-called “Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts” in her book’s subtitle referred mostly to the politics within the organization. The book spends far less time investigating, for instance, the developments in national politics and economic policy that are examined below, and which, it turns out, had an enormous impact on the development and ambitions of the Werkbund. To Werkbund leaders like Hermann Muthesius, Friedrich Naumann, and Ernst Jäckh, the Werkbund operated at the intersection of art’s claims to represent a civilizing German Kultur, on the one hand, and, on the other, industry’s demands for a political influence commensurate with its growing pre-eminence in German economic life. Jäckh, a Naumann disciple from southern Germany, replaced Wolf Dohrn as the managing director of the Werkbund in April 1912. This move was seen as crucial for enlarging the sphere of the Werkbund’s international activities, as Jäckh prided himself on his close contacts with the German Foreign Office and with newspaper editors throughout German-speaking Europe. It was no coincidence that Jäckh’s debut at the Werkbund annual conference in June of 1912 coincided with the first truly “expansionist” meeting of the Werkbund membership. Held on foreign soil in the Imperial Hapsburg capital of Vienna, the Werkbund conference featured speeches by leaders like Peter Bruckmann, a southGerman silver manufacturer who had served as the organization’s president since 1909. Before an audience that included unprecedented representation of government officials from both German and Austro-Hungarian government ministries, Bruckmann, in an address entitled “The Next Tasks of the Deutscher Werkbund,” announced that the Werkbund was now poised to become the official representative of German foreign trade and finished goods’ industries abroad.8 When one considers that April 1912 also marked the transfer of the Werkbund headquarters from Karl Schmidt’s offices at the garden city of Dresden-Hellerau to an office managed by Ernst Jäckh in Berlin, it is clear that the Werkbund was rapidly entering a new phase of its development. Most art histories cite the run-up to the First Werkbund Exhibition, planned for the summer of 1914 in the historic Rhineland city of Cologne, as the primary reason for these changes. Yet this is only one part of the story. It is a story that emphasizes the Cologne Exhibition as a landmark pre-war spectacle of art, architecture, and design. However, profound political changes were also afoot beginning in January 1912 that vaulted the Werkbund to the forefront of German commercial and foreign policy. That winter ushered in events in Wilhelmine German history that earned the designation of a period of “stable crisis” from the respected German historian

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Thomas Nipperdey.9 What happened, in short, is that the socialists of the Social Democratic Party captured the majority in the Reichstag elections of January 1912—in spite of the fact that there was a discriminatory, three-class voting system in Wilhelmine Germany that placed this party’s non-property owners at a distinct disadvantage.10 In the clamor following these elections the government struggled to keep control, and was forced to navigate among a series of unattractive political choices. For one, German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg rejected calls from outraged conservatives in the military, heavy industry, and agriculture to dissolve the Reichstag (parliament) and to ban political demonstrations in support of the Social Democrats. At the same time, Bethmann-Hollweg also refused socialists’ calls to convert Germany to a democracy. This was a central demand on the part of the victorious Social Democratic Party, who wished for a system of one-man–one-vote for its constituency of workers and other disenfranchised groups. The compromise struck by Bethmann-Hollweg and Interior Minister Clemens Delbrück, who shortly before had been Muthesius’ boss at the Prussian Commerce Ministry, is telling: the government hoped to overcome the sudden gridlock in domestic policy caused by the Social Democratic victory by aggressively promoting commercial expansion both at home and abroad. The major agents of this commercial expansion were to be the Deutscher Werkbund and Gustav Stresemann’s Association for Light Industry (Bund Deutscher Industriellen, or BDI), a group that represented the makers of German finished goods.11 By 1913, and working with Jäckh, Naumann, Muthesius, and Gustav Stresemann (who was also a Werkbund member), the Chancellor’s office and the Foreign Office were enlarging the Werkbund’s network by contacting German embassies and consulates around the world. German diplomatic outposts in Rio de Janeiro, Beirut, Calcutta, Genoa, and other cities received instructions about the Werkbund and its central role in improving the quality of German products and supporting German culture through the cooperation of artists, manufacturers, and merchants. The Chancellor’s Office also requested that consulates furnish it with addresses of all German businesses and professionals operating in foreign territory who could serve as conduits for Werkbund propaganda, which the ministry wished to have businesses disseminate as widely as possible in these countries.12 The shorthand for Germany’s aggressive expansion into world markets at this time was known as “Weltpolitik,” or global politics, to secure well-designed German products a place in the “Weltwirtschaft,” or world economy.13 In this new system, Germans from the working to the middle classes, and from manufacturers to business professionals, would benefit as a flood of revenues from the expanding export and manufacturing economy would raise its participants on a rising tide. In this vision, AEG appliances by the artist-architect Peter Behrens, or silverware and flatware from the firm of Werkbund president Peter Bruckmann, would move from being Werkbund exemplars of German “quality work,” or Qualitätsarbeit, to becoming leading German export items for distribution on a global scale. Architectural and design historians have seldom placed emphasis on this explicit

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foreign and commercial policy goal. German historians, for their part, have tended to focus on pre-World War I German naval fleet expansion, or on the gunboat diplomacy that came into fashion in 1911 with the so-called “Morocco Crisis.” Yet there are some important and under-appreciated ways in which the economics of military expansion dovetailed nicely with global commercial success for Werkbund designers and companies. The legendary Krupp Steelworks, one of the largest Werkbund firms, is an example of a company that took maximum advantage of the government’s new outlook. Working with company patriarch Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Bethmann-Hollweg’s office arranged free passage on a luxury steamer from South America to Germany for Major Joâo Simplicio de Carvalho, Brazil’s incoming Minister of Transport and one-time War Ministry attaché, so that he could tour the planned Werkbund Exhibition of 1914. Major Simplicio de Carvalho was to be shown German industry’s finest examples of locomotives, passenger train cars, automobiles, and planes, and was to be treated as an honored minister of state throughout his visit. As the Chancellor noted in a letter to the German consul in Brazil, the Krupp Company, one of Germany’s only heavy industries to join the Werkbund, would also take de Carvalho on a tour through the legendary Krupp steelworks, a family-owned global German company in possession of eighty factories in nearby Essen alone.14 Here family patriarch Gustav Krupp would usher the Brazilian dignitary through detailed explanations of the Krupp steel production process, followed by a visit to sales displays of Germany’s finest steel-plated armor, naval guns, artillery field pieces, and railway wheels and rails.15 Between the Werkbund Exhibition and the Krupp tour, Foreign Office officials expressed confidence that Major de Carvalho’s “far-reaching influence would soon be of benefit to German commerce, German industry, and shipping” in the form of sizable contracts from Brazil.16 It is in this context that we can understand such invited Werkbund design competitions as the project for a House of German–Turkish Friendship for Istanbul in 1916. The Stuttgart-based automotive giant Robert Bosch, a major Werkbund patron, underwrote the competition, which drew designs from such invited Werkbund architects as Bruno Taut, Peter Behrens, Hans Poelzig, and German Bestelmeyer. Colonial expansion and a certain orientalist outlook informed German efforts to gain influence over Ottoman territory as one of the few portions of the globe that had not yet come under the sway of another colonial power. Werkbund managing director Jäckh’s web of connections extended to the Ottoman Empire, where he had served as a diplomatic attaché for years. Jäckh was active as the head of the German–Turkish Union at the same time as he managed the Werkbund, and conveniently had its offices located on a different floor of the same Berlin building as the Deutscher Werkbund.17 In concert with official policies, Friedrich Naumann and especially Ernst Jäckh stepped up measures to sketch a pre-war road map for imperialism in the Wilhelmine Empire’s backyard. Friedrich Naumann’s Assistance (Die Hilfe) generally “took a strongly imperialist line,” while Jäckh, a regular contributor, launched a series of additional publishing projects to spell out the terms for a bold, expansive,

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German-led alliance.18 The foundation of the German-Austro-Hungarian Economic Association in September 1913, only a year after the Werkbund’s Congress in Vienna, lent fuel to Jäckh’s vision of a gigantic trading bloc dominated politically and economically by Germany.19 Such programs for customs’ unions and various degrees of unification of East Central Europe under German hegemony were certainly part of a long tradition of discussions among pan-Germanists and colonialists like Albert Ritter, Heinrich Class, Paul Rohrbach, and others.20 Jäckh optimistically and perhaps naively assumed that a German challenge to the British Empire at two of its “sorest spots,” namely Egypt and India, could succeed without provoking war.21 He was certainly not alone among factions of German industry in advocating a “Berlin to Baghdad line”—a rail line and axis of trade projected to stretch well beyond Germany, Austria-Hungary, through the Balkans and Turkey, and ultimately to the Persian Gulf.22 The imperial visions of Jäckh, Naumann, and Stresemann hinged on a relatively straightforward, interlocking mercantile scheme: Germany would be able to purchase such raw material supplies as oil, iron, and bauxite it desperately needed from newly secured markets in the Balkans, Turkey, and from Ottoman-Arab holdings extending around the Red Sea. In exchange, these allies and trade partners would have privileged access to products from Germany’s burgeoning finished-goods industries —i.e., Werkbund industries. German commercial, banking, and industrial interests generally backed these types of measures, while Jäckh’s patriotic and boosterist propaganda publications detailed ambitions for challenging England’s “Pax Britannica” with an alternative “Pax Germanica.” To promote this cause Jäckh produced such publications as Germany in the Near East Following the Balkan War (1913), Greater Germany (1914), The Rising Crescent: On the Path to German and Turkish Union (1915), and Werkbund and Mitteleuropa (1916).23 Jäckh’s program was notably more expansive than Naumann’s calls for a pan-German and East Central European Mitteleuropa, although Naumann’s book of the same name, published in 1915, espoused similar economic ambitions. Naumann’s Mitteleuropa was, in fact, to become the politician’s best-selling, most-translated, and most-discussed publication.24 Jäckh’s pre-war publications are just the furthest projection of a pan-German global economic and political power scenario that squared with the evolving policies of government and the lobbying efforts of Germany’s largest industrial associations between 1911 and 1914. They are also of a piece with Muthesius’ July 1914 lecture at the Werkbund’s annual congress in Cologne, “The Future Work of the Werkbund,” and with Naumann’s address a few days later, “The Werkbund and the World Economy.” Barely six weeks after these speeches and the heated Werkbund debates that so came to dominate pre-World War I German design history, the outbreak of World War I and the general mobilization of German military forces eclipsed the Werkbund’s expansive program for commercial domination. Even though the Werkbund would never be the same following the outbreak of the war, it is worth noting just how closely the agenda of many leading Werkbund designers and policymakers matched the German government’s preWorld War I politics of global competition and commercial expansion.

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Immediately following the contentious Werkbund congress, Jäckh, Muthesius, Naumann, and Bruckmann would unflinchingly use the power of the press, and particularly Rudolf Mosse’s newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, to dissipate and eventually to dismiss entirely the dissension arising from Henry van de Velde and other Werkbund “individualists.” Well into World War I, the Werkbund leadership’s propaganda and policy efforts pointed the way toward a far-reaching program of “types” for manufacturing, production, and export. However, wartime prerogatives, a militarized economy, and growing international isolation would preclude the realization of the pre-war Werkbund’s ambitious plans. Nearly a century later, what is important to realize is the degree to which divergent disciplinary interests have kept both historians of German architecture and design and historians of modern Germany from considering the interpenetration of political history, economic history, and architectural and design history examined briefly here. The unique character of the Wilhelmine era—a time that Kaiser Wilhelm II himself privately described in 1903 as “an infinitely difficult period of history” requiring “the reconciliation of traditional and modern times”25—calls on historians and architectural historians to at least do this much: to employ current interdisciplinary methods, in other words, to capture the layered, nuanced dynamics of the Wilhelmine era and its particular—and likewise interdisciplinary—times.

Notes 1 The present chapter developed out of state-by-state analyses first explored in John V. Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See especially Chapters 1 and 7. 2 The Werkbund has been most trenchantly analyzed in the following: Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven: Yale, 1996); on pre-World War I Bauhaus precedents see also Hans M. Wingler, Das Bauhaus 1919–1933: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin (Bramsche: Verlag Gebr. Rasch, 1962); Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed: Sources and Design Theory (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1985). 3 Muthesius began serving as a civil servant in the Prussian Ministry of Public Works in 1893, and began working for the Commerce Ministry in 1897. See Hermann Muthesius, “Mein Lebens- und Bildungsgang” (25 September, 1900), Muthesius Estate, Berlin Werkbund Archives; see also Eckhard Siepmann and Angelika Thiekötter, eds., Hermann Muthesius im Werkbund-Archiv, (Berlin: Werkbund-Archiv, 1990), pp. 105–28. 4 During late nineteenth-century industrialization an “old” Mittelstand of artisans, tradespeople, and shopkeepers was joined by a “new” Mittelstand of white-collar clerks, secretaries, and office workers in business and civil service. See Heinrich A. Winkler, Mittelstand, Demokratie, und Nationalsozialismus (Koeln: 1972); Herman Lebovics, Social Conservatism and the Middle Classes in Germany, 1914–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 6–11; David Blackbourn, “The Mittelstand in German Society and Politics, 1871–1914,” Social History, 4 (1977), pp. 409–33. 5 “Denkschrift über die Begründung eines Landesgewerbeamts und eines Ständigen Beirats,” in Anlagen zum Staatshaushalts-Etat für das Etatsjahr 1905, II. Band [Nr.16, Beilage G, Handels- u. Gewerbeverwaltung], p. 92. The famous phrase “cheap and bad” issued from the pen of Franz Reauleaux, a government reporter writing his Letters from Philadelphia as a detailed review of German applied arts goods at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author.

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6 For analyses of the debates in historical context see Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus, Chapter 7. 7 See Christopher Long, “The Origins and Context of Adolf Loos’s ‘Ornament and Crime’,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68, Nr. 2 (June 2009), pp. 200–23. 8 Deutscher Werkbund, Die Wiener 5. Jahresversammlung des Deutschen Werkbundes vom 6. bis 9. Juni 1912 (Berlin: Geschäftsstelle des Werkbundes, n.d. [1912]), pp. 10–11. 9 Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, Zweiter Band: Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1992), pp. 748–57. 10 Ibid., pp. 745–48; Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 224–35. For a more recent analysis of electoral practices in Wilhelmine Germany see Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 11 Hans-Peter Ullmann, Der Bund der Industriellen, Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft 21 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), pp. 27–33; also Dirk Stegmann, Die Erben Bismarcks, Parteien und Verbände in der Spätphase Wilhelminischen Deutschlands: Sammlungspolitik 1897–1918 (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1970), p. 33. 12 German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv-Berlin), BArch R901/18350, replies from German Consulates in Genoa, Jassy, Beirut, Singapore, Calcutta, and Batavia to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, 10 April 1913; 8 April 1913; 16 April 1913; 24 December 1913; 24 January 1914; and 7 February 1914 respectively; German Consulates in Beirut, Kristiania to Deutscher Werkbund Geschäftsstelle, 16 April 1913; 29 April 1913; pp. 53–142. 13 This is most clearly expressed in the title of Friedrich Naumann’s keynote address at the annual meeting of the Werkbund in Cologne in July of 1914, “Werkbund und Weltwirtschaft.” 14 Correspondence between Imperial Foreign Office and Freiherr von Stein, German Consul of Porto Alegre; between Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg (Im Auftrag gez. Johannes) and Freiherr von Stein; and between Bromberg & Cie.-Hamburg and Foreign Office, numerous letters all related to de Carvalho’s arrangements and dated between 4 May 1914 and 30 June 1914, Barch R901/18350, 147–151b. 15 Where the Werkbund would enter into a hopeful new phase by welcoming foreign dignitaries to an exhibition for the first time in 1914, Gustav Krupp, the “Cannon King” (Kanonenkönig), was adding to a long list of foreign customers: Krupp sold armor, artillery, shells, and other materials to fifty-two foreign governments before World War I, and sold 24,000 artillery pieces to the German military as well. See William Manchester’s exhaustive study, The Arms of Krupp: 1587–1968 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968), pp. 263–64. 16 Freiherr von Stein, German Consul in Porto Alegre to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, 8 April 1914, Barch R901/18350, p. 148b. 17 For a discussion of this competition see Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture, translated by J. A. Underwood and Edith Küstner (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 71–2. See also primary sources such as Jäckh, Werkbund und Mitteleuropa (Weimar: Gustav Kiepenhauer, 1916), pp. 16–18; Der goldene Pflug: Lebensgeschichte eines Weltbürgers (Stuttgart: Klett Verlag, 1957), pp. 202, 322–34; and especially Deutscher Werkbund and Deutsch–Türkischen Vereinigung, eds., Das Haus der Freundschaft in Konstantinopel, ein Wettbewerb für Deutscher Architekten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1918). 18 Quotation from Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914, translated by Marian Jackson (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1975), p. 236. See also Campbell, The German Werkbund, pp. 93–8. 19 Fischer, War of Illusions, p. 237. 20 See Klaus Wernecke, Der Wille zur Weltgeltung: Außenpolitik und Öffentlichkeit im Kaiserreich am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1970), pp. 288–310. 21 In 1913 Jäckh wrote, for example: “Helgoland and the fleet can protect Germany and hold England at bay. Baghdad and the Railway can threaten England at its sorest spots –

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22

23

24 25

at the Indian and Egyptian borders. This is what England has to fear.” Ernst Jäckh, Deutschland im Orient nach dem Balkankrieg (Strassburg: Verlag Singer, 1913), as quoted in Wernecke, Die Wille zur Weltgeltung, p. 292. See Fritz Fischer’s discussion of “Groups and Associations aiming at Berlin–Baghdad as the ‘New German Objective’” in War of Illusions, pp. 446–58. The historian Karl Erich Born calls the Berlin–Baghdad railway project, which was first conceived by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1887, “the most spectacular enterprise undertaken abroad by German banks.” See Karl Erich Born, International Banking in the 19th and 20th Centuries, translated by Volker R. Berghahn (Warwickshire: Berg Publishers, 1983), pp. 138–46. Ernst Jäckh, Deutschland im Orient nach dem Balkankrieg; Ernst Jäckh and Paul Rohrbach, Das Grössere Deutschland, as described by Paul Rohrbach in “Zum Weltvolk hindurch!”, in Preußische Jahrbücher (1914): p. 4, as cited in Fischer, War of Illusions, pp. 448–49, 449 n. 20; Ernst Jäckh, Der aufsteigende Halbmond: Auf dem Weg zum Deutsch–Türkischen Bündnis (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1915); Ernst Jäckh, Werkbund und Mitteleuropa. Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa, in Naumann, Werke, 4: pp. 485–835. Thomas A. Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans: A Study in Leadership (Oxford, New York, 1991), p. 159, as cited in James Retallack, Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 1.

RESPONSE Paul Betts

John V. Maciuika’s article is a wide-ranging piece that revisits some of the key arguments advanced in his rich 2005 book, Beyond the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics and the German State, 1890–1920 (University of California Press). It addresses the forgotten links between design, industry and the German Imperial government (most notably the Prussian Ministry of Commerce and Trade) that shaped the German design world both before and during the First World War, casting a long shadow over the German design world ever since. He is particularly persuasive in laying bare the Werkbund’s global imperial vision and how the pioneering association of architects, designers and industrialists was to play a key role in German commercial domination (e.g., Naumann’s famed Mitteleuropa dream) for the future. His section on the baldly expansionist wartime Werkbund is illuminating, especially his account of its close relationship to Krupp and the Foreign Office. Maciuika is certainly right that Werkbund historiography has traditionally concentrated on the internal politics within the organization or on its stylistic proclivities, thus ignoring its larger relationship to the political and economic concerns of the day. There are however a few points that I’d like to make about his article. First, his analysis of the Werkbund raises the question of just how German these developments were. As he writes, the Werkbund (thanks in large measure to its co-founder Hermann Muthesius) “transmuted the values of the British Arts and Crafts movement into techniques of proto-industrial design at state schools” across Germany. But what about similar institutional arrangements in other countries? The twentieth century was of course the Golden Age of design councils across Europe and North America, and later Japan, as design was embraced as a key instance of “soft power” by regimes across the globe. How did the Werkbund campaign fit into this broader international story of institutionalized design? Was it all that different from what was practiced elsewhere, say the export of American design as an ideological instrument as detailed in Victoria De Grazia’s 2005 book Irresistible Empire? The Werkbund

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certainly had its own globalized vision of national culture and commerce; but to what extent was the Werkbund vision itself globalized in international economic and cultural life? Maciuika also raises interesting questions about Germany. Viewed from a broader perspective, Maciuika’s Werkbund history was the rule, not the exception, in twentieth-century German design history. At first this may seem rather axiomatic, but this was hardly the case in the first half of the century. After all, the post-World War I era witnessed a strong reaction against the Werkbund’s wartime coalition of design, industry and government. The first Werkbund president during the Weimar Republic, Hans Poelzig, devoted his first speech in 1919 (“Werkbund Tasks”) to calling for modern architecture and design’s break from jingoism and commercial opportunism, arguing in favor of the moral integrity of artisan production and the independent designer. The early Bauhaus also had little interest in close relations with national government, as the Werkbund’s combative wartime nationalism was countered by an equally aggressive internationalism of the arts. Things did change later though. In the aftermath of the Depression and the Nazi takeover in 1933, the Werkbund began to seek more state patronage, and famously voted for a merger with Paul Schulze-Naumburg’s Kampfbund in 1933. The sad story of the Nazi era Werkbund and its various manifestations is by now well known; in any case, the fusion of state and design—first brokered in World War I—saw its revival in the Second World War, with many similarities, including a renewed Warenbuch of canonized design objects distributed to manufacturers and planners for mass production and export. While its bald imperial rhetoric may have been expunged after 1945, the Werkbund vision of national-level cultural organ survived the war. In 1951 the West German government founded a new design council in Frankfurt, the Rat für Formgebung, and the East German government followed a few years later with the Amt der industriellen Formgestaltung, both of which were charged with promoting German design abroad in their respective Cold War orbits. As a consequence, the Werkbund set in train a development that came to characterize much of German design culture over the whole century, apart from the interwar years. This leads to a final point about perspective. Macuika attributes scholarly unawareness of these connections to “divergent disciplinary interests [that] have kept both historians of German architecture and design and historians of modern Germany from considering the interpenetration of political history, economic history, and architectural and design history examined briefly here.” He is right in saying this, but one could add that the reasons that these wartime connections were not known for so long was also because of postwar developments. As noted, the wartime mission of the original Werkbund fell out of favor, as those members once sympathetic to its cause—such as Gropius and Mies—began to move in very different directions. The broader Weimar effort to retag modernism as fundamentally international in orientation and spirit meant that earlier efforts to nationalize (or “imperialize”) design were dismissed, repressed or forgotten. Of course the intimate association of design, national government and imperialism was resuscitated in the Nazi years; yet it was the Third Reich’s own fusion of design and

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the state that made this imperial Werkbund legacy all the more unpalatable after 1945. For those German modernists emerging after World War II in search of a new moral mission of design in the wake of Nazism and the war, including post-1945 Werkbundler and exiled Bauhäusler, the First World War’s shotgun marriage of state and design was greeted with wariness and trepidation, especially in West Germany. Such political distancing, to be sure, required some nimble biographical rewriting to suit new political circumstances. But the point is that the changed political developments after military defeat in World War I (and again in World War II) were as decisive as parochial disciplinarity in accounting for this longstanding historiographical blindspot. Nonetheless, it is to our great benefit that John V. Maciuika has restored these connections to their proper place.

9 WHERE IN THE WORLD IS DESIGN? The case of India, 1900–1945 Victor Margolin

The complexity of industrialization At the beginning of the 20th century, promoters of industrialization in India faced uncountable obstacles—British resistance, lack of capital and personnel, and especially the absence of a market for mass-produced products. Their initiatives were further complicated by the extensive debates and activities that ranged from all-out support for industrial development on a Western model to Gandhi’s extreme exhortation of a simple life of self-sufficiency. The short-lived swadeshi movement in Bengal that began around 1903 extended the 19th century desire to be free of British goods and prepared the way for Gandhi’s call for Swaraj, which combined swadeshi practices of economic self-sufficiency with a political strategy of resisting the British on a much wider front. Industrialists were frustrated with Gandhi’s antagonism to machines and his espousal of a simple rural life but they benefited from his ability to galvanize masses of people to struggle for independence.1 In general, capital was hard to come by and the British had little interest in making it available to abet Indian initiatives. Thus, industrialization depended on a small class of entrepreneurs, most of whom gained their initial wealth by providing commercial services to British businesses or the Raj. The wealthy maharajas also played a role. On the one hand, some supported local industrial initiatives and hired Indian craftsman to decorate their palaces. On the other, they patronized foreign architects and firms that manufactured furniture and provided interior design services.2 To account for the complexity of design activity in India between 1900 and 1945, it is necessary to study the interplay between a number of different actors, both Indian and British. Most numerous were the artisans, the main providers of daily life objects for the vast market of rural and urban dwellers. While some scholars argue that India’s artisan culture was severely crippled by competition from cheap

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mass-produced British goods, others claim that a considerable artisan class survived because the British did not compete equally in every sector. Mainly it was the export of cotton from the Manchester mills that challenged the Indian textile industry but even there Indian entrepreneurs fought back and, in fact, Mahatma Gandhi made the production of homespun cloth, or khadi, the central form of resistance to Britain’s economic and political hegemony.3 As demand increased for metal products such as cutlery, tools, and machine parts, small factories sprang up, especially in or near cities, to produce these goods.4 The urban furniture industry also drew in carpenters who had previously made traditional furniture for a rural market. Other products created in these small or medium-sized workshops included trunks, safes, locks, and various electroplated goods. By 1903, the swadeshi or self-reliance movement had begun to spread, particularly in Bengal, where it was fueled by the British decision to partition the region in 1905. This led to a call to boycott British goods and to a large number of initiatives to create and market indigenous products. Swadeshi activists did not adopt a single strategy. Some thought in terms of starting new industries, while others favored strengthening local craftspeople. Beginning in the 1890s, efforts were made to promote indigenous goods through exhibitions and shops and by 1905, the year of partition, the number of swadeshi shops in Calcutta had increased considerably. The medium-sized Calcutta Pottery Works was one of the few successful Bengali enterprises. With imported machinery and a skilled ceramist who had studied in Japan, the factory advertised swadeshi teacups, saucers, and teapots as well as additional items. Other competitors did less well due to undercapitalization and a lack of skilled workmen. The strongest swadeshi efforts were several cotton mills, although they barely scraped by due to a shortage of funds. In general, the swadeshi movement in Bengal failed to produce the economic renaissance its leaders had initially hoped for but it did encourage many Bengalis to think in terms of economic independence and helped prepare the way for Mahatma Gandhi’s powerful campaign to resist the British Raj by weaving khadi cloth instead of buying British cotton.5 The British opposed industrialization for a number of reasons. Besides the desire to prevent economic competitiveness—the attitude adopted by British businessmen and the Raj—a few idealists were against it because they believed it would not be good for Indians. Among them was the British art educator E. B. Havell, who served as Superintendent of the Art School in Madras between 1884 and 1891 before he became Principal of the Calcutta Art School in 1896. Havell was a craft romantic who shared an antagonism to industrialization with William Morris and others in the Arts and Crafts movement. He did not espouse a repressive view of Indian economic development but he could not imagine a future for India that might require relinquishing the spiritual ideals he believed to be part of the nation’s heritage in favor of an industrial initiative that would wreak havoc on the heritage of indigenous artisanry that he admired so much.6 Havell’s views were shared by Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, an AngloCeylonese scholar of South Asian art and a friend of Charles Robert Ashbee and others

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active in the Arts and Crafts movement.7 One consequence of Coomaraswamy’s Arts and Crafts connection was his 1909 book The Indian Craftsman, for which Ashbee wrote the foreword.8 Similar to Havell, Ashbee projected onto India all the ideals he felt Europe had lost through industrialization. He foresaw the eventual disintegration of what he called “the great city of mechanical industry” and claimed that India sustained a fundamental and enduring order that was far more admirable.9 Like others who imagined a nation of peaceful villages populated by satisfied craftsmen, Ashbee ignored the colonial context in which Indians lived, as did Coomaraswamy, a patrician himself, who condoned a caste system that insured the continuity of distinct craft traditions even as it perpetuated wide disparities of privilege. In contrast to the views of Havell and Coomaraswamy, Alfred Chatterton, a young British engineer who went to India in 1888 to teach at the University of Madras, was one of the rare British colonials who promoted Indian industrialization, even though he did so at the level of small and medium enterprises. Chatterton worked with the provincial government of Madras, becoming the Director of Industrial and Technical Inquiries when the Madras government established a fullfledged Department of Industries in 1906. With a government grant, he began a program in 1898 at the Madras School of Art to design and manufacture household vessels of aluminum, then a relatively new material for industrial use. The program was a success. It led to the establishment of the Indian Aluminum Company and stimulated the creation of other enterprises that were based on existing craft skills, including a tannery where water buckets, shoes and sandals were manufactured, using the industrial technique of chrome tanning. Chatterton also helped to establish the Salem Weaving Factory, which produced shawls, cotton goods, and silk cloths.10 However, he too believed in the colonial project and supported it in his collection of essays and addresses, Industrial Evolution in India.11 The lack of trained Indian industrial designers and engineers did not prevent the founding of various small to medium-sized enterprises in the interwar years to produce goods based on mechanical rather than craft processes. Though most lasted only a short time, a few did become successful. But due to difficulties already stated, entrepreneurs rarely envisioned companies on a bigger scale. The largest of these by far was the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO). Although it was not a producer of finished goods, TISCO acquired and developed various subsidiaries that did produce industrial products made of steel or that included steel in their manufacture. Few of these subsidiaries were exemplary but, despite their uneven showing, the overall success of the steel mill inspired other Indian entrepreneurs to think about enterprises on a comparable scale. In 1935, a group of industrialists met in Bombay to discuss the establishment of an automobile factory. Following an initial wave of enthusiasm, a 1936 report by an Automobile Factory Committee expressed doubts, which were reinforced by the Raj’s reluctance to provide any support. However, several projects were initiated independently of the committee, one led by the industrialist Seth

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FIGURE 9.1

The Tata factory

Source: Courtesy of Tata Central Archives © Tata Central Archives, India

Walchand Hirachand and another by Ghanshyamdas Birla. In 1942, the Birla group established Hindustan Motors Ltd. in Calcutta, while Walchand formed Premier Automobiles Ltd. in Bombay two years later. Because of the war, neither could begin production until peace was declared when, due to lack of expertise, each had to find a foreign partner with whom to collaborate, despite their mutual ambition to inaugurate a home-grown automobile industry as a sign of India’s industrial progress.12 Not one to think small, Walchand also founded Hindustan Aircraft in 1940 with assistance from Mirza Ismail, a high-ranking official who represented the King of Mysore. Walchand’s aim was to manufacture airplanes for the Indian Air Force. The undertaking was short of capital, thus he sold his stake. The Kingdom of Mysore refused to follow suit, although due to a lack of experience, it decided to yield management control to the British government. After independence, the company was nationalized by the new Indian government and did play an important role in modernizing the Indian Air Force. Eventually, it became one of the largest aerospace companies in Asia.13

Visual culture At the beginning of the twentieth century, literacy was still restricted to a limited segment of the Indian population. With the establishment of S. S. Brijbasi, a publisher of lithographic prints in Karachi, and other publishers in the 1920s and 1930s, the print culture inaugurated by the Calcutta Art Studio, the Ravi Varma Studio,

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and other studios in the 19th century was greatly expanded, thus insuring the continued traffic in cheap printed chromolithographs of mythological figures.14 Besides the popularity of these images, however, the publication of reading matter also expanded. Type fonts were available in most, if not all, indigenous languages and presses existed throughout the country, producing a wide range of materials from official documents to newspapers, books, and magazines. India’s linguistic diversity was extensive, despite the large number of Hindi speakers and the prevalence of the Devanagari script. Artists invented new forms of lettering for posters and other printed matter but India in these years was not a sufficiently developed commercial culture to warrant more extensive activity in type design. The printing historian B. S. Kesavan estimates that more than 500 newspapers and journals existed in India at the beginning of the 20th century.15 Among these was the illustrated journal, Modern Review, published in Calcutta by Ramananda Chatterjee (1865–1943) beginning in 1907. Modern Review, which appeared in English, promoted nationalist views and quickly attracted a nationwide readership. It featured lithographic illustrations but halftones were substituted for them as soon as the technology was available.16 The magazine’s illustrations influenced publishers throughout India, and by the 1920s and 1930s a number of other illustrated magazines had appeared. Kalyan, which was published first in Hindi and then in an English edition for overseas Indians, disseminated religious imagery, which helped to address some of the dilemmas of daily life.17 The educated class also read English-language pictorial magazines such as the Illustrated Weekly of India, which had started as the Times of India Weekly Edition in 1880 but was renamed in 1923. For the mass public, however, prints were not simply pictures dedicated primarily to intellectual explanation or aesthetic pleasure, but were the visual embodiment of deeply held spiritual and religious beliefs. This latter quality was exploited by British and Indian businessmen, who sought to link the goods they produced to mythological narratives.18 Spirituality and politics came together in a well-known lithographic calendar poster of 1908 for Kali Cigarettes, which depicted the goddess Kali in her most destructive aspect, waving a bloody scimitar. Produced by the Calcutta Art Studio, the calendar featured a small crouched lion in the upper left corner—a symbol for Britain—and a decapitated soldier in the lower right corner, both of which provoked British officials to read the poster as a sign of political rebellion. The artist Ravi Varma was perhaps the first Indian painter to earn money from commercial art, a practice that began in the 19th century when several companies adopted paintings of his for advertising purposes. This practice continued after his death in 1906. Though his pictures of mythological subjects were most frequently sought, there was also interest in his other genres such as portraiture. His painting of the Maharaja of Mysore, for example, was adopted for a calendar to advertise Maharaja Cigarettes, manufactured by the City Tobacco Company of Bangalore (see Figure 9.2). By the end of World War I, there was a sufficient consumer-oriented Indian middle class to entice some of the large companies from abroad to establish

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FIGURE 9.2

Maharajah Cigarettes, marketing material

Source: Courtesy of Osian’s Image Gallery © Ravi Varma/Calendar poster to advertise Maharaja cigarettes, The Osian’s Archive & Library Collection, India

manufacturing facilities in India or else begin serious marketing operations there. Among British firms, Lever and Associated Biscuit Manufacturers sold soap and biscuits respectively. The Czech firm Bata intended to compete with indigenous tanning factories to market shoes, while Dunlop promoted tires and General Electric

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and Phillips sold light bulbs. Kodak also set up operations in India to sell cameras to the rising middle class. The advertising strategies of these companies varied from one to another but also depended on which audiences they were trying to reach. These varied. First was the Indian consumer who might be from a range of economic strata although, given the products on offer, the likely market was the middle class. Then there were the foreigners living in India, including British colonials but not limited exclusively to them. And for some services, like the Indian State Railways, the market was in Britain. For each group of consumers there were distinct advertising strategies and representations of Indian culture. To encourage tourists from Britain to see India by rail, the Indian State Railways, a company owned and managed by the Raj, used exotic imagery in an extensive advertising campaign during the 1930s. Their posters featured scenic destinations, including a number of temple sites. As fodder for the tourist gaze, Indians were always included as part of the scenery. In some posters they were dwarfed by the impressive monuments, while in others, such as posters that depicted the Khyber Pass or the holy city of Benares, their activity was an essential part of the narrative. The artists were all British and included Austin Cooper (1890–1964) and Fred Taylor (1875–1963), who had done posters for the London Underground and the London and Northeastern Railway (LNER).19 In addition to advertising products, posters along with other means were used extensively by Indian film companies to promote films.20 In 1913, D. G. Phalke produced, directed, and edited the first Indian feature film Raja Harishchandra, a mythological drama whose visual style Phalke adopted from Ravi Varma. Phalke founded the Hindustan Film Company in 1917 and others soon followed it. Early film advertising included painted banners, posters, and printed handbills. Beginning in the 1920s, posters and handbills were supplemented by a new form of advertising, the film booklet, which contained pictures of the film as well as a summary of it. One of the earliest printed film posters, and among the first to depart from the Ravi Varma aesthetic, was Baburao Painter’s Kalyan Khajina (The Treasures of Kalyan) of 1924. Painter (1890–1954), who was the film’s director as well as the poster designer, sought to imitate the realistic style of Bombay’s J. J. School of Art, where so many artists who did advertising posters trained. Art Deco graphics entered India by way of film posters, whose designers adopted the style as a sign of modernity. By the 1930s, the themes of Indian films had expanded beyond the original mythological and historical dramas to include modern situations. As in the West, the stylized Art Deco graphics were associated with the 1930s and were rarely used in the postwar years. Their significance in India, however, was to create hybrid graphic forms that mingled traditional Indian scripts with modern Western lettering styles.

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Conclusion The case of India demonstrates that economics, technology, politics, and culture are essential components of design history and any attempt to incorporate the story of Indian industrialization and mass communication into a world history of design must take them into consideration. They are crucial in contributing to a design history narrative that can incorporate not only India, both as colony and nation, but also the many other places where engagements with design have heretofore remained invisible.

Notes 1 Substantial material on Indian industrialization can be found in a number of economic histories by Indian scholars including D. R. Gadgil, The Industrial Evolution of India in Recent Times, 1860–1939; (Bombay et al.: Oxford University Press, 1971); Rajat Kanta Ray, ed., Entrepreneurship and Industry in India, 1800–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Ray’s own Industrialization in India: Growth and Conflict in the Private Corporate Sector, 1914–47 (Delhi et al.: Oxford University Press, 1979); Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 ((New Dehli: People’s Publishing House, 1973); and Sunil Kumar Sen, Studies in Economic Policy and Development of India, 1848–1939 (Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1972). Vera Anstey’s The Economic Development of India (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1952 [1929]) contains helpful information but looks at India’s economic history from a colonial point of view. 2 Amin Jaffer, Made for Maharajas: A Design Diary of Princely India (New York: The Vendome Press, 2006). 3 Judith Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). S. Balaram discusses Gandhi’s ability to endow the weaving of khadi cloth with political symbolism in “Product Symbolism of Gandhi and Its Connection with Indian Mythology,” Design Issues 5 no. 2 (Spring 1989): 68–85. See also Susan S. Bean, “Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Indian Independence,” in Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, eds, Cloth and Human Experience (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989): 355–376. 4 Gadjil, The Industrial Evolution of India in Recent Times, 1860–1939: 34. 5 For a comprehensive discussion of the Bengali swadeshi movement, see Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908. 6 Havell’s role in India as an art educator and proponent of Indian crafts is discussed in Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 246–254; Tapati GuhaThakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 149–159; and Pushpa Sundar, Patrons and Philistines: Arts and the State in British India, 1773–1947 (Delhi et al.: Oxford University Press, 1995): 148–155, 157, 172. See also Debashish Banerji, “The Orientialism of EB Havell,” Third Text 16 no. 1 (2002): 41–56. Havell stated his positive views of Indian crafts and his critique of industrialization in his book, The Basis for Artistic and Industrial Revival in India (New Delhi: USHA, 1986 [1912]). 7 For an account of Coomaraswamy’s life in Chipping Camden near Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft and his subsequent stay in India, see Roger Lipsey, Coomaraswamy: His Life and Work, vol. 3 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977 [Bollingen Series LXXIX]): 41–54 and 75–93. See also Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920: 159–167. 8 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Indian Craftsman (London: Probsthain & Co., 1909). 9 C. R. Ashbee, “Foreword” in Coomaraswamy, The Indian Craftsman: ix.

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10 On Chatterton, see Vera Anstey, The Economic Development of India: 210–212, and Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908: 135. 11 Alfred Chatterton, Industrial Evolution in India (Madras: The “Hindu” Office, 1912): 340. He says, “A leaven of Englishmen will always be required to preserve the present high standard of service, and it is difficult to even imagine the time when the direction of affairs will pass out of our hands.” 12 Ibid.: 176–182. 13 Ibid.: 281. 14 On the development of Indian print culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, see Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905 (Delhi et al.: Oxford University Press, 2006); Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007); Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations; and Christopher Pinney, “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004). 15 B. S. Kesavan, History of Printing and Publishing in India: A Story of Cultural Awakening, v. 1: South Indian Origins of Printing and Its Efflorescence in Bengal (India: National Book Trust, 1985): 233. 16 Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations: 120–122. 17 Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art: 147–149. 18 Ibid.: 121–134. 19 Images of Indian State Railway posters can be found on the websites of various poster dealers. 20 For a discussion of Indian film advertising between 1913 and the end of the 1930s, see Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002): 101–135.

RESPONSE Christopher Pinney

Victor Margolin does a good job of highlighting the diversity of approaches within India to the ‘industrial’ and ‘artisan’ question. Swadeshi, as he says, did not invoke a singular design or artifact-related strategy. Some advocated artisanal self-reliance as an essentially moral strategy (M. K. Gandhi most famously, and Rabindranath Tagore to a lesser extent), others advocated mineral exploitation and heavy industrial development, such as the geologist Pramathanath Bose (briefly alluded to) who discovered petroleum in Assam and was instrumental in the establishment of the Jamshedpur TISCO steel works. Some, like the extremely wealthy industrialist G. D. Birla were industrial tycoons of a highly extractive variety, but he was also a main funder of Gandhi’s activities (he maintained a very extensive correspondence with Gandhi, and facilitated his travel and residence [Gandhi would be assassinated, recall, in the Birla House in Delhi]). More critically, Margolin’s account seems to simplify the British/India divisions: British colonizers appear intent on ‘artisan-izing’ India so that it is forced to buy Manchester textiles; Indians, correspondingly, are involved in ‘resistance’ to this. For example, the 1851 and 1886 Exhibitions appear to unproblematically serve British interests. It may be that on balance they did, but when one looks in detail at the various figures involved, a more complicated story of intentions and outcome emerges. 1851 for instance had huge consequences for English design – not only through the impetus to preserve the exhibition collections in South Kensington, and subsequently the Victoria and Albert Museum, but also through Mathew Digby Wyatt’s (Secretary to the 1851 Exhibition, EIC Surveyor and assistant to Brunel) use of Paisley ornamentation of Brunel’s Paddington Station train shed (here motifs probably emanating from English herbals circulating in the Mughal period incorporated by ‘Kashmiri’ handloom weavers, subsequently inflected by Scottish machine production and looped back through Kashmir became a central feature of one of the new [as Ruskin put it] ‘cathedrals’ of the industrial age).

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These complex flows can of course be given a much longer history. Chintz – the quintessential sign of Englishness – would here be emblematic. Derived from the north Indian term for spotted cloth (chint), the vibrancy of its colours was so attractive that Indian imports would largely destroy the European textile industry in the 17th century. Manchester’s role in the 19th century was a belated echo of a much earlier globalization and set of capital flows. I will return to the economic dimensions of design in my concluding thoughts later. But let’s briefly expand on this longer history of aesthetic influence, not least because it has been the subject of an important – and in my view unjustly neglected – recent publication by Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (2005). Firstly consider the impact of an Indian aesthetic on European Romanticism. Almeida and Gilpin have recently marshalled convincing evidence that India was the uroffenbarung (moment of revelatory insight) of Romanticism. Almeida and Gilpin propose that visual images from India opened – in the words of James Forbes ‘a new scene . . . to the intellectual view’. Images produced by the likes of Tilly Kettle, William Hodges and Edward Moor introduced Britain to a fantastical, sublime and enchanted India. Hodges was acknowledged by Joshua Reynolds in a presidential address to the Royal Academy to have provided ‘hints of composition and general effect, which could not otherwise have occurred.’ For the poet and artist William Blake, Reynolds’ neoclassicial aestheticism sustained the evil of empire. In his copy of Reynolds Works of 1798, Blake wrote that ‘The Arts and Sciences are the Destruction of Tyrannies and Bad Governments . . . Empire follows Art and Not Vice Versa as Englishmen suppose.’ In formulating an Art opposed to Empire, Blake drew heavily on Indian sources – Charles Wilkins’ 1785 translation of the Bhagavad-gita affected him greatly and an Indian aspiration seems to be at work in a number of his images: Almeida and Gilpin have provocatively suggested that Blake’s celebrated Nebuchadnezzer ‘resembles not so much King Lear as a sadhu or Hindu ascetic . . .’ and that his Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth from c.1805–1809, derives much of its structure and iconographic detail from Daniell’s depictions of monumental carvings of Buddha and Siva. Blake’s Jerusalem from c.1804–1820 is clearly iconographically indebted to Moor’s Hindu Pantheon (which was published by his friend Joseph Johnson in 1810), just as many of its ideas owe much to Wilkins’ translation of the Gita. More generally it seems plausible that Blake’s repeated creation of complex ‘friezes’ – surfaces covered with elaborate mythological forms – owes much to his engagement with depictions of Indian cave-temples The key figure in the 1886 (and earlier) Exhibition(s), George Birdwood is now much vilified for his refusal to concede that India was capable of producing ‘fine art’. But to think of him as straightforwardly ‘orientalist’ deletes much of the complexity of his Romantic Morris-ian nostalgia for ‘those ideals he felt India had sacrificed through industrialization’ (to cite Victor’s observation about Ashbee and Havell). Havell, by the way, also needs to be situated closely (alongside Abanindranath Tagore) in relation to a pan-Asian anti-colonialism. Birdwood – largely through his influence on John Lockwood Kipling (father of Rudyard) – is

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part of a complex network which connects John Ruskin, William Morris, Kipling himself and the aesthetician Ananda K. Coomaraswamy to Gandhi. Lockwood Kipling and Coomaraswamy both articulated within the sphere of art pedagogy and aesthetic theory positions that prefigured Gandhi’s own essentialization of the village, of artisanal – as opposed to industrial – production, and of a political ethic rooted in a civilizational ‘craft’. But this flow of ideas – triangulating India, Britain, and Gandhi in South Africa – would form the basis of a much more significant aesthetic ‘intervention’ in the form of Gandhi’s somaticization of a political theology. His increasingly naked body became an aesthetic surface incarnating an ethics of anticolonial practice, and this body incarnated in turn next to the chakra (the spinning wheel which symbolized the self-production of swadeshi) made visible a political performativity that lay at the heart of his endeavour. Separating the economics from the aesthetic – as I think Margolin does in relation to Gandhi – tends to lose sight of the centrality of the moral somatics of khadi (see Bayly, Bean, Trivedi et al.). Margolin usefully draws our attention to a range of industrialists, and industrial projects, that often get left out of accounts of design in India. Alongside the examples of the Indian Aluminium Company, Hindustan Motors and others that he cites he has also commented on phonography, cinema and lithographic presses as archetypal economic/design institutions which draw our attention to the infrastructure which makes possible the mechanical reproduction that cultural critics are usually so happy to consider without reference to mechanics. The swadeshi currents that drove Tata and Birla also informed the arts of mechanical reproduction. H. Bose founded Swadeshi Records Ltd so that Indians would not be forced to rely on the Gramophone Company of India (i.e., EMI). D. G. Phalke, the father of Indian cinema, was prompted to make films because he thought Indians had the right to see their own gods on the screen, not just those of the Christian colonizers. In 1913, the year in which Phalke released his first feature, Raja Harishchandra, he gave a series of interviews to the Maharastrian nationalist B. G. Tilak’s newspaper, Kesari, and to Navyug in which he addressed the difficulties of capital formation in the nascent Indian film industry. He famously recalled his epiphany while watching The Life of Christ in the America-India Picture Palace in Bombay in 1910. ‘That day’ he commented ‘marked the foundation in India of an industry which occupies the fifth place in the myriads of big and small professions that exist. And [that] all this could have happened at the hands of a poor Brahmin!’ In this same article he then documented how he initially raised Rs 25,000 which was used to lever the larger sum that he required to start making his first films. In so doing Phalke positioned this new technology for the animation of India’s gods and goddesses within a strengthening Bombay-centric indigenous capitalism. Phalke approached cinema as he would have approached any new business. Gandhi’s message was powerfully nurtured – throughout the 1930s – by the impact of pictures mass produced by the publisher S. S. Brijbasi. The Brijbasi brothers ran a picture framing shop in Karachi for several years and were only awakened to the possibility of becoming picture publishers by the coincidence of a travelling sales representative from a German printing company, and a client

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requesting the framing of a photograph of his son dressed as Krishna in 1927. Brijbasi’s images (which would soon come to dominate the pan-Indian market) were initially reproduced photographically in Dresden in the form of postcard-size bromide prints. So Margolin is absolutely right to draw our attention to the necessity of engaging the economic history of design in India. But my suggestion is that we do not have to confine ourselves to aluminium and automobiles. The history of all of India’s visual culture is necessarily also an economic history, and it is one which, moreover, was always (and remains) configured by complex global flows and exchanges.

10 HANDMADE MODERNITY Post-war design in Turkey Gökhan Karakus¸

The history of modern design in Turkey is only now beginning to be understood. The largely undocumented designs of a number of architects, interior designers and artists have recently been organized into a history that throws light on to the Turkish experience of modernism providing an example of how design practice outside of the Western context developed. The canon of Western design history, largely concerned with industrialization, has tended to ignore the activities of practitioners in agrarian and nomad cultures which continued to be dependent on non-industrial tools and craft techniques. This form of production was, and still is today, a reality in places such as Turkey. While post-war designers in Western Europe and the USA sought ways to design furniture with an eye towards mass production, in Turkey the question was how to work within the existing handicraft culture. While similar issues can be seen in other geographies (such as Scandinavia for example), in Turkey we have the added dimension of a craft culture associated with an Asian, Islamic, and nomadic civilization. In the design of furniture and interiors in twentieth-century Turkey, the relation of modern and pre-modern practices existed in the spheres of both production and consumption. Novel aesthetics and techniques of handicraft developed alongside shifting requirements of daily life, during a period when there was a major transformation of Turkish society. It is in this context of urbanization and growth that new designs reached a wider population—a transformation that is ongoing even today in Turkey. A lifestyle based on Western, modern modes of living was linked to a type of design produced on the principles of modernist abstraction and industrial materials. Ironically however, such objects were produced artisanally in what we can call a handmade modernism. This short survey looks at key moments and figures in design from the 1940s to the 1970s, showing how Turkey can be situated within a global history of modern design.

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The late Ottoman and early Republican periods Modernism in Turkey is closely associated with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and the transformation in social life that ensued. From dress code, to alphabet, to architecture, the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk initiated an array of changes that had significant effects on material culture. While design was not one of these, the turn towards Western oriented ways of living, especially in the public realm, was comprehensive and radical. In private interior design and furniture this change happened over a longer period of time and was a more organic process, as might be expected given the deeply embedded physicality of domestic space. The concept of furniture in Turkey was itself something new for a culture that, as late as the 1930s, still used traditional forms in many domestic settings. The interior design of the late Ottoman period as well as the Anatolian peasantry was based on textiles integrated into architectural interiors such as divans, cushions, pillows and rugs. There were no tables, chairs, beds or storage units of a Western format. It is interesting to note that in the interiors of public spaces that existed under the Ottoman system—mosques, hamams, and medrese—there was very little furniture in the Western sense. While the Ottoman royalty and the elite of Istanbul and Izmir maintained close connections to European culture through the activities of the merchant and professional classes of non-Muslim (Greek, Armenian and Jewish) minorities, these Western-facing groups were a very small subset of urban society. Domestic society and lifestyle in Turkey changed very little up until the post-war period, with major changes occurring only in the past 30 years.1 With the advent of the new Turkish Republic new prototypes for architecture and to a lesser extent design were offered as a substitute for the Ottoman system. Based on the combined efforts of Republican architects such as Emin Onat 2 and Sedad Hakkı Eldem,3 as well as Austrian, German and Swiss architects such as Bruno Taut, Clemens Holzmeister and Ernst Egli who were brought to Turkey in the 1930s, a radically new design paradigm based on the modernist architecture of Central Europe was instituted by the state, primarily for public buildings. As a symbol of power and authority this architecture served the purposes of the new regime, pointing to universal values through geometrical abstraction and modularity synthesized with a heavy, somber style similar to that of Stalinist and fascist architecture. The architects did have an interest in certain elements of Ottoman architecture, particularly its mathematical complexity, but this was abstracted and subsumed within a modernist idiom. This architectural prescription was however not translated into furniture, furnishings and interior decoration. While new forms of architecture and urbanism were served up as models for a modern lifestyle, domestic life for the most part maintained a resilient continuity with Ottoman and Anatolian precedents. There was no active political reorganization of domestic space, as interior design did not merit consideration by the state. A notable exception was Eldem, whose attempt to develop a national architecture involved disciplined studies of the Turkish house.

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His very thorough analyses were the only substantial study integrating architecture and interior design, including furniture.4 There was also an almost complete lack of education in design, with only one school, the Istanbul State Fine Arts Academy, providing classes from 1929 through the 1940s. Interior design and furniture was largely left to a class of tradesmen and craftsmen, as had been the case since Ottoman times.5 While the minorities and Turkish urban elites of Istanbul, and to a certain extent Izmir, applied versions of the neoclassic and later art nouveau and art deco styles to interior design,6 they were a very small subset of the population despite their economic and political power. This is not the place for a long exegesis on the relations between cultural and economic capital in the early Republican period in Turkey; suffice it to say after the calamities of World War I, the elites were a small group largely concentrated in Istanbul, disconnected from the regions and the new capital of Ankara. It was in this context of the Republican period of the 1940s, especially after the end of World War II that a new form of domestic life started to emerge. While again this trend was concentrated and initiated amongst the elites, this shift in lifestyle was not an ideological phenomenon like the state-sponsored early modern style. It was a bottom-up social transformation facilitated by demand, an aesthetic and intellectual pursuit motivated by the dynamic economic conditions of the day.

Architecture and design in Turkey in the post-war decades The post-war period in Turkey was deeply affected by a global system of capital, with American culture as the model. In Turkey this meant the rise of design motivated by the demands of popular culture and an end to the top-down statist system imposed since the foundation of the Republic. In the 1940s many public buildings were designed by architects like Eldem and Onat, culminating in the competition for the Istanbul Municipality building of 1952 won by Nevzat Erol. These stark buildings of the “second national movement” were exponents of the state’s desire for an outward-looking, modern, and rationalist idiom that was universal. While efforts were made (especially by Eldem) to fuse Ottoman and rationalist principles, for the most part this monolithic style was exceedingly spare, purposefully anonymous. The second national movement in architecture would not live beyond these state-sponsored buildings. In the late 1940s popular politics would start to motivate new design trends. The architect, designer and tastemaker Selçuk Milar, a graduate of the School of Architecture of the Istanbul State Fine Art Academy, was one of these figures.7 His publication in 1947 of editions of the magazine Eser, covering architecture, interior design, and art, represented the beginnings of this interest. Milar’s greatest fame was gained in 1950 with a design of a political poster for the newly forming centrist Democrat Party that was a catalyst in the shocking defeat of the Republican party for the first time since the foundation of the Republic. The poster, featuring an upturned hand with the slogan “Enough, It’s Time for the People’s Voice”

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announced the end of unitary state politics. As an editor and designer Milar pointed to Western models that eschewed the harsh lines of the dominant rational architecture; he had a particular liking for Danish wood furniture of the 1940s by the likes of Finn Juhl. During the 1940s and 1950s this Scandinavian style was a benchmark for taste, particularly in Ankara. Long known for its woodworking culture, the city’s. carpenters included figures such as the trade-school trained manufacturer Ali I hsan S¸ark, who produced a raw, heavy version of the Danish style. This furniture was popular amongst high government officials, Ankara’s cultural elite and the many foreign nationals who lived in the city. Milar would in 1957 open an art gallery in Ankara that married his hodge-podge modernist aesthetic with avantgarde art by Turkish artists such as ceramicist Füreya Koral and the neo-primitive artist and textile and ceramic designer Bedri Rahmi Eyübogˇ lu, creating one of the first original interior design concepts of the time. Istanbul during this period saw a similar introduction of other modernisms through the efforts of young architects such as Turgut Cansever8 and Abdurrahman Hancı,9 graduates of the Istanbul State Fine Arts Academy Architecture School. The Architecture School at the Academy, under the leadership of Eldem throughout the 1940s, had sought to blend a thorough knowledge of local traditions with universal principals, but had largely failed to generate a convincing design idiom. Cansever and Hancı, however, would both go on to become important figures in Turkish architecture. They first teamed up in 1951, designing the house Yalman Evi on the Princes Islands, for the industrialist Mehmet Rıfat Yalman. Hancı had interned with Auguste Perret in France, and Cansever had recently returned from a tour of Europe. The pair were filled with a youthful energy, and designed everything down to the slightest detail. This gesamtkunstwerk was based thoroughly on modernist principles, but the furnishings were produced by the last remnants of Istanbul’s Greek cabinetmakers and carpenters. Open living areas flowed towards the exterior, emphasizing light and space. The sumptuous yet minimal furniture, primarily in wood with upholstery, sculpturally commanded the interior. Stylistically, it continued the interest in Danish wood furniture that Milar had popularized in Ankara. There was a mix of orthogonal storage units and spiky, organic seating units, all in light-colored locally available woods. The only deviation from the modernist credo was a handmade wooden staircase with brass fittings, its wavy lines seemingly evoking the island setting to surreal effect. Also notable were woodblock print textile designs by the painter Bedri Rahmi Eyübogˇ lu10 for the house, which included a primitive flower motif that was applied to the curtains. Hancı and Cansever would go on to design and build another building on the Princes Islands, the Büyükada Anadolu Kulübü (Anatolian Club of Büyükada) of 1950–1955. This was a social club for Turkish parliamentarians that extended the modernist architecture vocabulary while integrating interior design elements including the wooden handmade furniture similar to those produced for the Yalman Evi. Later in the decade Hancı would produce many noteworthy interiors and furniture, especially for hotels and retail spaces. He would design a series of office furniture and chairs for the German manufacturers Domus KG, H. Shoeck,

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Schwaikheim in 1961. These lean, flowing forms in steel, chrome and wood were highly refined, industrially produced furniture for a European context. In 1961 he worked again with Eyübogˇ lu to produce an abstract ceramic wall piece for the meeting rooms at the NATO Headquarters in Paris. The contrast of Eyübogˇlu’s primitive ceramic wall mosaics with Hancı’s urbane and spare furniture was a unique Turkish synthesis that had its gestation in the Istanbul avant-garde of .the 1950s and 1960s. (Other important names within this group were the sculptor Ilhan Koman, ceramicists Belma Diren, Sadi Diren, Füreya Koral and Jale Yilmbas¸ar, and the decorative artist Mustafa Pilevneli.) Cansever also continued to produce buildings, furniture and interior designs, his work at the Türk Tarihi Kurumu (Turkish Historical Society) in 1966 being the most successful project of the decade. Post-war prosperity in Turkey also saw the arrival of architecture and design from the U.S. The first Hilton Hotel outside of the U.S. was completed in Istanbul in 1955. For the Turkish government, the major investor in the project, this was an opportunity to bring a utopian vision of America into the country while generating revenue from the burgeoning global tourism sector. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in collaboration with Sedad Hakkı Eldem, the Istanbul Hilton was extremely influential in its stylized orientalist aesthetic. It was aimed at a tourist audience, but was also a powerful example of American culture for the Turks. For the local population, the Hilton presented the first live example of the muscular corporate modern architecture being produced in the U.S. at the time. While the guest rooms offered the full-blown conveniences and comfort of American consumer culture, the public spaces were a fusion of Eldem’s Turkish geometries and domes and flowing forms mixed with Bunshaft’s severe Corbusian language. The hotel’s upholstered furniture, designed by SOM but produced in Ankara was again based on the Danish teak style. The Hilton, a “Little America” in Istanbul, would be copied many times in Western-style hotels and restaurants in Turkey in the coming decades.

Kare Metal: the beginnings of contemporary furniture in Turkey In writing the history of contemporary design in Turkey, it is possible to find a moment that shows that the Western version of events provides an incomplete history. One such case is the metal furniture designed and produced from 1953 . onwards by the sculptors Sadi Özis¸, I lhan Koman and S¸adi C¸alık at the Metal Sculpture Workshop at the Istanbul State Academy of Art in Istanbul. The project was the basis for the Kare Metal company, which operated from the late 1950s through to 1967. Made exclusively in metal, the spare and geometric furniture produced by this small group provides an unusual example of modernist design applied in a nonWestern context. We see in the tables, chairs, and other furniture produced by Kare Metal how industrial materials and methods can combine with craft techniques, a modernist sensibility informed simultaneously by universal and local ideas.

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Combining as they do industrial materials with abstraction, the furniture can be compared to the work of Western designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi and Harry Bertoia for companies such as Herman Miller and Knoll. In comparison to the fame of these “icons” of post-war design the work of Kare Metal is virtually unknown—showing how biased history can be as a result of uneven documentation. Working at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Art, Özis¸, Koman and C¸alık gained the attention of Istanbul’s small community of architects and interior decorators. They soon received a commercial offer from one of the leading furniture showrooms in Istanbul, Baki Aktar and Fazıl Aysu’s Moderno furniture shop in Elmadagˇ. At the end of 1954, emboldened by the commitment of Moderno, Özis¸, Koman and C¸alık set up their first workshop outside of the Academy in S¸is¸li and recruited . two young craftsmen, Ahmet Pilevneli and Ismail Sakız to help them meet their growing order list, which included commissions from the architect Sedad Hakkı Eldem and other contemporary designers. Together with a close family associate of Özis¸—Mazhar Süleymangil—and his father Tevfik Özis¸, the company Kare Metal was created—its name (meaning “Square Metal”) reflecting not only the geometry of the products but also the four partners (S¸adi C¸alık was not a partner but provided assistance to the group). The Kare Metal group was most prolific from 1954 to about 1958. Although over time the designs of the chairs were fine-tuned, they retained a commitment to certain prototypes and forms developed early on. Dependent on a vocabulary of abstract shapes, the simple, minimal style of the furniture was driven by the limited means of handmade production. Perforated sheet metal was bent in a few places to produce a lounge chair. Metal rods were soldered into a wavy grid to produce a horizontal chaise longue. Mesh was shaped around forms derived from the human body, and rendered into a wide armchair. Overall the design of Kare Metal emphasized the industrial sources of the material, while providing a clear and organized geometry. Similar work was being produced around the world at this time, as designers responded to the new industrial possibilities that were a part of the postwar economic boom. In Turkey there was a similar expansion, based on Prime Minister Adnan Menderes’ economic reforms. Yet prosperity was limited for designers and producers such as Kare Metal. With all imports banned, and with limits on the movement of currency outside of the country, Turkish producers were cut off from outside sources of materials and had to make do with the means at hand. On the material side, the Kare Metal group made do with what they could find. Özis¸ recalls (in a recorded interview from Autumn 2008): . . . during that period there was no material to make steel furniture. Only plumbing pipes and steel construction rods. Small bent rods. We thought of ways of straightening them out. We found a metalworker in the Pers¸embe Pazarı market who had a roll mill. He was a well-known man, a roller named Miço who worked in an oily workshop. He would straighten out our rods

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and stiffen them up under the fire. It was very difficult for us to find pipes for new furniture. But it was perhaps the limited resources and techniques that gives the work of Kare Metal its interest, when compared to the mass produced work of Eames, Bertoia, Noguchi and others. In the case of Kare Metal we have the use of industrial materials but not an industrial production process. They never managed to produce their furniture in large volumes in a factory, and hence the furniture has the simplicity and directness that one might expect of craftsmanship. This was modern furniture produced by hand, yet to the designs of individuals who had a very advanced understanding of abstract sculpture. The Kare Metal group’s furniture gained them the attention of important global figures in their day. Through their contacts from their days in Paris, a small article was written about them in 1958 in the magazine Architecture d’aujourd’hui, edited by the French theorist and publisher André Bloc. This was quite an accomplishment for a Turkish group at the time, and the publicity resulted in interest from Florence Knoll who offered to put Kare Metal furniture into mass production. Unfortunately by this time Özis¸ was running the firm by himself; the group had dispersed, with Koman in Stockholm and C¸alık spending time on his art in Izmir. Kare Metal was not able to respond to Knoll’s proposal and take this important step into the global furniture sector.

Design and retail: Turkish modern furniture in the 1960s and 1970s The next phase in the history of modern furniture in Turkey again emerged out of Istanbul and Ankara and was created by idealistic graduates from the Academy of Fine Arts. Figures such as Yıldırım Kocacıklıogˇ lu and Turhan Uncuogˇ lu, who founded Interno in Istanbul, and Azmi and Bediz Koz of the Ankara design company MPD, were inspired by their modernist teachers at the Academy, such as Hayati . Görkey, Sadun Ersin and Utarit Izgi. Interno and MPD were among the first design firms to set up their own showrooms. In tandem with their development of retail spaces, these designers also synchronized their furniture and interiors, a strategy aimed at selling design products and design services together. Although many of the initial designs of this period were copies of European models, a unique local approach to design gradually developed. As such this period represents the foundations of a modern attitude to design and interiors in Turkey that is influential today. Of course there were other important actors in the furniture sector (such as the architect Yılmaz Zenger, who experimented with fiberglass in the early 1960s, and the office furniture producer Armo), but for the purposes of this short survey, we will focus on Interno and MPD. Driven by a zeal for early modern and contemporary Italian design, ranging from Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier to Giò Ponti, Achille Castiglioni and Carlo

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FIGURE 10.1 Azmi and Bediz Koz designed this interior and furniture for architects Nes¸et and S¸aziment Arolat, Ankara, Turkey, in the mid-1960s. This private apartment shows the type of chunky handmade wooden furniture being produced by Ankara’s cabinetmakers from the 1950s inspired by Danish models mixed in with ethnic Turkish glass and textiles. (Couch concept design by Nes¸et and S¸aziment Arolat.)

Source: © Azmi Koz, through the auspices of the Architecture and Design Archive of Turkey, Garanti Galeri

Scarpa, these young designers looked abroad for visual examples of the kind of design they were being taught at the Academy. The source they found most inspirational was the Italian magazine Domus, edited by Ponti. This publication had been at the center of design practice since the 1920s, and more recently Italy had seen the growth of a contemporary furniture design sector exploiting new materials such as fiberglass and plastic. Turkish designers were strongly influenced by this Italian success story. Yıldırım Kocacıklıogˇ lu and Turhan Uncuogˇ lu were both graduates of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts Interior Design Department. They set up their design office in 1962 in the Kadri Han in Beyogˇ lu in downtown Istanbul, producing copies of early modernist furniture by Marcel Breuer and Le Corbusier and the contemporary work of the Italians. Due to the ban on importation into Turkey, the challenge for Interno was to recreate this industrially produced furniture with local craftsmen, most of whom were Turks trained under the Armenian and Greek artisans who had until now been the main workshop-based producers of furniture in Turkey. Interno’s work, focusing on residential apartments for Istanbul’s new corporate elite, involved the design and production of complete interiors. Following their move into a showroom on Mim Kemal Öke Caddesi in 1968, Interno became a sort of museum of modern design. They displayed copies of the

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leading examples of early Modernist furniture (some for sale, some not) and new Italian pieces that they brought in their luggage from trips to Italy: a Castiglioni lamp here, a Scarpa table there, new fiberglass and plastic pieces by Joe Colombo from Italy, Breuer copies. The showroom and its design were a unified design statement that had not been seen before in Istanbul. Interno continued to push their unique cosmopolitan fusion in successive decades, serving as the model for contemporary interior design to the educated, business and cultural elite of Istanbul, as well as to Izmir, the Mediterranean coast and the Marmara Region. In Ankara, meanwhile, Academy graduates Azmi and Bediz Koz opened a small store called Butik A on Selanik Caddesi in 1960. They had also studied interior

FIGURE 10.2 The interior of the Interno shop in the mid-1960s in Istanbul, Turkey. Interno was a showcase for the icons of modern design favored by the young design team of Yıldırım Kocacıklıogˇ lu and Turhan Uncuogˇ lu. Due to a ban on imports these pieces were handmade, locally-produced copies

Source: © Yıldırım Kocacıklıogˇ lu, through the auspices of the Architecture and Design Archive of Turkey, Garanti Galeri

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design with Kocacıklıogˇ lu and Uncuogˇ lu in Istanbul, and shared their interest in the early modernists and Italians such as Vico Magistretti. They also shared the Ankara taste . for Danish wooden furniture that had been popularized by Selçuk Milar and Ali Ihsan S¸ark (see above.) The partners went through a similar development to Interno’s, first producing copies and then adapting these forms. Their work was especially suited to Ankara’s mix of Turkish political and cultural elites and foreign diplomats, and their popularity grew throughout the 1960s, leading to the formation of the company MPD (Mobilya, Proje, Dekorasyon, still operating today) in a showroom across from Kugˇulu Park in Ankara. Ankara’s social scene was more progressively aligned than Istanbul’s, and MPD also showed art by well-known artists such as the painter Orhan Peker. Both Interno and MPD achieved their success during a difficult time in Turkish history. Unable to import materials and technologies, these designers’ understanding of a global modernist style developed gradually from the practice of copying. While their formal innovation perhaps remained limited, they introduced the concept of furniture as a designed product—as opposed to the traditional conception of the medium as a service provided directly by craftsmen. As trained designers they bridged the gap between the Turkish craftsmen’s limited but robust capabilities in joinery, and the taste of a Turkish urban elite that wanted to share in their modernist vision. Though these design studios and showrooms worked in a relatively closed world, they were the founders of a design and production strategy that has served as an important model in Turkey . in ensuing decades. Furniture companies founded in the 1970s, such as Utarit I zgi and Ali Muslubas¸’s ARMO, the designer Faruk Malhan’s Koleksiyon, and Aziz Sarıyer’s Atelye Derin, were all still based on the craft workshop system.

Conclusion This short history shows the slow evolution of a design aesthetic in Turkey based on international modernism. Starting from ideological state-built architecture, a different sort of modernism emerged in opposition to—but also dependent upon—agrarian and nomadic craft culture. A new urban elite was the catalyst for a grass-roots design culture involving designers, manufacturers and clients in a joint enterprise. This was Turkey’s first design aesthetic created by social dynamics as opposed to the dictates of the state. Connected to the way people live and the means of production, this furniture presented a resolved synthesis of the modern and the pre-modern agrarian, rural and nomad cultures still vital in Turkey today. Kare Metal, MPD and Interno founded modern furniture design in Turkey by resolving the complex requirements of craft production and modernist design practice. Though they worked with a restricted palette of materials, in hand techniques, and served a small market, these groups produced a unique contribution to the history of modern design that is only now being understood. Note: Source material on Kare Metal, MPD and Interno is from recorded interviews conducted by Gökhan Karakus¸ with Sadi Özis¸, Yıldırım Kocacıklıogˇ lu

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and Bediz Koz as part of the Garanti Kültür Architecture and Design Archive in Turkey.

Notes 1 Deniz Kandiyoti and Ays¸e Saktanber, eds, Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 2002, especially Sencer Ayata, “The New Middle Class and the Joys of Suburbia,” pp. 24–42. 2 Afife Batur, Emin Onat: Kurucu ve Mimar, TMMOB Mimarlar Odası, Ankara, 2009. 3 Bülent Tanju, Ugˇ ur Tanyeli, Sedad Hakkı Eldem 2: Retrospektif, Osmanlı Bankası, Ars¸iv ve Arastırma Merkezi, Istanbul, 2009. 4 Eldem had published as early as 1931 studies of interiors of contemporary Turkish houses and furniture in the principal architectural magazine Mimar in two articles, Mimar Sedat . Hakkı, “Evlerimizin Içi” (The Interiors of our Homes), Mimar, 7 July 1931, pp. 233–236 and Sedat Hakkı, “Mobilya” (Furniture), Mimar, 8 August 1931, pp. 273–274. In the 1940s after a number of propositions for a Milli Mimari (National Architecture) based on Turkish historical house types and urbanism he again turned to interior design with the article “17. ve 18. Asırda Türk Odası,” (The Turkish Room in the 17th and 18th Century), Güzel Sanatlar, 1944, pp. 1–2. Eldem’s attempts throughout the 20th century to create a new idiom for modern Turkish architecture culminated in his massive 3 volume Türk Evi/Turkish House, analyzing the classic Ottoman-era Turkish houses. Türk Evi/Turkish House, Türkiye Anıt, Çüevre, Turizm Degˇ erlerini Koruma Vakfı, 1984. 5 In 1923, interior design education had appeared as a section labelled Tezniyat (Decoration) of the Ottoman state’s first art school, the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi in Istanbul founded by the French-trained orientalist painter, Osman Hamdi. This . school was later turned into Istanbul State Fine Arts Academy which in 1929 set-up a Iç Mimari (Interior Architecture) division within the Tezniyat (Decoration) Department that also included ceramics, graphics and poster design. The creation of Industrial Design departments would have to wait until the late 1960s. See Alpay Er, “Does Design Policy Matter?—The Case of Turkey in a Conceptual Framework,” in Lee Soon-in, World Design Forum 2002: Design Policy and Global Network, Korean Institute of Design Promotion and ICSID, Seoul, 2002; and Alpay Er, Fatma Korkut and Özlem Er, “U.S. Involvement in the Development of Design in the Periphery: The Case History of Industrial Design Education in Turkey, 1950s–1970s,” Design Issues, Vol. 19. n2., 2003. 6 Of these applications of the art nouveau and art deco styles the most important was the work of Raimondo D’Aronco, Italian architect to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II from 1893–1909, Diana Barillari and Ezio Godoli, Istanbul 1900: Art-Nouveau Architecture and Interiors, New York, Rizzoli, 1996. 7 Selçuk Milar, Arkitekt, 03/1991, p. 46. 8 Atilla Yücel and Ugˇur Tanyeli, Turgut Cansever: Düs¸ünce Adamı ve Mimar, Osmanlı Bankası, Istanbul, 2007. 9 Nil Birol, Abdurrahman Hancı, “Yapılar/Projeler, 1945–2000,” Literatür, Istanbul, 2008. 10 Eyübogˇ lu was an important figure in 20th century art in Turkey. He entered the Academy in 1929 to study painting but left in 1931 to tour Europe, working briefly in the studio of cubist painter André Lhote in Paris 1932. He returned to Turkey in 1934 but always maintained ties to Europe. His first one-man show was in Bucharest in 1935. His neo-primitive style was a synthesis of early modernist styles merged with primitive forms similar to examples of ancient Anatolian cultures. He was best known for the highly labor-intensive mosaics and prints. Sabahattin Rahmi Eyübogˇ lu and Ömer Faruk S¸erifogˇ lu, Yas¸asın Renk 1911–1975, Istanbul, 2008.

RESPONSE Edward S. Cooke, Jr.

Gökhan Karakus¸ provides an important new case study that charts the establishment of a modern furniture culture in a region that, under Ottoman rule, relied on textiles and upholstery and thus had little real furniture history. In examining this development of “furniture as a designed product,” Karakus¸ pays attention to the overlap between the exploration of regional vernacular expression, attempts to forge national aesthetics, and a fascination with transnational modernism. His narrative charts the limits of ideologically motivated state-built architecture, which succeeds only in the public realm, and the rise of a new design culture drawn from local traditions, limited by economic policies, and adapted within the domestic realm. Karakus¸ identifies academically trained designers as the crucial link between a skilled artisanal class and the fashionable urban elite. However, Karakus¸’ exciting new research needs to be considered within a broader comparative sense of both design history and craft history. As throughout much of the Euro-American world in the interwar years, Austrian, German, and Swiss architects provided designs in the latest International Style for Turkish state commissions, while Istanbul’s elite—merchants, professionals, and non-Muslims (Greeks, Armenians, and Jews)—sought art deco and modern furnishings. Certainly the move in the 1920s and 1930s towards a modern aesthetic based on European examples and introduced by immigrants is a story familiar in America since Karen Davies’s pioneering At Home in Manhattan.1 But as Davies pointed out, modernism at this point had two sides: the rational new urban aesthetics of Donald Deskey and other industrial designers, and the more synthetic updated traditionalism of architects like Eliel Saarinen and Eugene Schoen. In Turkey this desire to blend contemporary abstraction and local convention can be seen in the efforts of Sedad Hakki Eldem, a seminal figure in Ankara who should be explored in greater depth in the future. Karakus¸’ essay suggests that during the 1930s Turkish modernisms seem to have geographic dimensions.

Response 135

The tension between Istanbul and Ankara, between hard modern and soft modern, and between imports and local work grew in the post-war period and endows this story with depth and urgency. Istanbul became the most cosmopolitan market for new design in the 1950s. Architects like Turgut Cansever and Abudurrhanman Hanci had traveled or worked in the centers of European architecture, and were embraced by a clientele that read Domus and purchased locally made versions of archetypal modern furniture designed by Mies van der Rohe, le Corbusier, and Gio Ponti from shops such as Moderno and Interno. But increasingly the dominant influence seemed to be American commercial modernism, epitomized in SOM’s Hilton Hotel of 1955, and copied by Hanci and others for another decade. In Istanbul steel, chrome, and wooden furniture filled totally integrated gesmtkunstwerk interiors that also boasted block printed textiles and ceramic wall mosaics designed by other Istanbul State Fine Arts Academy (ISFAA) graduates. As in America, a certain educational institution rose up at this time to dominate the discourse and practice of modern interior design in the post-war period. In America it was Cranbrook, while in Turkey it was the ISFAA, whose graduates would comprise the leaders of the 1950s and 1960s. Even the metal furniture of Kare Metal seems to echo the sculptural metal wire work of Harry Bertoia and Charles and Ray Eames; it was hatched within the school’s sculpture department and then adapted into the high end retail market. That Knoll, the American shop run by a Cranbrook graduate and stocked with the work of Bertoia and Eero Saarinen, expressed interest in the line in 1958 simply underscores the parallel.2 In Ankara, Karakus¸ uncovers a different sort of trajectory. In the capital, Selcuk Milar rejected the cold rationalized work of central European modernism, most commonly linked to Bauhaus design, and instead gravitated towards a soft modernism more dependent upon the work of Scandinavian designer craftsmen. Initially local craftsmen such as Ali Ihsan Sark made close copies of the work of Finn Juhl and others, but then developed their own versions sold at shops such as MPD. Such preference for a warmer, more personal sort of modern expression produced in democratic northern European countries also characterized much of the work of designer craftsmen in America during the same period. Milar’s interest in blending Scandinavian principles and Turkish workmanship resembles the goals of the American Ben Thompson, a founding member of The Architects Collaborative in 1947 who established Design Research in 1953. Just as DR imported Scandinavian furniture, ceramics, glass, and textiles and sought out local craftspeople making similar products, the Ankaran shops offered an alternative modernism to that promulgated in Istanbul.3 Although he claims the introduction of modern furniture was “a bottom-up social transformation,” Karakus¸ focuses primarily upon the institutional history of modern design in Turkey—the ISFAA’s educational system for designers, the experimental shops established by ISFAA graduates, and the dominant retailers who promoted the work of people whose professional genealogy led back to ISFAA. This provides one part of the history of Turkish modern furniture, one that substitutes Turkish names and forms into an outmoded design history paradigm. Karakus¸ seeks to distinguish the Turkish “new design practice” from that of contemporary

136 Edward S. Cooke, Jr.

European and American firms but bases this argument on the assumption that all non-Turkish work was the result of industrialized mass production and that only Turkish work was “modern furniture produced by hand, yet to the designs of individuals who had a very advanced understanding of abstract sculpture.” Using terms like “handmade modernity” or “handmade modernism” underscores the problematic nature of relying on handmade as a technical process rather than a cultural attitude.4 Recent close analysis on modern furniture production, from Breuer to Aalto to Eames, reveals that all modern furniture up until injection molded plastic furniture or metal contract furniture relied upon some elements of artisanal skill and non-industrial tools and could be categorized as jigged batch production rather than mass production.5 Such a revised perspective places the Turkish story firmly within a global story rather than singling it out as exceptional or unique. In seeking to offer an alternative story to top-down state design dicta, Karakus¸ privileges the designer. But the focus upon architects, interior designers, and artists does not fully comprise a bottom-up movement. To explore a more grass-roots movement during this time, Karakus¸ might focus upon the craftsmen who actually made the work. He seems to suggest that the traditional cabinetmakers of Istanbul, who were Greek and Armenian, might not have been totally integrated into the social or production system and lost work to Turkish craftsmen who had connections to the ISFAA. A closer examination of the craftsmen, their training, and their type of work might yield insights into a more complex furniture trade that expands the strands of modernism to include Byzantian, Asian, and Islamic features. The craft structure of Ankara, where the cabinetmakers seemed to maintain their status, offers an alternative Turkish model. What allowed the native craftsman there to maintain their status? Might one chart the emergence of a craft economy in Ankara? Certainly the Milar gallery that opened in 1957 sounds more like an alternative to or critique of high design. Exploring the woodworking culture of Ankara more fully might complicate the narrative Karakus¸ has laid out in his essay. I offer these critiques of Karakus¸’ underlying paradigm and his glossing over of the artisanal issues so that future work might investigate shop floor history and the makers’ worlds so that we may more fully contextualize, historicize, and theorize modern Turkish furniture. Karakus¸’ work is a valuable first step in this process.

Notes 1 2 3

Karen Davies, At Home in Manhattan: Modern Decorative Arts, 1925 to the Depression (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1982). On Cranbrook, see Robert Judson Clark et al., Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision, 1925–1950 (New York: Abrams, 1983). On the American response and the rise of designer craftsmen, see Edward Cooke, Jr. et al., The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940–1990 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2003), esp. pp. 18–37. On Design Research, see Industrial Design 4, no. 10 (October 1957), pp. 86–91.

Response 137

4 5

On the importance of historicizing “handmade,” see Edward Cooke, Jr., “Arts and Crafts Furniture: Process or Product?” in Janet Kardon, ed., The Ideal Home: 1900–1920 (New York: American Craft Museum, 1993), pp. 64–76. For example, see Clive Edwards, Twentieth-Century Furniture: Materials, Manufacture and Markets (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Derek Ostergard, ed., Bent Wood and Metal Furniture: 1850–1946 (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1987); Sharon Darling, Chicago Furniture: Art, Craft, & Industry, 1833–1983 (NewYork: Norton, 1984), esp. pp. 269–341; Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); and Don Wallance, Shaping America’s Products (New York: Reinhold, 1956). On the differences between batch and mass production, see Philip Scranton, “Diversity in Diversity: Flexible Production and American Industrialization, 1880–1930,” Business History Review 65, no. 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 27–90; and Scranton, “Manufacturing Diversity: Production Systems, Markets, and American Consumer Society, 1870–1930,” Technology & Culture (July 1994), pp. 476–505.

11 OLD EMPIRE AND NEW GLOBAL LUXURY Fashioning global design1 Peter McNeil

In 1989, fashion designers Pam Easton and Lydia Pearson began to create from an Australian regional city of Brisbane their range of garments that were deliberately nostalgic and feminine, with an air of knowing retrospection generated through an engagement with historical and ethnographic sources. At first they were not widely known and their market was completely local. Within ten years their female clothing line, manufactured in Brisbane but made of textiles garnered from Vietnam and India, as well as Italy and France, was retailing to a global clientele: in Browns, London; Neiman Marcus, USA; and Alta Moda, Kuwait. For contemporary designers, it is not uncommon to engage with ethnographic elements; this can sometimes amount to an unthoughtful activity. Within Easton Pearson’s design imagination, traditional designs are not simply copied but rather amended to create new allusions and aesthetics. In going to the ‘source’ of ethnic textiles and re-commissioning in India fabrics that had not been produced in some cases for decades, their practice raises questions about authenticity, intervention and revival. This short paper uses a specific case to address a series of issues affecting the relationship between design, textiles and fashion in a world that is often perceived as increasingly ‘globalised’. It investigates the micro-processes through which local actors (producers of traditional fabrics in India; entrepreneurs in provincial Australia; and consumers in cosmopolitan and provincial cities in the Western hemispheres) interact to create a series of ‘relational connections’. These connections affect all actors but are in turn also affected by a series of concepts, practices, images and representations – some of which are historically inspired – that allow meaning to be formed, shaped and negotiated. This paper raises issues of ‘otherness’, of constructed exoticism, and centreperiphery, but emphasises how certain topics such as class, conspicuous consumption and lifestyle, themes that are more generally associated with fashion, continue to be significant in understanding the formation and success of design at a global scale.

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Who owns fashion? Fashion today, like design, is conducted along transnational lines in which the West (Europe and North America) no longer has a monopoly on the idea of fashion, if in fact it ever did. The debate regarding the West’s ‘invention’ of fashion is lengthy, complex and unresolved.2 Nonetheless, it becomes increasingly problematic to suggest that fashion can only emanate from several cardinal points or centres, as today its very means of imagination and production are completely global. As Simona Segre Reinach argues in her analysis of Italian fashion made and marketed in and for China: having or not having a ‘national fashion’ on which to rely is fundamental for the success of brands operating in the contemporary market, although production may be transnational or perhaps due to the very fact that production is transnational. Segre Reinach notes the denting of the conviction of certain ‘Euramerican’ centres as having ‘sole rights’ to fashion: ‘the possibility of creating fashion, i.e. of being recognised as “author countries” is however part of a process in which hierarchies and roles are being constantly renegotiated according to the contexts and players concerned’.3 As Christopher Breward comments in this book, the nature of the fashion city has changed. The role of particularised consumer taste has become significantly more important within late twentieth-century fashion as media and marketing contexts move away from the notion of fashion as a uniform or even a dictatorial force. Secondly, new important centres of global fashion have appeared next to the more traditional European and North American ones. They interact reciprocally to form identities that are often globally constructed. Some Asian cultures, such as those expressed in Singapore, Hong Kong and parts of China, have undergone a ‘reorientalism’, in which they buy back the imagery created in the vision of the European colonisers. As scholar Hazel Clark wrote of Hong Kong in her most prescient essay of 1990: Increasingly at the end of the twentieth century major cities tended to promulgate their own fashion looks which are interpretations rather than imitations of what is current globally . . . What becomes fashionable in a city relies largely on the way that contemporary urbanites choose to identify themselves through fashion.4 In order for nations to assert a healthy state of fashion in the current system, they must first argue for distinctive national patterns of design innovation as well as conformity to a general international fashion ‘template’. The case of Easton Pearson is an example of the disposition of a business and fashion-design project spanning several continents that originated from a rejection of the pervasive – one might even say ‘proto-global’ – fashion trends of the late 1980s based on minimalism, to ‘take

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refuge’ instead in a more local but also romanticised and nostalgic vision of Australian fashion that is self-consciously cosmopolitan.5

Virtuosity in variation ‘Not everyone wants to dress in futuristic clothing.’ For some people, ‘the future seems scary and alien’ Easton Pearson explained.6 Such strategies were also apparent at the time in contexts as different as the reasonably-priced revivalist designs of the very British Laura Ashley and in the elite neo-rococo couture of Frenchman Christian Lacroix. Easton Pearson’s agency as designers became stronger when they refused mass-produced textiles and worked instead to commission and design their own fabrics in India, South-East Asia and Europe. Easton Pearson have been responsible for introducing European, North American and Australian women to a range of textile possibilities they were unlikely to encounter unless they travelled abroad and, even then, only if they ventured from the main tourist trails. The issue of homogeneity, brought about by globalisation here becomes, in a local context, a matter of the variety, broadening the spectrum available more generally. Unlike some designers – such as the more recent Kenzo and Etro, who take the feel and texture of Asian textiles and then apply them to a European form – Easton Pearson embrace the effects of indigenous tradition and textiles. ‘The possibilities offered by specific textile techniques clearly influence us in terms of what might be adapted into clothing’, notes Easton.7 Company records reinforce the proud focus on the artisan: ‘all handwoven’, for instance, is noted of the raw silks for September 1991. Some of the textiles they commissioned in India had not been produced for several decades. This remanufacturing process has been made possible through a sustained engagement with both merchant-brokers and also craftspeople in India. On several occasions, the designers noticed old order books in business premises and asked to see the samples therein. From early interactions of the 1980s which relied on faxes, hand-coloured photocopies and telephone calls, ironically now the designers eschew digital communication, and insist upon personal interactions face to face, travelling to India and Vietnam on a regular basis in order to develop their textile ranges. In pursuing this ‘ethnic’ turn, Easton Pearson is aligned with a group of contemporary designers, including Dries Van Noten, Rifat Ozbek, Kenzo, Ugur Ile Alijan, Anna Sui and, more recently, Peter Som. These designers continue the interest in the exotic evident in clothing influenced by Japonisme in the second half of the nineteenth century, and revisited in different forms throughout the early twentieth century by designers including Mario Fortuny, Maria Monaci Gallenga, Maurice Babani and Jeanne Lanvin. Fashion designers seem often to be allured by orientalism. However, orientalism in fashion is difficult to assess in cultural terms: as scholar Nancy Troy argues in relation to the work of Paul Poiret in the early twentieth century, it can be a symbol of conventional luxury or transgressive liberation at the same time.8 The ‘ethnic turn’ might be a reference not to the East but to Scottish tartans, however in the consumer mind over the course of the

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twentieth century it has been constantly drawn back to Central and South East Asia, as well as South America. Some of this attention was directed by intertwined cultural and political imperatives, such as fashion designer Bonnie Cashin’s 1956 trip to India, paid for by the Ford Foundation.

Portable decoration Easton Pearson’s engagement with textiles and their design raises two issues with global implications: labour and agency. Too often debate over the production of textiles and apparel is equated primarily with the exploitation of labour. When one considers ‘design’ and the wider meaning of craftsmanship, however, the cultural politics of labour and in particular its gendered nature become central. The quilts made by the women of the Great Raan of Kutch are well known to textile experts, and Easton Pearson were first to import the work of the Shrujan women’s cooperative into Australia.9 The Raan of Kutch in Gujarat, western India, is one of the poorest parts of the world. Women were once day labourers (majoor) but have now found, through their ability to sew collectively, a new source of income and agency. As a woman says of the project: ‘A few years ago I would have introduced myself as a majoor. Now I can proudly call myself an artisan. We design patterns, set deadlines, embroider and market ourselves. The work you buy is not just embroidery, it’s an expression of our pride.’10 As scholar Judy Frater notes, in such a resource-limited environment objects are scarce, but this does not mean that textiles are not embellished. Quite the contrary. The outlining stitches of Rabari textiles become affiliation markers and bonds, as well as a form of portable wealth. Each motif is named and refers to a natural form and also visualises women’s lives, becoming ‘virtuosity in variation’.11 The complex meanings generated by traditional craft practices and techniques thus become a design ‘resource’ of unparalleled flexibility in which the distinctiveness of each handworked stitch and irregular dyed colour-way are transferred to more Western notions of ‘individuality’ and ‘variety’ in clothing and tastes. The portable decorations of certain Indian nomadic peoples – traditionally the embroideries that introduced a bride into her groom’s family – now find their way into the wardrobes of urban and affluent women. The exportation of garments that are manufactured in Brisbane, Australia, from textiles woven and embellished in centres as different as India and Italy, raises some interesting questions regarding the circulation and consumption of goods that are not necessarily rare, but rather carry meanings of distinction and place. Thus in describing the garments created by Easton Pearson that are directed at wealthy consumers in the boutiques of London, Sydney and Dubai, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the ground of which they are composed has specific meanings in the centres where they are manufactured. Easton Pearson have noted that they always face a challenge in persuading the desert women in Kutch to accept their packages of sewing – compared to the indigenous colour ways, the women dislike the pale colours and anaemic palette designed by Easton Pearson. Thus, in viewing a textile as ‘ethnic’ or ‘authentic’, we can be blind to its

142 Peter McNeil

very reception at the place of its making, amongst the poor labourer, and it may well take on another cast when placed in an upper-middle-class boutique. In placing scissors and needles in the packages to tempt the women to prioritise the bundles of Easton Pearson sewing over their other commissions, a great deal is said about the dilemma of the West in interacting with the poorest in the developing world.

New luxury Easton Pearson’s success is now international. The company has developed a range of luxurious lines for export to North America and Dubai, and approximately 65 per cent of Easton Pearson garments are exported.12 Their work quickly found favour with style gurus such as Joan Burstein of Brown’s, London, and Stacey Kaye of Henri Bendel’s, New York. Luxury department stores including Neiman Marcus, Dallas and Los Angeles, and Lane Crawford, Hong Kong, have featured stories and run events around Easton Pearson ranges. Sheik Majed Al-Sabah, nephew of the Emir of Kuwait, hosts exclusive ‘trunk’ parties for his wealthy clients. The Sheik runs the well-known ‘Villa Moda’ boutique in Kuwait, his so-called ‘luxury bazaar’ which first opened in 1992 in Dasman, later shifting to a 20 million US$ building on the edge of Kuwait City in 2001. The Sheik is an influential figure in shaping the consumption of Western luxury in the Middle East, not least because he was the financial backer of the up-market Islamic fashion magazine, Alef, aimed at Gulf readers as well as women of the diaspora.13 The Sheik noted in interview that ‘Australian designers perform very well for us. The fabric weights. The exchange rates, the climate compatibility.’14 Clearly the ‘ethnic’ allusions also resonate with the Gulf clients. Motifs appearing in Easton Pearson designs have deep meanings in Asian cultures, as well as strong formal qualities that make them ideally suited to being incorporated into fashion design (see Figures 11.1 and 11.2). Patterns borrowed from the Ottoman Empire of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the types of silks extensively traded with Europe, include the Ottoman triple-spot motif which originally concerned power and strength and might refer to the spots on the prestigious coats of leopards and tigers. Shisha, or mirror work from India, once used mica or beetle wings rather than glass, and may indicate the evil eye. Mashru (meaning ‘permitted’) is a fabric with a silk warp and a cotton weft; Islamic tradition says that, in order to protect against vanity, men should not wear silk against the skin. Raffia is used in cultures originating in Africa; and tie-dye is used in Japan, Indonesia, China, South-East Asia, Central America and Africa. Sufi embroidery, made by the Sodha women of India, relies on skills of detailed memory. Kantha is a quilt made from old white saris in Bangladesh and eastern India; fabric is layered and then quilted using a running stitch to produce a padded effect. They also make women’s jackets that refer to the keriya, a jacket traditionally worn by Gujarati men with a hand-embroidered yoke.15 Within Easton Pearson’s design imagination, traditional designs are not simply copied but rather amended to create new allusions and aesthetics. Easton Pearson clothes are not primarily about cutting. When they use an indigenous textile, the

Old empire and new global luxury 143

Easton Pearson, Designers. Picos bolero, spring/ summer 2004, cotton net, hand embroidered with raffia, silk lining. Ciel dress, spring/ summer 2004, cotton net, hand embroidered with raffia and decorated with stone chips, silk lining. Berri skirt, spring/summer 2004, grosgrain viscose belt FIGURE 11.1

Source: Photograph courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery

144 Peter McNeil

FIGURE 11.2 Easton Pearson, Designers. Detail. Berri skirt, spring/summer 2004, cotton net, hand embroidered with raffia and decorated with stone chips, wired tiers and silk lining

Source: Photograph courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery

Old empire and new global luxury 145

garment also tends to be more abstracted. Many of the garments are based on traditional clothes and many were originally made for men, such as the skirted garments worn by Mughals in India and the little jackets worn by working men in Rajasthan and Gujarat. More recently they have generated collections from ideas around artists and moments, such as the New York School of the 1940s to the 1970s – shortened artists’ smocks in deep colours with decoration along the necklines and cuffs. Continuing from the modernist tradition in which both the cut and the materiality of non-Western garments provided European and American designers with the opportunity to create new visions of dressing the female body, ‘traditional’ garments are given new contexts and meanings. Unlike many designers who import mass lengths of sequinned fabrics from India and then cut them to shape, Easton Pearson delivered the pieces and had them reworked in Mumbai or Kutch, then reimporting them to Australia for making-up, and then onwards to export markets. Such journeys were taken to ensure a particular designerly vision in which the precise (Western) vision of the textile was realised, often by trial and error, but the journey is also redolent of the new global flow of garments and other commodities.

New global or old empire luxury? Easton Pearson’s ability to mix ethnic textiles with European lines also generates a self-conscious narrative about the garments. They have a playful desire to pursue combinations that would have seemed absurd, even offensive, in a colonial society. The spring/summer 2002 collection, for instance, mixed Victorian blouses with batik skirts. Clothes of empire become warped and distorted, as if a local dowager went slightly mad and had her servants remake all her clothes in indigenous textiles, or if a debutante were stranded in a colony and embraced the textile tradition of her retainers (see Figure 11.3). Even the names of the garments reinforce this: Sabrina, Edwina, Albertina, Wallace, Edith and Bella. ‘An aura of dilapidated suffragette’, announced an undated press release. Given the high prices involved, the indigenous woman would be likely denied access through either pricing or prohibitions to access the type of garments suggested by the Easton Pearson designs. Yet today, in a global market, the commodity they produce may now be targetted for women of multiple nationalities, ethnicities and indeed sites, and this spatial and ethnic complexity loops back and becomes a part of a marketing strategy, a public relations campaign, and a narrative set up through titles of dresses, themes of parades and fashion magazine styling. Although examples from the cultures of literature, art, music and performance are more commonly interrogated to gain understandings of colonial, post-colonial and global experiences, I would suggest that in this case fashion design provides a possible case. As Angela Woollacott notes in her monograph To Try her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity, for Australians ‘after 1901, being part of an empire meant being both a citizen of a ruling power of a small empire and a subject of a global empire’.16 Empire, as Woollacott notes of Simon Gikandi’s position, means a

146 Peter McNeil FIGURE 11.3 Easton Pearson, Designers. Coro shirt, spring/summer 2004, stripe-weave shirting cotton, hand cut and stitched. Esme top, spring/summer 2004, crystal dobbie cotton, hand decorated. Larkin skirt, spring/summer 2004, screenprinted cotton, hand decorated with plastic sequins. Grosgrain and silk belt, spring/summer 2004, hand made

Source: Photograph courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery

Old empire and new global luxury 147

‘messing’ of identity of both coloniser and colonised.17 So the Easton Pearson design using a vintage 1950s or 1960s textile produced for the tourist trade takes on ironic meanings. The reference to an imperial or colonial past to create a ‘new global present’ can be seen not just in the choice of fabrics and their material mixing, but also in cultural references to personalities and historic periods known for their glamorous and exotic internationalism. Easton Pearson have on several occasions noted their interest in particular women who are bridges between ethnicity, feminism and folklore, such as Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.18 They also exhibit an interest in style icons and freethinkers of the 1930s to 1950s such as socialite Slim Keith (2001 collection), artist Georgia O’Keeffe, photographer Tina Modotti, writer Jane Bowles, and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, whom they imagine wearing their vintage Fiji silk scarf print: ‘We were imagining Peggy Guggenheim leaving the canal in Venice for a cruise to the South Pacific. She was pretty wacky.’19 Easton Pearson’s interest in interwar vintage fashions points to the presence of colonial networks and experiences contained within certain twentieth-century fashion itself. These years generated a category of clothing whose messages are still under-researched – what we might call ‘fashions of empire’ – in which high-end European fashion was deliberately modulated for a colonial setting. An example is Anne Messel, Countess of Rosse, and her 1935 honeymoon trousseau for a trip to Asia, which included a fascinating piece of chinoiserie based on a Balinese palette, a wrap dress by the iconic designer Charles James. The mother of former New York fashion editor Polly Mellen would have her Chanel pyjamas copied in the West Indies in brightly coloured cotton cloths by furnishing houses such as Scalamandré. Within the ‘experience economy’, the ‘cultural turn’ and the era of ‘new economy’ that dominates contemporary hotel tourism and up-market shopping, the conjunction of eccentricity, luxury and exclusivity confers prestige and market advantage.20 In referring back to outmoded notions of aristocracy co-mingled with retrospection and an image of the interwar avant-garde, fashion consumers can imagine themselves to be equally distinctive, resistant in fact to the very homogeneous forces that make their airline connections, currency transfer and duty-free shopping possible. This might be particularly important for a generation of middleclass post-feminist women, who wish to engage with fashion in a thoughtful manner that does not suggest that they simply follow trends and marketing devices like a fashion ‘victim’, and whose wearing of hand-worked textiles suggests that their fashion purchase is beyond the quotidian (see Figure 11.4).

Conclusion There is something meticulous and orderly about Easton Pearson. Even their sample books are immaculate and thoughtful; nothing is left to chance. There is none of the tearing hand and hasty scribbles of a French male couturier of the 1950s. All is measured, careful and organised. Samples, such as silk organza, are often tied down in knots so as to show the inherent properties of the textile. This sense of respect,

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FIGURE 11.4 Easton Pearson, Designers. Detail. Larkin skirt, spring/summer 2004, screenprinted cotton, hand decorated with plastic sequins. Grosgrain and silk belt, spring/summer 2004, hand made

Source: Photograph courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery

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of materiality, of making and of authoring textiles with a series of actors from entrepreneurs in Mumbai to rural workers in Kutch, is presented here as a possible new way to consider the process of fashion design. Although the global fashion industry demands a series of narratives, stories, styling opportunities and allusions, these images are no longer so very ‘white’, Anglo-Saxon, centrist, or homogeneous. Perhaps it makes a great deal of sense that Easton Pearson generated this design practice from a city and a region that had been noted for awkward and hostile race relations with indigenous peoples and a frontier mentality based on an economy of primary production and mining. We might not require that nasty linguistic construction the ‘glocal’ in order to understand that centre-periphery and metropolitanprovincial binaries have never been neat nor simple one-directional flows.

Notes 1 This essay is based on research commissioned to accompany the Gallery of Modern Art (Queensland) exhibition (Miranda Wallace, Peter McNeil and Jane de Teliga, Easton Pearson, Queensland Art Gallery, 2009). 2 On this point see Peter McNeil, ‘Introduction’, in Peter McNeil (ed.), Critical and Primary Sources in Fashion. Volume 1. Late Medieval to Renaissance, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2009, pp. xix–xlii. 3 Simona Segre Reinach, ‘Italian and Chinese agendas in the global fashion industry’, in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, Routledge, 2010, pp. 533–42. 4 Hazel Clark, ‘Fashion, identity and the city: Hong Kong’, Form/Work: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Design and the Built Environment, University of Technology, Sydney, no. 4, March 2000, p. 90. 5 The British journalist and writer Colin McDowell has criticised Australian labels for ‘the ethereal and deeply feminine ethos that can loosely be described as a Japanese influence’, ‘Editorial: Style’, Sunday Times, London, May 2000, p. 13. 6 ‘On the world stage’, Vogue Australia, September 1999, p. 36. 7 Easton Pearson Transforming Traditions, Exhibition Catalogue, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Qatar, 2005, Easton Pearson Archive (henceforth EPA). 8 Nancy Troy, ‘Paul Poiret’s minaret style: Originality, reproduction and art in fashion’, Fashion Theory, 6, 2 (2002), pp. 117–43. 9 Easton Pearson personal notes. EPA, Box 11/4. 10 Statement from KMVS (Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan) product brochure, Bhuj, Gujarat, c. 1990, author’s collection. 11 Judy Frater, A Thousand Dialects in Stitches, Bhuj-Kutch, India: Kala Raksha Folk Art Museum, 2000, p. 11. 12 Courier Mail, 16 May 1998. EPA, Box 10 Nos 1–6: Loose Editorial Folders. 13 I thank Professor Reina Lewis for assisting me with this information. 14 Advertorial, Vogue Australia, July 2004, n.p. 15 Precious Lovell, Easton Pearson Transforming Traditions, Qatar, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, 2005. 16 Angela Woollacott, To Try her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 149. 17 Woollacott, To Try her Fortune, p. 179. 18 Rhana Devenport, ‘Artisans and artist colonies: The fabrics and frocks of Easton Pearson’, Object, 43 (2003), p. 37. 19 [Anon], ‘Be frayed, be very frayed’, Age, 21 November 2003, p. 10. 20 See Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke (eds), Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life, London, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2002.

RESPONSE Shehnaz Suterwalla

Peter McNeil offers a vivid and detailed insight into the complexities of global fashion design. Through his case study analysis of Easton Pearson, an Australian fashion house set up in 1989 that recreates and revises ethnic textiles and designs, he illustrates the opportunity for originality and ‘new allusions’ engendered by the innovative ‘relational connections’ between local producers and global consumers. Meanwhile the article highlights concomitant issues of ‘otherness’ and constructed exoticism that lie beneath the surface of such global design practice. McNeil’s account of Easton Pearson’s methods, which refuse mass-produced textiles and work instead to commission and design their own fabrics in India, South-East Asia and Europe, highlights the double advantage of this fashion house to the Western consumer: the benefit of original design, and an emphasis on the embodied effects of indigenous tradition and textiles. We also learn how Easton Pearson privilege face-to-face interactions with local producers as a means of reinforcing authenticity within their pursuit of ethnic artisanship and revivalism. So far so good. However, as McNeil himself points out, this case study raises disquieting debates about labour and agency, in particular how changes in temporal and spatial frames invert the meaning and significance of ethnic design, with the result that Easton Pearson’s cultural raiding of ethnic traditionalism can be seen as a historical reconstruction of artisanal practice that suits the global story of the design house, but distorts the agency and meaning of the objects that they appropriate. As McNeil writes, ‘Thus in viewing a textile as “ethnic” or “authentic”, we can be blind to its very reception at the place of its making, amongst the poor labourer, and it may well take on another cast when placed in an upper-middle class boutique.’ In the world of fashion the incorporation of the exotic, through objects and styles, presents ‘an effective way of creating a frisson (a thrill or quiver)’1 especially when the differences between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ are accentuated stereo-

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typically. However, exaggerated differences between the East and West only serve to solidify historical and essentialized markers of difference based on the binary of familiar and strange.2 Exotic dress, such as the sari or the veil, for example, have often been used in orientalist discourse to mark the production of ‘third world difference’ by the racialized gaze.3 This process has most often involved static readings of ethnic textiles and design as ‘authentic’ symbols of tradition. Their appropriation into the social space of global consumption has served to highlight the ‘whiteness’ in capitalist marketing of exotica at both local and global level. In the case of Easton Pearson, McNeil’s description emphasizes how the design house attempts to unfix ethnic design so that ‘traditional’ garments are given new contexts and meaning. However this unfixing is undertaken still to ensure that a particular designerly Western vision of the textile is realized, in line with Easton Pearson’s self-conscious narrative about its garments. As outlined in McNeil’s chapter, as much as the design house champions the traditional craft practices of ethnic design, in actual fact it is using it merely as a resource to fuel the consumption of social things associated with the ‘other’. Arjun Appadurai has shown in his analysis of the social life of things that this sort of process is not that different from how art and archaeology collections are put together in the West, where ‘extremely complex blends of plunder, sale, and inheritance combined with the Western taste for things of the past and of the other’.4 The result is that objects are turned into eroticized commodities set up to be mythologized, idealized and rendered into tropes. The creation of fantasy around the ‘other’ is further exaggerated as Easton Pearson’s processes of revivalism transform textiles from traditional to cool hybrid, decontextualizing them from place of production and overlaying them with new meanings. By placing these objects in the Western fashion system,5 the company facilitates the consumption of difference or ‘other’, giving rise to the opportunity to ‘recode and neutralize long-standing tropes while simultaneously intensifying them’.6 On a more positive note, however, the Easton Pearson case study offers an example of ‘cosmopolitan localism’,7 which refers to the point of intersection between local and global dimensions that exist through specialized networks of activity. Through the development of complex networking systems within the local and the global in South-East Asia and Europe, Easton Pearson are able to draw from the richness of different actions – connected to specialized labour – occurring in the different temporal frames that vary through regions and cultures, based not only in time zones but also on individual subjectivities. This is thanks to their ability to identify particular and unique personal skills such as the craft practice of the women of the Great Raan of Kutch in India. Easton Pearson’s challenge lies in navigating the murky ground of transnational revivalism to avoid the pitfall within Western design methods where local places and territories are turned into commodities, to be consumed as the authentic ‘other’, even though paradoxically, and at the same time, they can be seen to enable agency among subaltern women.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

J. Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion, London and New York, Routledge, 1993, p. 17. I refer in particular to the highly influential text, E. W. Said, Orientalism, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. M. Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991. A. Appadurai, ‘Introduction’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 26–7. I allude here to R. Barthes, The Fashion System, London, Cape, 1985, because of its exploration of how within the world of fashion words become loaded with idealistic bourgeois emphasis. D. Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference, Boulder and Oxford, Westview, 1996, p. 136. See Ezio Manzini’s paper ‘A cosmopolitan localism: prospects for a sustainable local development and the possible role of design’ (2005): .

12 ANALYZING SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES The design of Happy Network in China Basile Zimmermann

In 2009, China was the country in the world with the greatest number of Internet users, and the overall amount of web pages in Chinese was estimated at over sixteen billion. As in the West, the development of the Internet—very strongly supported by the government of the People’s Republic of China—had changed millions of people’s lives and work habits. Web-based platforms for online communities, also called Social Networking Sites (SNS), were part of this revolution. In April 2008, a new SNS was launched in China: (Happy Network). Its particular rhetoric, compared to existing social networking websites at the time, was that it focused on the idea of ‘having fun’.2 In June 2009 the number of registered users of the site exceeded 30 million, and was growing at a fast pace. The company was eleventh in a list of top Chinese websites, and analysts called it China’s top Internet phenomenon of 2008/2009.3 Websites and web pages are paradigmatic objects for anyone interested in the question of global design as they are at the same time circulating inside and part of the structure of an international network: the Internet. Based on research beginning in July 2008 in Beijing, this paper presents ongoing research about Happy Network’s web interface design process. It shows how the network interpreted design concepts already used by other social networking websites, improved them by providing different ways of interaction between users, and developed its own means of advertising. Methodologically, it also suggests how web design can be analyzed using insights taken from two different theoretical frameworks in social sciences: the grounded theory and the actor-network theory.

Ongoing research about ongoing design A key challenge of studying web-based design of all kinds, and SNS in particular, is conducting ongoing research about ongoing design. Websites and web pages, in

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contrast to other design phenomena, experience rapid changes. To observe them and archive information about their design calls on the researcher’s ability to deal with a moving (sometimes even disappearing) target. Rather than going through general statements about the issues at stake, I relate how I conducted – and still conduct – this research, and I explain how decisions about the work process were taken. By doing so, I hope to provide readers with a ‘research case study’ that will contribute to how this type of design research can or cannot be conducted. In short, two methodological points form the basis of this research. First: the results take the shape of a description written using the first person singular, rather than the more ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ voice in which the research is present but the narrator is absent. A sentence like ‘During the summer of July 2008, while staying at a Chinese musician friend’s place in Beijing, I noticed he and many of his friends were spending a lot of time on a website I had never heard about before’ differs in more than tone from ‘In July 2008, a new social networking website was spreading among Mainland Chinese net surfers.’ The second sentence hides both the subject and the subjectivity behind the research. The first, while sounding more personal and not very ‘scientific’, is actually more precise in the sense that it gives more detail about the process that produced the results.4 Reliable information means traceable information. A second methodological point is that making comparisons and asking questions are the main tools used to bring relevant elements into the description. 5

Happy Network During the summer of July 2008, while staying at a Chinese musician friend’s place in Beijing, I noticed he and many of his friends were spending a lot of time on a website I had never heard about before. When he opened his user page, usually several times a day, he used to make this joke: ‘ ’ (‘Let’s be happy for a while’). The name of the website was , Happy Network, a new social networking site. My friend’s joke referred to the name of the site. Intrigued, I registered and started to edit my own user page on July 23. At that time, I already had experience of doing research on the Internet in China. One thing in particular I had learnt while working on Chinese blogs with my students was the need to take screenshots of the web pages. The content changed very frequently, sometimes within minutes, and most of the time it was difficult to archive the pages using the print or save functions of the browsers. Some content was available only through streaming from far-away servers. Quite often, it varied according to the information the machines got about the person visiting the page. For example, in the case of a connection using a browser in French, the page would display advertisement banners in French. That meant a French-speaking student who configured her computer in French did not see the same page as, say, a Spanish-speaking student – even if both were visiting the same address on the Web at the same time. Also, since blogs are frequently edited, some pages gave me the feeling that they were ‘alive’, as their contents were changing constantly. As with human beings, the only way to archive the movements of web pages is to take pictures or record movies.

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Therefore, from the very start of the research process on Happy Network, I decided to take screenshots. I also tried – on the basis of the two research tricks mentioned above – to make systematic comparisons with the well-known Western SNS Facebook and to ask myself the following question: ‘How is advertisement provided on Happy Network?’ Of course, I could have made comparisons with another SNS, and chosen another research question. At that time, I’d already had an account on Facebook since 2007. It was heavily used among my friends and colleagues in Switzerland, which made comparative analysis convenient. Also, I had announced a new seminar on advertising in China at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. A friend working in the advertising industry had told me about SNS as ‘advertisers’ paradises’ because users could be selected according to their age, gender, taste, habits, etc, and targeted with appropriate advertisements. So I hoped Happy Network would provide me with some useful observations.

The user page Figure 12.1 displays sections of three screenshots I took on my laptop in Beijing at the end of July 2008. At that time, two basic features of Happy Network were radically different from Facebook. First, where the latter used one page for my user information (screenshot A) and another for the news feed about my friends (screenshot B), Happy Network mixed the two on a single page (screenshot C): my information on top, the news feed about my friends’ activities at the bottom. Second, while Facebook told me very explicitly that it would never tell my friends about whose profile or photos I viewed, Happy Network did exactly the opposite. Recent On the right-hand side of my user page, a dedicated section called visitors (screenshot C, upper right) told me who viewed my profile and at what time. If I found the avatar of an unknown visitor intriguing, I could click on it in order to visit his or her user page – which would then display my avatar and time of visit in their own Recent visitors section. This feature, sometimes called Footprints, although not used on Facebook, is actually standard on many social networking sites, especially in Asia.6 Another obvious difference between the two sites can be found in their name. Happy Network clearly indicates the notion of having fun, without any relation to a particular social class (anyone could register on the site). Facebook’s name is related to the published directories of American universities for new students, and evokes the presentation of individuals. Its design also looked more serious than Happy Network’s, which displayed a cartoon-like yellow star as a logo (the respective logos can be seen on the upper left of screenshots B and C).

Games Happy Network provided several games, which, contrary to most of Facebook’s applications, were mostly designed by the owners of the site themselves.7 Some were heavily used by my Chinese acquaintances and the many other Chinese people I

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FIGURE 12.1

Comparison of screenshots of Facebook and Happy Network, July 2008

quickly got to know while trawling through the ‘recent visitors’ pages.8 A game called Parking Wars was particularly successful.9 Almost everyone I knew was playing it, and although it was quite simple, I noted that some friends were still playing on a daily basis eleven months later. The basic rules of Parking Wars were that users had to place their cars on friends’ streets, and could earn virtual money if they remained there. The way to cash in the money was by moving the car to another space, but friends could take away money by giving tickets to your cars (if parked on their streets). The goal was to make as much virtual money as possible, so as to buy new virtual cars. Interestingly, Parking Wars seemed to be a copy of a game of the same name that had been running previously on Facebook. It had been developed as a teaser for a television reality show,10 and was also very successful on the Facebook network (a friend in Switzerland told me he kept moving his virtual cars for months). However, Happy Network developed its own way of using the game as an advertising platform. On March 27, 2009, I noticed for the first time that some of the walls behind the parking places had started to display advertisements (see Figure 12.2). A few weeks later I also noted that some car manufacturers had a link to a commercial for a real vehicle on their website, right next to the corresponding virtual car.11 Another fascinating application on Happy Network was the Polls game, which was also clearly among the most popular applications. It allowed users to create polls and answer other people’s polls. Topics varied from ‘What would you do first if you could change one thing in China?’, with an array of politically related answers, to more personal questions like ‘What kind of computer do you use?’ and ‘How old were you when you had sex for the first time?’ There were also topics only relevant within circles of friends, such as ‘Why did Xiao Wang go home so early at

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Screenshots of Parking Wars on Facebook and Happy Network, July 2008–July 2009. The grey patches have been added to hide users’ names and avatars

FIGURE 12.2

yesterday’s party?’ Some polls were directly related to Happy Network and allowed me to get some kind of feedback straight from the users. For example, a poll started on June 25, 2009, on the topic of ‘To what extent did you play on “Happy Network”?’ The poll had received 103,180 votes by July 8; twice as many people selected ‘Feeling too lazy to move cars on Parking Wars’ as ‘Feeling too lazy to start new polls’.12 Advertisement banners appeared at the end of poll pages at about the same time as the wallpaper in Parking Wars. Unlike Facebook, which increased the number of banners on my user page from one in July 2008 to three in August 2008 when it switched to its new version, advertisements on Happy Network were never displayed directly on my user page, but only inside the games and applications I was using. Interestingly, while Facebook’s advertisements clearly related to my profile information – e.g. my gender, the languages I speak, my age and location (typically I got advertisements for men’s underwear, or in one case, an iPhone advertisement in French saying that 36 years old was the right age to get one) – Happy Network’s advertisements focused on which kind of activity I was performing. For example, when I clicked on a button named ‘part-time job’ to get some virtual money in order to buy seeds for my garden (in another game), the advertisement banner at the bottom of the page displayed an advertisement for a job placement company.

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Evolution in time Today, my Happy Network user page looks very much like the one I had twelve months ago, but with a few additions. Tabs are now available in the news feed section and allow me to filter what kind of information I want to see about my friends: pictures, diaries, notes, forwards, status, or conversations. Several new applications are available, and I have added a couple of them. One in particular was strongly suggested by the website in April 2009: the transfer tool. It allows me to forward almost anything coming from a friend. For example, if someone posts a picture or a story I like, in two clicks I can forward it to all of my contacts.13

What to think about all this? Having reached the end of this short report, readers may be looking for explanations. In many academic texts, a description is traditionally followed by an explanation. As the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour put it, this question lies in “. . . the difference between the empirical and the theoretical, between ‘how’ and ‘why’, between stamp-collecting – a contemptible occupation – and the search for causality – the only activity worthy of attention. Yet nothing proves that this kind of distinction is necessary.’14 In a more recent publication, Latour tells us more about descriptions, and – maybe the most interesting and difficult point – what makes a good description. The simple fact of recording anything on paper is already an immense transformation that requires as much skill and just as much artifice as painting a landscape or setting up some elaborate biochemical reaction. No scholar should find humiliating the task of sticking to description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement . . . If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description . . . A good text should trigger in a good reader this reaction: ‘Please, more details, I want more details.’15 While I hope the story I have been relating here does not remain too much in need of an explanation, it definitely warrants more detail. The few elements described in this essay are only a very tiny part of a huge and highly complex object. Happy Network has hundreds of features which have not been discussed in this paper. Even a short list would range widely: the interface for its use on mobile phones, the various applications users can add,16 its commercial and legal battles with the other SNS on the Chinese market,17 interaction with the government on censorship issues,18 users selling their virtual goods against real money,19 debates in the local media about the impact of SNS on society,20 etc. Unlike for archeologists who often expend great effort in order to discover only a little information, ongoing research about the current design of websites raises the question of how to choose what information to discuss among the billions of web pages available.

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After one year of research on Happy Network, I can say for certain that the huge success of this website and its impact on Chinese society makes it an object of interest. It is worth noting that at the beginning I had no idea whether the site would even survive long enough for me to conduct my study of it. Design research, applied to software objects which quickly become obsolete and disappear forever, requires more researchers taking random screenshots of what is happening on their screens. If most of these pictures will never be used in publications, the few that will be kept for analysis and comparisons will be useful in that they provide precious evidence of what was going on between machines and people at a certain period of time in history.21

Global design Common features between Happy Network and Facebook as well as many other online communities’ sites illustrate the fact that we are currently witnessing extremely rapid exchanges of flows of ideas on a global scale. It is important to keep in mind that these movements are simultaneous, and that they are not going in one direction but in many. For example, when Michael Jackson passed away in June 2009, Chinese users on Happy Network reacted a few hours before European Facebook users, because the time difference meant that they got the information at a time when people in Europe were still asleep. At the moment, on the English-speaking web, Happy Network is often described as a ‘fake’ Facebook. It is true that Facebook was launched in 2004 – more than four years before Happy Network – and probably inspired the latter’s creators. But Facebook also came along after other online community sites, which have a long history that goes back to the very first days of the Internet. In China, one of Campus (which the first SNS websites, UUZone,22 was launched in 2003, and emulates Facebook by focusing on universities and students) has existed since 2005. Japan’s most successful SNS, Mixi, started about the same time as Facebook. So did Facebook inspire the design of Happy Network? Or maybe it was UUZone, Campus, or Mixi? Most probably, considering the amount of exchange of information between China and the rest of the world, not one but all these existing social networking sites and many other technical objects inspired the designers of Happy Network. The question of whether or not to try to interview Happy Network’s designers was one of the main points of debate when I presented this research at the Royal College of Art in London, in May 2009. After eight years of ethnographical work on Chinese electronic musicians in Beijing (a previous research topic), I am personally convinced that the designers would not tell me straight away how and why they designed their online community. Trust and understanding need months, if not years, of participant observation in order to make out the real stories behind these kinds of activities, especially at times of trouble such as the huge competition Campus and Happy Network. So it is not merely a matter of today between interviewing the designers (hundreds of such interviews can be found on the

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Chinese web) but of opening several new chapters for this research. Maybe I’ll cross the line soon and try to meet these people.

Acknowledgements Glenn Adamson and Sarah Teasley, for making me write this paper; Nadia Sartoretti, for her advice and research assistance; Michèle Ramponi, Alvaro Cosi and Yves Bennaim, for stimulating conversations and teaching about the advertising industry; Nicolas Nova, for telling me about Parking Wars on Facebook, letting me park illegally on his street for a while, and useful comments on the first draft of this paper; and Andrej O’Murchu for helping me improve my English. The financial support of the Société Académique de Genève, Fonds Han Suyin, is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes 1 Statistical Survey Report on Internet Development in China, p. 28, January 2009, Online. Available , accessed September 4, 2009. The 24th Survey Report from July 2009, at the moment only available in Chinese, doesn’t provide an update of the number of web pages but indicates a growth of 6.4% for the overall number of websites in China between the end of 2008 and June 2009. 2 The concept is presented as Happy Network’s main strategy in several sources in Chinese (see for example Online. Available , accessed July 9, 2009. Or in its competitors’ discourse: Louis Lau (ed.), Online. Available , accessed April 14, 2009. It can also easily be observed by analyzing the site’s discourse, features, and main applications. The idea of going on the Web to have fun, rather than for work or to look for information, is often described as one of the main characteristics of Chinese net surfers. 3 It is difficult to get real figures for Happy Network at the moment, given the complexity of the Chinese web and the very competitive environment which doesn’t encourage site owners to let outsiders know too much about their business. There are also some problems in evaluating the figures given by statistics since users of Happy Network often open more than one account in order to get fast virtual money by playing with themselves. The information summarised here comes from various sources I compared, as well as my own observations on the site (discussed in the paper). In Chinese, synthesized and fairly reliable information about Happy Network is available on Baidu , accessed July 9, 2009; Wikipedia in Chinese , accessed July 11, 2009; as well as in the press, e.g. Online. Available , accessed July 11, 2009. Statistics are available on China Websites Ranking: , accessed July 11, 2009, or from Alexa , accessed July 11, 2009, as well as Google Insights for Search , accessed July 9, 2009. In October 2010, Happy Network merged with sister network RenRen.com, also owned by Oak Pacific Interactive Group. 4 Most writings of the American sociologist Howard S. Becker are written in autobiographical style and had a deep influence on the way I wrote this paper. For more information about Becker’s specific approach to scientific writing see H. Becker, Writing

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5 6

7 8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19

for Social Scientists, Second Edition, Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2007. On the use of the passive voice in scientific articles, see also B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 54. One can note that autobiography is a classic way of writing for ethnographies. Since this report is based on participant observation on the social networking site Happy Network, it makes sense to describe the results in this way. J. Corbin and A. Strauss, Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, London: Sage Publications, 1998. This information comes from a Swiss web designer who worked in Japan and China during the past few years. I also remember using a ‘footprints’ section myself on in January 2007 (an SNS based in Japan which focused on cultural exchange, now closed). In July 2009, it had 38 applications, 29 of which were designed by Happy Network, one in collaboration with another company, and eight by third parties. I didn’t notice any other foreigner until February 2009, when some of my students registered after I presented them the website. For a short article in English about this game at the moment of observation, see ‘Chinese “facebook” friends hooked on games’, China Daily. Online. Available , accessed July 13, 2009. , accessed July 13, 2009. I have been able to find posts on the discussion board of the application Parking Wars on Facebook which were dated from December 29, 2007 – which makes it clearly much older than the version on Happy Network. A short article on this game and its development for Facebook can be found here: Simon Carless, ‘AGDC: Area/Code’s Lantz On Creating Parking Wars For Facebook’. Online. Available , accessed July 13, 2009. Several games in Happy Network are described by Chinese net surfers as copies of existing applications on other SNS. The complete list with references can be found on Baidu or Wikipedia in Chinese (see links in previous notes). A blog post, Tangos, ‘Kaixin001 Has Ads on Apps’, China Web 2.0 Review. Online. Available , accessed July 13, 2009, dated December 8, 2008 mentions the presence of ads for the car manufacturers on Happy Network. There were seventeen possible answers, voters could pick up to eleven. Facebook has a similar feature called ‘share’ but at the moment its use is limited to several kinds of data, whereas Happy Network’s transfer tool is more general. B. Latour, ‘Technology is Society Made Durable’, in A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, edited by John Law, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 129. B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 136–7. A short description of the apps on Happy Network in October 2008 is given in this blog post from Alan Rutledge, ‘Kaixin001: China’s Apple of Social Networks’, TechCrunch. Online. Available , accessed July 14, 2009. See Juliet Ye, ‘Kaixin001 v. Kaixin: Social Networking Goes to Court’, China Journal. Online. Available , accessed July 13, 2009. The ‘Great Firewall of China’, so-called, and censorship issues are often discussed in the Western media in a very truncated way, usually much closer to a Hollywood movie script (the ‘bad’ Chinese government against the ‘good’ dissidents fighting for their freedom) than to what is really going on in the PRC, especially on the Internet. Z. Tai, The Internet in China: Cyberspace and Civil Society, New York: Routledge, 2006, provides a detailed discussion on this issue. For example, in this article from February 2009, a user is reported selling his account – containing amazing virtual goods – for 80,000 RMB (about twelve thousand US$)

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Online. Available , accessed July 14, 2009. 20 Articles in the Chinese media on SNS have very similar concerns to those that I hear in Switzerland, e.g. on privacy or legal issues. See for example Online. Available , accessed July 13, 2009. 21 Many attempts are made in order to archive what is going inside computers today. The Internet Archive stores the data available on the World Wide Web, and computer museums are trying to keep old machines able to run old software. However, pages such as those inside the SNS are most of the time password protected, and therefore cannot be archived automatically. 22 UUZone.com closed recently, see ‘Chinese SNS Website UUZone.com to Close in March 2009’, China Tech News. Online. Available , accessed July 13, 2009.

RESPONSE Ngai-Ling Sum

Basile Zimmermann examines a fascinating topic in the popular social networking site Happy Network, which can be seen as an equivalent in China to Facebook and its social networking practices. The author draws his methodological-theoretical insights from grounded theory and actor-network theory (ANT). Inspired by these more hermeneutic and ethnographic entry-points respectively, he argues in favour of (a) using a ‘first person’ writing style to provide more precise and grounded descriptions of the research process; and (b) ‘making comparisons’ and ‘asking questions’ to bring relevant elements into the description. Following these introductory methodological remarks, the author moves to a ‘first person’ description of the importance of taking ‘screenshots’ in order to compare Happy Network with Facebook, and to ask ‘how are advertisements provided on Happy Network?’ His answers are found in subsequent detailed descriptions of ‘the user page’, ‘games’ and ‘global design’. Though this is an admirable attempt to generate ideas about social networking sites through one ‘research case-study’, I want to raise questions on four grounds. First, the claim to uniqueness of grounded theory and ANT is to generate thick descriptions of their research objects via micro-sociological theory. One must note that these aims may be inconsistent. Whereas grounded theory (as described by Zimmermann) takes the first person as its entry-point, actor-network theory highlights the plurality of perspectives generated by actors located at different parts of a network. Whereas grounded theory privileges first-person observation as an entry-point, ANT emphasizes the need to understand social relations and processes in terms of plural standpoints with no actor (or, indeed, actant) being privileged above the network. This theoretical dilemma is not easily solved and is, indeed, an issue faced by social scientists more generally and designers more specifically. In the case of user-centred design, the challenges of adopting the first-person stance drawn from grounded theory and the needs to understand all plural standpoints of the user community require further reflection.

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Second, grounded theory bases its research on all sorts of data (e.g., observations, personal stories, interviews, statistics, etc.) to generate codes, categories and possibly new theories. It is clear that Zimmermann seeks to gather data by collecting screenshots and making comparisons – important strengths of his article. But it is less clear what we do with these data. What about generating categories to understand social networking sites and their design, including the extent to which these reflect existing networks or, as ANT would suggest, actants in constructing new forms of network and interaction? It is also unclear why the author chose to focus on how advertisement are provided on Happy Network; one would have thought that if Happy Network is the research object, more attention would be devoted to examining the ‘idea of having fun’ and related practices. This would involve closer investigation of the construction of virtual friends, online games, etc. Third, the author quotes from Latour to support his case for a thick description. ANT seeks to achieve that goal by paying attention to the semiotic-material dimension of networking. In this regard, it is interested in the ‘how’ of the networking social process – in this case, this would require attention to the specificities of the web-based social networking platform in China. A serious application of ANT, for historians and designers as well as sociologists, must involve the examination of some elements of the semiotic logic(s) (or mini discourses) in the constitution of the social and, in addition, the constructive role of materialities or affordances such as the Web itself (Latour 2005; Law 2007). In this case, the discourses of ‘having fun’ or the production of ‘happiness’ would be an interesting entry-point. From a narrower perspective, this would involve examining the constant (re-)making of this network via discursive practices, such as the construction of ‘friends’ via user pages, the rolling out of ‘games’, Happy Network’s engagement in legal battles with its clones, and the more recent entrance of traditional and official media (e.g., Xinhua newspaper) into the arena. On a broader level, this involves asking whether ‘having fun’ can be designed. This seems almost contradictory, insofar as ‘fun’ could be seen as necessarily spontaneous, rather than planned or designed. How interactive is that design, and who participates? What role does the Web, the site or material for networked happiness play in defining ‘fun’? And how does the global nature of the Internet affect local experiences of ‘having fun’ online in China? Fourth, and relatedly, Zimmermann seems to overlook some important contextual issues related to Happy Network, which is targeting white-collar workers in a transitional China under one-party rule. Happy Network exists under the shadow of the famous Internet ‘Great Firewall’ and the call for the building of ‘Green Dam’ (i.e., Internet censorship software pre-installed on all computers). Such controls raise several issues concerning the place of networking sites in the broader scheme of Internet design in China, and possibly elsewhere. First, in information terms, what are Happy Network’s conditions of existence, its use of information, and privacy policy? Second, in Foucauldian-biopolitical terms, why does it appeal to the whitecollar population? How do they take part in the management of their own control, and what are the mechanisms that are involved in the micro-management of leisure time, risk and security of a society based on one-party rule that privileges

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consumption over democracy? Recently, Happy Network started charging users on some items (it costs 2 yuan to send a birthday cake to a ‘friend’).1 Is this a sign of a passage from the socialization to the economization of games?2 What are the responses of users towards the emergence of social networking platforms as a society of consumers and part of the cultural industries? Finally, there are questions to raise about Happy Network’s problematic interface with the global Internet, the micro-managerial nature of these games, and their relation to the expansion of capitalism. Such issues pose critical political, ethical and commercial questions for designers. In particular, by contributing to the design of ‘fun’ sites that may dull the critical senses of consumers and/or citizens, is one complicit in reproducing a system of control? Or, given that many believe that the growth of market capitalism eventually requires greater political as well as economic freedom, does good design in this area contribute, indirectly, to a better future? The historical record on this is mixed and provides no easy answers.

Notes 1 2

Detailed discussion is widely circulated on the Chinese language websites (e.g., , accessed on 29th August 2009. On this discussion, see ‘New Commune Challenging the “Happy Network”’, , accessed on 29th August 2009.

13 FROM NATION-BOUND HISTORIES TO GLOBAL NARRATIVES OF ARCHITECTURE Jilly Traganou

How can the “global” as a methodology, as suggested by the editors of the present book, help us understand architecture today? I will consider the “global” as a way of thinking about contemporary architecture, but also as a way of reconsidering architecture’s history. In what follows I will suggest the need to perform a shift from the orthodox focus on the nation-state as a conflated political and cultural unit within which architecture emerges, to considering conditions of internal otherness, as well as architectural networks that operate beyond national borders, crystallized in an array of localities across the globe. I will also suggest the need to look at contemporary global architectural networks with the eye of the ethnographer, in order to listen and understand not only the grand stories of global architectural production but the voices of the “multitude” of mobilities that are generated across the globe.

Layered places, plural identities I recognize the place, I feel at home here, but I don’t belong. I am of, and not of, this place. Caryl Phillips, Introduction: A New World Order, 2001 In the words of Caryl Phillips, more and more people today “feel of, and not of” the places where they spend their lives.1 In his writings, Phillips, a black British author, shows an acute consciousness of this growing condition of plural belonging. As immigration alters ethnic demographics of most regions throughout the globe, and cases of multiple national affiliations are proliferating, the association of people’s identity with place and origin is becoming complicated. At the same time, new professional patterns create conditions that make people live in more than one location at the same time. Whether they are call-center employees of US companies

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physically residing in Mumbai, or architects in the world’s peripheries working for US architectural offices that “offshore” part of their digital design production overseas, increasing numbers of people live in what Arjun Appadurai has called “layered places.”2 What does this tell us about the condition of belonging today, and how does this affect the way we perceive architecture as a symbolic enterprise? The experience of “internal otherness” can have particular effects on practice in any discipline. In his book, A New World Order, Phillips discusses his experiences as a young black person raised in an environment as predominantly white as Northern England, being made to feel a stranger, one who does not belong. But this experience is far from unique, and does not relate only to race. Phillips soon discovered that he was not alone in his experience of not belonging. In fact he was one among many individuals who had similar dual or multiple attachments. As Phillips explains in his book Extravagant Strangers it has been precisely strangers, those who do not fit, who have played key roles in canonical British literature. Figures such as George Orwell, J. G. Ballard, Shiva Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro were not born in Britain, and have all been strangers in one way or another. Some writers who have marked British literature were colonized subjects being brought to the metropole where they had an experience of disenchantment; others were descendants of the colonizers who lived too long away from their motherland to maintain any vital ties with it. Phillips reminds us that it is often the experience of estrangement that gives rise to creativity, as “all these writers are trying to understand how they belong to ‘Britain’”3 but also, and most importantly, that notions of selfhood and otherness are not as distinct as usually we are taught to believe. It is the job of the intellectual to tease out these elements of internal otherness as they are entangled in national narratives of literature, architecture, design, or culture at large. In no way should these conditions be considered as only the effects of contemporary globalization. In fact, the whole world history of material production could be rewritten by taking into account encounters among different groups, rather than essences of cultures, as they occurred due to trading, colonization, missionary expeditions, and other processes that brought groups in contact with each other. How can the notion of internal otherness affect the way we look at architecture today, contemporary or historical? In their eagerness to question the domination of postmodern architecture by corporate values as well as the Eurocentric narrative of architecture since modernity, scholars of architecture (especially those who worked within the framework of critical regionalism) have looked at the architecture of nonWestern cultures as a resource of resistance that derived from the positions of the world’s peripheries. These newly articulated forms of resistance, however, bordered dangerously with essentialized views of identity. Tadao Ando became valorized as the Japanese architect par excellence; architects Dimitris Pikionis and Aris Konstantinidis as the paradigmatic representatives of Greekness, and so on. However, many of these architects may have not been as native to their respective lands as historians wished to believe; most importantly, neither did these lands have as singular traditions as these views implied.

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In her article in an anthology on travel and architecture I recently co-edited with Miodrag Mitrasinovic, architectural historian Katharine Bartsch gives us the example of one such architect, Geoffrey Bawa, who has been misguidedly considered as a “native” of Sri Lankan culture. Throughout his life, Bawa was celebrated for creating architecture that was rooted in Sri Lanka, and recent scholarship has seen his work as a paradigmatic case of critical regionalism. It is perceived as a product of an assumed “local” architect who masterfully combined tradition with modernity. However, Bartsch reveals how both the “regional culture” of Sri Lanka and the “identity” of the architect are much more complex than the majority of Bawa’s historians chose to acknowledge. Bartsch questions the certainty about the architect’s “origin” from a pure Sri Lankan tradition, as well as the very existence of a “Sri Lankan tradition.” She suggests that Bawa’s diverse heritage (Anglican, German, Muslim, Scottish and Sinhalese) and personal trajectory (between Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom) resists his being classified as a local. Even more so, Sri Lanka’s diverse ethnic environment (Muslim, Sinhalese and Tamils) and multifaceted history (which is influenced by various types of encounters that ranged from Buddhist and Hindu settlers and Arab traders to Portuguese, Dutch and British colonizers) render the recognition of a singular or unified Sri Lankan “tradition” impossible. In doing so, Bartsch finds that contemporary architectural historiography, in its urge to reappreciate the regional as an alternative to a Euro-centered modernity fell into an understanding of culture (in this case Sri Lankan) as “homogeneous, distinct to a group, and rooted-to-place entity.” This view obscured internal local differences and hybridizations which had occurred through various encounters among others.4

Architecture beyond the nation Today, the conditions of internal otherness and multiple affiliation are more and more on the rise. National architectures are being produced equally by nationals and by non-nationals, whose culture has little to do with the cultures of the places where they practice. Whether they have an immigrant relation with the place of their practice or have been commissioned to build in locations with which they share no ties (as in the case of most global firms today) more and more architects practice in places with which they have a contested relation. The recent interest in David Adjaye’s architecture is symptomatic of an awareness of these conditions. David Adjaye, principal of Adjaye Associates, is a Ghanaian, Tanzanian-born, Londonbased architect, who, as the son of a diplomat, spent most of his childhood as an expatriate in various countries of Africa and the Middle East. After settling in London in 1979, and during his formative years in architecture, traveling became a means of expanding his architectural vocabulary, bringing him to different parts of the world (such as Portugal and Japan) that proved to be instrumental to his professional development. As his work has gained international recognition in the last ten years, traveling has come to dominate Adjaye’s daily routine, both as a practicing architect and an educator. One should not disregard the partial truth in curator Deyan Sudjic’s claim that Adjaye’s architecture sprang out of 1990s London,5

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where he lived most of his life, conducted his architectural studies and set up his practice. But neither should one disregard the architect’s itinerant life from early childhood to the present and his internal otherness within the United Kingdom, as well as the role that race, ethnicity, and the conditions of plural belonging that he experienced since his childhood have played in his approach to architecture. It is the last, in combination with a broader campaign that is branding blackness, that has triggered the architectural audience’s imagination which repeatedly and unfailingly focuses on Adjaye’s biography, beyond the unquestionable quality of his work. “Making Public Buildings,” an exhibition that focused on Adjaye’s travels exemplified the case of an architect whose “native” culture is not just fluctuating between Africa and Europe, but rather aspires to be cosmopolitan, and, thus, defies his simple classification as “other” to his Western counterparts. What do such “of, and not of” conditions, to use again Phillips’ vocabulary, mean for the architectural histories that have been written in the name of nations, especially now, with the mistrust in the master-narratives of Euro-centered modernism that characterizes the contemporary world? Books and dedicated magazine issues on nation-bound architecture, such as those of Holland, Spain or Japan, have been attractive to students and consumers of architecture, who want to see national spirit as being crystallized in unique and differentiated architectural productions. It is true that architectural production is affected to a certain extent by the national economic climate, by the nation’s manufacturing capacities and traditions, by the national (or often regional) architects’ associations and educational establishments, and by the degree to which architecture is held in esteem in the local place. But for many thinkers, nations are becoming today more and more incapable of maintaining their autonomy in regards to all the above. According to Arjun Appadurai, “the nation state has become obsolete and other formations of allegiance and identity have taken place.”6 Moreover, as geographer Donald McNeil has stated in his discussion on global architects, “the territorial boundaries that had kept most architects tied to a small set of national markets no longer make much sense for design firms capable of operating in the dynamic economies of [places like] the Gulf and China.”7 Architects’ education takes place in global schools, manufacturing takes place often overseas, and economies on all scales are increasingly subject to transnational conditions rather than or in addition to national endeavors and policies. It is true that unlike other design processes, architecture seems inescapably localized. However, today it operates as a multi-sited enterprise that involves networks of locations and actors. The realization of most major architectural projects today involves major managerial enterprises that have largely to do with coordinating works and teams of experts located remotely from each other. In a rather perverse realization of modern architecture’s dreams of industrialization, the manufacturing of architecture today often happens at remote locations from the actual building site. The manufacturing of major parts of Santiago Calatrava’s roof of the Athens 2004 Olympic Stadium, for instance, was realized in Italy and shipped to Greece; the special steel plate used for its construction was made in Germany. Even in the work of architects who declare their practice as committed to aspects

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of environmentalism, building materials are habitually being harvested and brought from areas far away from the building’s site despite attempts for sustainability. Lisa Findley informs us how Renzo Piano’s Centre Culturel Tjibaou (Cultural Center of Tjibaou) in the French territory of New Caledonia, a building that was built as a means of reflecting and preserving the indigenous culture of the Kanak people, used natural resources from far away locations. Mahogany, one of the main materials of the building, was harvested from forests in Africa, shipped to France for intensive shaping, gluing and forming, then arrived in New Caledonia for assemblage at the final location.8 The architectural site is not more than a node within a broader system of spaces where architecture is being conceived, produced, reproduced, consumed, and imagined. It is ironic that despite these conditions, architecture is often used as the last resort of nations to prove their uniqueness or, even, their status. As architectural production is less and less associated with the place where it is built, and as, with the flow of immigration and changing demographics, many citizens today do not anymore subscribe to nations as cultural units, our perception of national architecture cannot remain the same. The debate around the New Europe, echoing the contested condition within each of its nations, can provide a new way of thinking about architecture. As Ash Amin writes: Slowly, Europe is becoming Chinese, Indian, Romany, Albanian, French and Italian, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist or New Age, American, Disneyfied, oneearth conscious, ascetic or locally communitarian. It is becoming a place of plural and strange belongings, drawing on varied geographies of cultural formation. And thus it is constantly on the move in cultural terms.9 “Are all these migrants and movers undermining a European identity or are they promoting a European consciousness?” Donald McNeil asks.10 And how do national narratives function in light of supra-national frameworks such as those of Europe, the Middle East, or Islam?

Global architectural networks As scholars of sociology and architecture have shown, architects’ professional development has been strongly related to “networking” operations, which are conducted through combined physical, virtual, and communicative travels.11 The architecture profession is not only “highly mobile,” as architects move to study and work, but also “rich in networking capital,” as architects will often “undertake long journeys for social networking.”12 This condition has been pertinent since the modern era, starting with the architects of the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne – International Congress of Modern Architecture) and continuing with those in the circle of Constantinos Doxiadis in the 1960s, but has further accelerated nowadays. Manuel Castells (1996) has argued that post-industrial networks differentiate between “spaces of flows”—nodes and hubs for the elites—and ordinary “spaces of

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places.” In the case of architecture, the “spaces of flows” include prestigious global schools of architecture, locations designated as major construction sites for the global building industry (Berlin after the reunification of Germany, or China today), cities mythologized as emblematic of the zeitgeist or even of the future (Tokyo in the 1980s and 1990s), or, more recently, areas of the developing world where transnational, non-governmental organizations seek architects’ and designers’ collaboration for improving impoverished environments and providing emergency shelter. The highly hierarchical international networks that modern architecture established across the world keep to a certain degree their influential role even today. Within the context of modern architecture, travel and connectivity secured prestige; to be an elite architect meant to be also a cosmopolitan architect. Established centers of architectural education such as the Architectural Association in the UK and the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the US are still the places where most renowned architects obtain their qualifications. These schools offer an education that has little to do with national or regional needs or standards. Students in global architectural schools are trained in strategic thinking that is subsequently applied in various locations across the world (thus travel is an essential part of their curriculum); in other words students in these schools are trained to function as global architects, not unlike students of other design disciplines, as in the project described by Barker and Hall in this volume. Most importantly these are the places where they also obtain their networks of support. As the architect Markus Schaefer described in an interview: What is interesting about the current time is that architecture culture is in many ways thoroughly globalized. Of course, there are regional differences, and these regional differences are very important. But in the end, the agenda is set by a network of people who act very globally and who are interconnected through star culture and academia. This happens at the level of established architects who often are not only stars by virtue of being invited to the important competitions and winning them, but who also have a professorship at a prestigious university . . . Circles of the professional and academic worlds overlap. Architects who are very successful, like Rem Koolhaas or Jacques Herzog and Pierre De Meuron, are people who bridge this gap, obtaining legitimacy through their academic work while at the same time drawing commissions from the commercial world. In addition, they obtain visibility through professional and academic publications, for which you need to know the right journalists and the right magazines. In this model, constituted out of these three elements, successful careers play themselves out . . . Only rarely does an outsider rise to global awareness with respect to any of these three circles.13 In fact, it seems that architecture is still operating within a system that is similar to the one that was established by the early internationals. It consists of elite architecture firms whose principals meet at globally important nodes (cruise boats in the case of

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the CIAM and Doxiadis circle, MIPIM fair today14) and operate beyond national borders. To use Castells’ term, this system clearly operates through the “spaces of flows.” But at the same time, one should not underestimate the vast numbers of architecture students and professionals who also operate in network relations on a daily basis, that expand far beyond the well known “epicenters” of architectural education and publicity. Indeed in today’s world, architectural networks proliferate being often entangled with other networks of pervasive mobility that include a wide array of movers: economic immigrants, tourists, professional travelers, illegal immigrants and celebrities. Even schools that may not be considered as global do function within broader supra-national networks, while architecture students across the globe can easily be exposed to global networks of architectural education through blogs and audio feeds. According to McNeil, “one of the most innovative manifestations of European integration is the growing number of European exchange students following programmes in Universities in other European countries. Here the ERASMUS or SOCRATES initiatives were designed to create a common European experience among its youth, and stressed the potential integrative power of a Europeanization of education.”15 Even though again this is not a new phenomenon (and plentiful examples of educational exchanges can be found since the Renaissance) the volume of these travels today and their overall expansion to social strata beyond the elites is unprecedented.

Instead of conclusions Beyond the global histories of architecture which unfold in highly prestigious architectural schools and at the financial centers of the world, numerous micronarratives remain to be heard and written. Here the historian needs to work more as an ethnographer, following such subjects as: architects in their hotel rooms being updated on the development of construction sites at remote locations; exchanges and misunderstandings during students’ pin-ups presented in languages other than their native ones; architecture educators’ routines in trains and airplanes in their weekly commute to their affiliated schools; groups of architecture students with their instructors visiting newly exotified locations around the globe; countless exchanges in blackberries, emails and wiki platforms; executives’ dinners with clients and strategic partners. Historians should also be attentive to the flows of immigrant workers in their search for jobs at construction capitals in the world; architectural offices and freelancers in the world’s peripheries rendering digital products for renowned European and US-based architects; as well as networks of politicians, realtors, cultural impresarios, and planners; and also tourists, the locals, and the public at large, those who are the consumers, users, critics and “stakeholders” of what may be called global architecture. It is by being mindful to all these constituencies together that one can grasp the meanings and makings of global architecture, which unfold beyond the cult of the starchitect or high visibility projects.

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Notes 1 C. Phillips (2001) A New World Order, London: Secker and Warburg, p. 1. 2 A. Appadurai (2002) “The Right to Participate in the Work of Imagination,” in L. Martz (ed.), (2002), Transurbanism, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Interview with Arjun Appadurai conducted by Arjen Mulder in January 2001. 3 C. Philips (1997) Extravagant Strangers, New York: Vintage Books, p. xiv. 4 K. Bartsch (2009) “Roots or Routes? Exploring a New Paradigm for Architectural Historiography through the Work of Geoffrey Bawa,” in J. Traganou and M. Mitrasinovic (eds) (2009), Travel, Space, Architecture, Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 5 D. Sudjic (2005) “Building in London,” in P. Allison, (ed.), David Adjaye: Houses; Recycling, Reconfiguring, Rebuilding, London and New York: Thames and Hudson, p. 186. 6 A. Appadurai (1996) Modernity at Large, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, p. 169. 7 D. McNeil (2009) The Global Architect: Firms, Fame and Urban Form, New York: Routledge, p. 1. 8 L. Findley (2005) Building Change: Architecture, Politics and Cultural Agency, London and New York: Routledge, p. 44. 9 A. Amin (2004) “Multi-Ethnicity and the Idea of Europe,” Theory, Culture & Society, 21:2, p. 2. 10 D. McNeil (2004) New Europe: Imagined Spaces, London: Hodder Education, p. 125. 11 J. Larsen, J. Urry, and K. Axhausen (2006), Mobilities, Networks, Geographies, Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, p. 4. 12 Larsen, Urry, Axhausen, Mobilities, pp. 64 and 74. 13 J. Traganou (2009) “Mobility and Immobility in the New Architecture Practice: A Conversation with Hiromi Hosoya and Markus Schaefer,” in Traganou and Mitrasinovic, Travel, pp. 261–62. 14 McNeil (2009) The Global Architect, p. 56. 15 McNeil (2004) New Europe, pp. 126–27.

RESPONSE Global agoraphobia Lucia Allais

What is really new about the global predicament of the 21st-century architect? It is not mobility—the cathedral builders of the 13th century were famously itinerant. Nor is it the modern image of the architect as afflicted by a kind of global agoraphobia, for which building in as many places as possible appears to be the only palliative. Already in 1444, Leon Battista Alberti advised architects to situate themselves in Rome by using a modified astrolabe—an instrument designed to find land while navigating the seas.1 Indeed, ever since “the globe” was discovered and theorized as such, architects have portrayed themselves as carriers of a global coordinate system, applicable wherever the homogeneity of space could be detected.2 Nor can we say that the mobility of architectural forms is new, although it has very much intensified since the 19th century, when architectural traditions were reinvented and attached to nation-states to anchor their political identities. Already in 1856 Owen Jones had no trouble describing his color scheme for the Crystal Palace as inspired by Arabian carpets, and copied from motifs of the Persian textile trade, and designed to filter the gray skies of Victorian London into a wholly new colored atmosphere, truly representative of imperial England in her industrious cosmopolitanism.3 Ever since industrialization itself became a place-making strategy, modern buildings have absorbed foreign localities and imported techniques into a universal situatedness. Yet only later in the 20th century, after international histories of modernism had been established and contested, did architects and historians began to recognize “vernacular,” “non-pedigreed,” and “non-Western” building traditions as belonging to the same “world” as the classical Vitruvian system and modern European architecture. Architecture became global at the same time as its historiography: towards the end of “The Short Twentieth Century,” when the large geo-political blocks that anchored modernism were fragmented into innumerable constituencies, each clamoring for political autonomy and cultural representation.4

Response 175

What is new, then, as Jilly Traganou writes, is the expectation that architecture creates a sense of global “belonging,” that it express an infinity of local identities while addressing mobility as a fundamental human condition. Traganou borrows from the rich literature in anthropology, sociology, and culture of mobility to make a link between architecture as a “symbolic” practice, the deceivingly “situated” nature of buildings, and the hyper-mobility of a growing class of cosmopolitan architects. She traces this convergence to the transformation of the architectural profession into an international network since 1900, and, calling for historians to become architecture’s resident “ethnographers,” predicts that a proliferation of micro-narratives will result from the “unbinding” of architectural narratives from national historiographies. This is a political stance: a call for architecture to become a medium of representation that transcends the nation by taking mobility as common ground. As such, it raises methodological questions. To what extent is the tie that binds peoples to nations the same tie that has bound modern architectural historiography to national narratives? Do the mobility of peoples and the mobility of architectural forms follow the same logic? Are identity and belonging, and the politics of recognition these concepts imply, the only ways for architecture to participate in a global political imaginary? Many of these questions can be addressed by considering the case of Nubia: a desert region that entered architectural discourse in the second half of the 20th century as the site of a paradigmatically “situated” architecture, even as its inhabitants became increasingly uprooted. Nubian architecture consists of mud-brick houses, built by their inhabitants from aggregate collected on the banks of the Nile, then decorated with distinctive lattice-work and brightly-colored motifs marking passages and doorways.5 Roofing methods vary by district—the Kanuz build catenary vaults and domes, the Arab and Mahas make flat canopies—but house-plans are consistently organized as sequences of domestic spaces around a vast open court. Villages are loosely aggregated and oriented towards the Nile, leaving a narrow strip of fertile land to be harvested annually. The overall effect is of rootedness in the desert, hospitality amidst transience. But this architecture is not only self-built, situated, and oriented—in a word, local—it is also transnational in the ancient sense of the term: Nubia lies across the border between Egypt and the Sudan, and it has long figured as “The Corridor to Africa” in canonical texts of World History, from Herodotus to Hegel.6 Nubia’s vernacular architecture has cohabitated for millennia with the massive Pharaonic temples, rock-cut Meroitic tombs, and Roman-era Christian shrines built along the Nile by conquerors from the North and South. As a product of a region whose cultural autonomy has survived a history of imperialisms, Nubian architecture evokes a world where mobility does not necessarily mean homogeneity. Yet Nubians became famous in the 1960s and 1970s because they are transnational in the modern sense: a constituency forcibly relocated by national planners several times over the course of the 20th century, to make way for the flooding produced by the building and raising of a hydro-electric dam in Aswan. With each resettlement, Nubian architecture became known in ever-finer ethnographic detail.

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During the first major move, in the 1930s, the Egyptian cultural ministry sent anthropologists and architects to document the submersion of old villages and the rebuilding of new ones. One of the visitors to these new villages was the architect Hassan Fathy, who later spearheaded an anti-modernist movement for the revival of traditional building methods. It was in Nubia that Fathy “discovered” the mudbrick vaulting he used in his famous scheme for the village of Gourna, experiencing the epiphany he described in his bestseller, An Architecture for the Poor.7 While Fathy genuinely admired Nubia’s builders, and while he was lucid about the role of modernization in triggering a “renaissance” of their craft, he undeniably helped to distance Nubia’s architecture from its people. He had no trouble combining Nubian vaulting with Mamluk and Ottoman elements from disparate regions of Egypt into the trademark neo-traditionalist style that he deployed as an expert in vernacular architecture.8 In Fathy’s hands, the lessons of Nubia became applicable across the Middle East. Nubia’s passage into global history was completed in the 1960s, when the Aswan High Dam was built. This time, the entirety of Nubia disappeared under water and over 100,000 farmers were relocated to distant new towns. They promptly plastered and painted over their prefabricated houses with their signature colors, encouraged by anthropologists funded, this time, by the Ford Foundation.9 But ethnographic scrutiny, decorative motifs, and modern amenities proved poor substitutes for the Nile, whose rhythms and materiality had regulated their lifestyle. Nubia’s male population became fully transient: living in far-away cities; sending wages home. In contrast, the region’s ancient monuments were carefully taken apart and relocated along the Nile by a UNESCO-led international consortium of experts, which also conducted an extensive archaeological survey.10 Indeed as Nubians were gradually marginalized, their culture was institutionalized into a global framework. Their ancestors, now known as “the Black Pharaohs,” became protagonists in a variety of multicultural policies worldwide, including the project of Afro-American studies in the United States.11 In 1997, a Nubian Museum was built in Aswan, where lifesized replicas of Nubian houses are displayed next to Pharaonic sculptures. The museum’s building, fronted by an enlarged Kanuz arch, combines Nubia’s architectural tropes into a postmodern image so cohesive that it earned an Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2001.12 Thus Nubian “belonging” has been modernized into a self-perpetuating globalism, in a three-way architectural division. Nubian vaulting has become an emblem of universal constructive integrity, pitched against the industrialized building methods of the West. Nubian village plans have been inscribed into a discourse about the environmental consequences of large-scale development projects.13 Nubian decorative motifs have entered the market of African iconography as products of a living tradition, a global art of hospitality.14 Yet the question of where the Nubians themselves “belong” remains a local—or national—problem. The case of Nubia shows that architecture’s ability to convey identities in the global imaginary does not ensure its accountability to the political constituencies from which these identities are drawn. What matters here is not the weakening of the nation-state

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per se—Egyptian and Sudanese governments still hold power over their Nubian citizens—but the weakening of the nation as privileged form. How then can global architectural histories be told, when global knowledge has advanced hand in hand with global disenfranchisement? One answer, as Traganou suggests, is to deploy social-scientific methods in charged and unexpected ways. A Latourian anthropologist recently studied the model shop of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, identifying its language of “scaling up” as an architectural Esperanto for young designers, and revealing that design firms are also “places” themselves, important sites of provenance for many of the architects Traganou interviews.15 Another form of visual Esperanto lies in a brand of spatial analysis that relies on diagramming of quantitative research. Thus the magazine Urban China, which is bound by its Chinese subject, language, and state controls, nevertheless sustains a dialogue with the Western avant-garde, largely through its visual style, about the role of research in design disciplines.16 A more narrative genre of social theory permeates recent scholarship that takes apart national histories of architecture by showing the multi-, inter- and transnational agents they contain.17 And one new textbook takes a series of time-cuts through five millennia of global architectural history, culminating in a final chapter, “Globalization Takes Command,” that identifies seven modes of global contemporary architectural practice.18 What these methods have in common is a move away from the architect as an identifiable author of communicable political meanings, towards architecture as a practice of material delegation, engagement, situation, assemblage, aggregation and mediation. Perhaps the liberation from nation-building and nation-binding narratives requires precisely a freeing from the symbolic politics of identification and recognition, from the expectation that architects create stable forms which are to be deciphered as cohesive political fictions by everyone else, historians included. A global method pays attention less to the mobility of architects and objects and more to mobilities through architects and objects. The antidote to global agoraphobia is not an ontology of worldwide belonging or an epistemology of the world of mobility, but a history where architecture is itself an act of worlding.

Notes 1 In his 1444 Forma Urbis Romae Alberti gave instructions for making a portrait of the city by surveying its monuments using a radial coordinate system using a “horizon.” JeanYves Bouriaud & Francesco Furlan, eds, Forma Urbis Romae (Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 2005). A decade later, in Book X of his De Re Architettura, he introduced the practical task of flattening a site for building with an in-depth discussion of the size and shape of the earth. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert and Neil Leach (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). 2 I borrow the expression from Branco Mitrovic, “Leon Battista Alberti and the Homogeneity of Space,” in JSAH 63/4 (Dec 2004): 424–439. 3 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: B. Quaritch, 1868). See also Anneke Lenssen, “Travels of the Carpet Myth: Retracing Owen Jones, Ibn Khaldun, and Gottfried Semper,” in Thresholds 34: Portability, (Summer 2007): 70–73. 4 I borrow the phrase from Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London : Michael Joseph, 1994).

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5 The effect of hospitability is especially marked in districts where the bottom of the courtyard walls are shaped into exterior benches. The authoritative source on Nubian architecture is Omar El-Hakim’s Nubian Architecture (Cairo: the Palm Press, 1993), with a foreword by Hassan Fathy. See also Horst Jaritz, “Notes on Nubian Architecture and Architectural Drawings,” in Robert A. Fernea & Georg Gerster, eds, Nubians in Egypt: A Peaceful People (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973). 6 Known as “the Land of Kush” in the Bible, Nubia appears in Diodorus Siculus’s Library of History and Herodotus’s Histories. For a summation of this literature, see William Y. Adams, Nubia: Corridor to Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 7 Hassan Fathy, Gourna: A Tale of Two Villages (Cairo: Ministry of Culture, 1969); An Architecture for the Poor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); and “Notes on Nubian architecture,” in Robert Fernea, ed., Contemporary Egyptian Nubia: A Symposium (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1966). For a critical evaluation of the Gourna project, see Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: UC Press, 2002). For Fathy’s career in relation to national and regional identity politics, see Nasser Rabat, “Fault Lines: Hassan Fathy and the Identity Debate,” in Gilane Tawadros & Sarah Campbell, eds, Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes (London: Institute of International Visual Art, 2003): 196–203. 8 Fathy developed his stance as a regional expert after working in Athens for Doxiadis, a Greek internationalist architect who played a major role in bringing modernist architectural principles to global agencies of planning and development. While there are many differences between the ideologies of Doxiadis and Fathy, they both saw architecture as a comparative system of knowledge, wherein environmental, constructive, and symbolic criteria determine which architecture “belongs” where. Doxiadis’ system was a cybernetic matrix he called Ekistics; Fathy’s was a holistic vision for building a worldwide network of “Palaces of Mud.” See Panayiota Pyla, “Hassan Fathy Revisited,” in JAE 60/3 (Feb 2007), 28–39, and Fathy, “Palaces of Mud,” in Malcolm Miles and Tim Hall with Iain Borden, eds, City Cultures Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2000): 232––235. 9 The Ford Foundation funded the two-phase Ethnographic Survey of Egyptian Nubia conducted by the Social Research Center of the American University in Cairo. Hussein Fahim, one of the researchers, later published Egyptian Nubians: Resettlement and Years of coping (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983) and Nubian Resettlement in the Sudan, (Miami: Field Research Projects, 1972). See also Hasssan Dafalla, The Nubian Exodus (London: C. Hurst/Universe Books, 1975). 10 UNESCO’s official account of the campaign is Torgny Säve-Söderbergh, ed., Temples and Tombs of Ancient Nubia, (London: Thames & Hudson & UNESCO, 1987). See also Rex Keating’s Nubian Rescue (London: Robert Hale & Company, 1975). 11 William Y. Adams chronicled Nubia’s historiographic fate in “The Invention of Nubia,” in Hommages à Jean Leclant (Le Caire : Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1994). See also “Nubia and ‘Inner Africa’: the Ideological Uses of African State-Building,” in Steven Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (New York: Verso, 1998), 138–155. As recently as 1999 Henry Louis Gates took a film crew to Nubia as part of his documentary Wonders of the African World (PBS Home Video, c.1999). 12 Plans for an Anthropology Museum were first made in the 1960s by Nasser’s Egyptian Cultural Ministry, who hired Hassan Fathy to develop a scheme, which was never realized. The prize-winning building was designed by architect Mahmoud El-Hakim. The Aga Khan Prize for Islamic Architecture seeks to establish global criteria of architectural judgment that compete with Western vangardism (although some of its representatives are always featured on its steering committee) by rewarding projects that engage directly with religious and symbolic politics. The jury’s statement praised the scheme’s ability to “successfully adapt local architectural styles without imitating them.” See . “Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2001.” In A + U 377 (Feb 2002) 102–129. See Nevine El-Aref, “Drowned but Triumphant,” in Al-Ahram No. 564 (13–19 Dec 2001).

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13 A representative example is “Social and Cultural Destruction,” Chapter 3 of Edward Goldsmith & Nicholas Hildyard, The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams: Volume 1. (Cornwall: Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1984). See also Hussein Fahim, Dams People and Development (New York: Pergamon Press, c. 1981). 14 See for instance Louis Werner & Michael Nelson, “The Decorated Houses of Nubia,” in Saudi Aramco World (July–August 2006) 57/4, and Elisabeth Schneiter, “Ways-out ways in: Nubian doorways,” in World of Interiors 28/10 (October 2008). The primary reference is Marian Wenzel, House Decoration in Nubia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). 15 Albena Yaneva, “Scaling Up and Down: Extraction Trials in Architectural Design,” in Social Studies of Science 35 (2005): 867–894. Yaneva’s focus is on the act of modeling, but the underlying internationalism is clear. As for the concept of a studio provenance, to take three of Traganou’s interviewees: Markus Schaeffer is “from” OMA, Hiromi Hosoya “from” Toyo Ito’s office, and even David Adjaye can be seen as “from” David Chipperfield’s London office. 16 See the collaboration between Urban China and the American/Dutch magazine Volume, which published mutually bootlegged special issues: Urban China 31 – Post-Disaster Reconstruction and Crisis Management and Crisis: Urban China Bootlegged by C-Lab for Volume in the Spring of 2009 to coincide with Urban China’s work being on display at the New Museum in New York City. . 17 Three examples from an American context are Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty (New York: Routledge, 2007); Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); Reinhold Martin & Kadambari Baxi, Multi-National Cities (Barcelona: ActarD, 2007). 18 Francis Ching, Mark Jarzombek, & Vikramaditya Prakash, “Globalization Takes Command,” in A Global History of Architecture (Hoboken: Wiley & Sons, 2006).

14 E-ARTISANS Contemporary design for the global market Tom Barker and Ashley Hall

Touchdown in Ghana The first thing you notice as you step out of the aeroplane in Accra – the capital of Ghana – is the air. Thick and heavy with humidity, the air carries the ancient smell of brown earth – reminiscent of baked bread and sewers – intermingled with the sounds of wildlife and city chaos. Like any tropical country, Ghana is a slow place that bides its time; thanks to the climate it has to. But like the African elephant, a sluggish start is no indication of the speed that the country will attain when it accelerates. When we last flew to Ghana we sat next to an oil prospector who was flying out to greet the first barrel of oil from the vast new reserves just discovered offshore. Perhaps now, the elephant is on the move. In 2009, Ghana became a focal point for us as the latest in a series of annual international design collaborations called GoGlobal. Initiated in 2005, each GoGlobal collaboration has had a different theme, derived from preparatory visits and discussions with host partners. We wanted the themes to have both local and global relevance, and to avoid ‘design tourism’. In other words, the results needed to have ongoing value that lasted beyond the project period. The aim of GoGlobal Ghana was to consider whether the creative industries in a developing country could be nurtured through design collaboration and an ecommerce model to contribute significant economic growth through increasing the level of international trade. The project was initiated with three phases planned for execution: a creative studio with innovation design engineering1 students from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London and the Kwame Nkruma University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana; an e-commerce process for supply, distribution and marketing; and finally a ‘hub’ location to facilitate project delivery and dissemination to other African regions. We wanted to establish an evolved model for contemporary design collaboration, based on analysis of the previous GoGlobal annual project collaboration parameters

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and results. Our aims were to develop skills of working in other cultures; develop a global perspective on design; understand differences and similarities between design cultures in developed (industrialized) and developing countries; evolve an understanding of wellbeing and satisfaction through work beyond wealth accumulation; develop relationships and networks for global collaborations in design and production; evolve social and cultural elements with respect to design, exploration of personal goals and opportunities in life; gain an understanding of skills through knowledge transfer; transcend the limitations of monocultural working; and most generally, to encourage curiosity and creativity.

GoGlobal history GoGlobal began with a relatively spontaneous visit to China by Tom Barker and 18 postgraduate design students from the RCA in 2005, and has now developed into a collaborative design research and networking activity. Participating institutions are the Royal College of Art, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the London School of Economics (LSE), the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), and a number of other global partnering organizations. Past GoGlobal projects have included: ‘Products for Beijing’ and subsequently ‘Design to mitigate the effects of consumerism’ in Beijing, China with Tsinghua University (2005, 2007); ‘Massclusivity’2 in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand with Thai Creative Design Centre (TCDC) (2006); and ‘The future of food’ with Tsukuba University in Japan (2008). All of the previous GoGlobal projects have focused on international design collaborations with industry and academia at a postgraduate masters design level. Our research into formats for successful collaboration was conducted through an empirical evolution of working models, a better understanding of collaborative partnerships, and integration of product innovation, production, social and economic factors. The selection of countries aimed to explore design collaboration in a range of both developing and developed countries in distinct cultures, allowing a comparative assessment of the results. Each of the GoGlobal exercises tried to answer the question: what are the most effective ways in which designers from different countries can collaborate to tackle a complex regional brief of the host country, creating better and more appropriate designs than each could as an individual? GoGlobal projects have helped the participants gain an understanding of diverse cultures by learning to design in collaboration, and to gain a global perspective on their creative outlook. Designs from the projects in 2005, 2006 and 2007 have been exhibited and the designs from GoGlobal Thailand in 2006 have been commercialized and manufactured for sale; the projects have also been featured in the international design and lifestyle press, such as Blueprint3, Axis4 and Elle Decoration5. After GoGlobal visited Japan in 2008, the protagonists (by then Tom Barker, Ashley Hall and Garrick Jones of the LSE) were persuaded to set themselves a more ambitious, risky and complex challenge: one that could potentially make a more strategic difference to a country that could notably benefit from wealth creation

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through design. The previous GoGlobal Thailand project suggested that design could deliver regional benefits by bridging the gap between policy and implementation. Our partnership with TCDC brought together RCA and Thai designers to produce a range of products that acted as exemplars to promote Thai crafts, evolve contemporary Thai design language and promote the use of design to maintain and create new craft skills. The team needed a welcoming host country that was politically and economically stable. Ghana was selected as the location for the project after discussions with the British Council, and following visits to the United Nations in Geneva, along with a follow up visit to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) XII in Accra, Ghana, and meetings with potential Ghanaian collaborators. The enthusiasm of local collaborators, the country’s vibrant creative culture, and the high profile of creatives there all had a strong influence on the decision to be based in Ghana. There is also a rich cultural history of craft production in Ghana, from the gold, clothing and textile designs of the Ashanti region, through to stools, jewellery, carving, metalwork, and woven baskets. GoGlobal Ghana was particularly influenced by the UN’s UNCTAD studies of global creative industries. UNCTAD’s 2008 Creative Economy Report, ‘The challenge of assessing the creative economy towards informed policy-making’, highlighted the potential socio-economic and cultural value of creative industries: . . . the interface among creativity, culture, economics and technology, as expressed in the ability to create and circulate intellectual capital, has the potential to generate income, jobs and export earnings while at the same time promoting social inclusion, cultural diversity and human development.6 In the UK for example, creative industries now contribute 7.3% to the national economy, of which around 1% is artefact design, craft and fashion. But for developing countries, there is a question of how to leverage design creativity for social and economic benefit using sustainable models given the context of low levels of industrialization, poor transport and infrastructure, and weak financial systems.

Creative Africa and Ghana’s UK connection Africa is a vast and diverse continent of 54 countries. It may be argued that this diversity is greater than that of Europe; for example, Africa is estimated to have 2,000–3,000 spoken languages. Although many of the countries on the continent are very poor, the last decade has seen economic growth and stability in an increasingly large number of states. There is also no shortage of creativity: today’s African writers, designers, architects, and film-makers are increasingly making their mark globally. African-based contemporary creative industries are less well established, however (though even here there are exceptions such as Nollywood, Nigeria’s answer to Hollywood, which is the continent’s most prolific film-making industry).

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The UK has a strong connection with Ghana, which was a British colony until it achieved independence in 1957. The Ghanaian ethnic group in Britain is the largest African presence after Nigerians, and there is a great deal of movement of Ghanaians between the UK and the homeland. British Ghanaians are extremely well represented among the UK’s top creatives, and include the architect David Adjaye; the artist Chris Ofili; Ekow Eshun, Artistic Director of the ICA; Ozwald Boateng OBE, bespoke couturier; the musician Sway; and John Akomfrah, the film director.

Ghanaian economy and culture Any international collaboration, design or otherwise, is vastly improved when there is some mutual understanding of cultural differences. Our hosts from both organizations gave us invaluable advice and guidance on Ghanaian culture and society. This was vital, as there is little literature available, although we did track down an invaluable book in Accra called Ghana: Understanding the People and their Culture by John Kuada and Yao Chachah7 – a fast introduction to the customs and history of the country. Our hosts referred many times to how happy people were in Ghana, and although this seemed self-evident we decided to have a look at world rankings to see just how happy Ghanians were compared with other nations. Ghana’s ranking among the ‘happiest’ countries of the world is 51, ahead of China (54), Greece (58), India (69) and Zimbabwe (99) (Source: 1995–2007 World Values Surveys).8 Clearly this happiness doesn’t relate directly to personal wealth; Ghanaian GDP per capita at $3,000 is a twelfth of the UK’s. On this measure from the World Economic Outlook Database for October 2007, Ghana is ranked at number 18 out of the 53 African countries (Egypt is $5,600, South Africa is $14,500). However, Ghana’s economy— with a focus on cocoa, gold, diamonds and lumber—has been growing quickly since 2000 and has tripled its GDP in just over eight years. GDP (PPP adjusted) in 2008 was $70 billion, with an economic growth rate of 6% in 2008. Like most African countries, the global financial crisis in 2008 has had little effect, since the banks in Ghana have negligible exposure to foreign debt.9 This growth was promising, and because of the nature of the GoGlobal project we wanted to know if Ghanaians were particularly entrepreneurial, as is sometimes claimed. (The International Entrepreneurship website, for example, notes that ‘. . . the entrepreneurial environment is vibrant and growing in comparison to its other West African counterparts’.)10 Could local designers leverage any value created by the design project? Anecdotally, we certainly met a lot of enterprising individuals in Ghana, whether they were selling mobile phone top-up cards by the road, dried bananas in traffic jams, or operating personal electronic money transfers with the UK. But were we meeting typical Ghanaians?

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Leveraging design We had three hosts and project collaborators in Ghana who included our academic partners from the Kwame Nkruma University of Science and Technology’s (KNUST) College of Art and Design, based in Ghana’s second city of Kumasi, and the Aid to Artisans organization in Accra and Kumasi who provided the project with national supply chain experience, market intelligence, and the viewpoints of Ghanaian craftspeople. The project partners for the e-commerce delivery elements were ShopAfrica53/BSL, based in Accra. The British Council Accra also provided us with meeting space, information and a final launch venue to present the finished products to artisans and potential investors. Our selection of KNUST also had some useful entrepreneurial benefits. Kumasi is surrounded by gold mines and is the ancient start of the historic Trans-Saharan gold route that ends in North Africa where it connects by sea to Europe. Millennia of trading have resulted in a rich enterprise culture of small businesses and the upfront pitching of new business ideas that we were to grow accustomed to witnessing on the city streets. Added to this is the impact of the British colonial era and exposure to global trading ideas, initially by sea trading then later on by other routes. The e-Artisan project looked at ways of leveraging design creativity in Ghana. The innovative aspect of our focus was the use of two key elements designed to work together in a syndetic (connective) manner: first, the use of collaboration to develop designs; and second, marketing through e-commerce models. Our project method of contemporary design collaboration has evolved iteratively, based on feedback and observation. Over time, the quality of the work produced by GoGlobal indicates that it could be successfully extended into a commercial– academic joint venture. Industrial design and production in a developing country must be able to address the issues of reduced levels of industrialization, poor transport and infrastructure and lack of access to finance. The reduced levels of industrialization restrict the choice of materials and production processes, as well as impacting on quality control and packaging. Poor transport and infrastructure makes the supply chain more complex and costly, as well as affecting reliability. Damage to merchandise is also a problem. A further issue to contend with in developing countries relates to financial transactions at every level relating to the payment for goods and materials, as well as shipping. Banking can be rudimentary; not all of the stakeholders involved in a project may have access to financial institutions, interest rates can be very high. Ghana itself is heavily cash based and most people do not have bank accounts; however, the use of cash, while it may simplify the process and ensure the flow of capital, invites fraud. Furthermore, returns’ policies are problematic when goods have been shipped overseas. E-commerce helps to mitigate these difficulties. An online customer interface and ordering system can meet a wide variety of demands: marketing and branding, processing all financial transactions throughout the supply chain, tracking and delivery, and supply chain management. E-commerce also has the advantage of being able to operate without traditional infrastructure. BSL, the project e-commerce partners in Ghana, established ShopAfrica53.com in 2008/9. ShopAfrica53 is a web system for browsing and purchasing merchandise

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from around Africa. The system currently operates only in Ghana, but will expand to cover other African countries over time. BSL have also developed a scratch-card system for purchases, which ensures that the commercial supply chain is always cashflow positive. This is an important point when selling artefacts long-distance, since non-payment could present great financial difficulties for an artisan if they have paid for materials in advance and started their work. Through courier relationships, BSL facilitate the transport of artefacts within Ghana and internationally. Additionally, BSL have an alternative banking method in development that allows artisans to be paid via their mobile phones, access their balance, and make payments to others. Mobile phones are in widespread use in Ghana, and BSL have an automated messaging service to communicate orders and information from the website to artisans around the country. Although GoGlobal Ghana will eventually have its own web portal which will link to ShopAfrica53 for all transactions.

Project collaboration To develop designs, Ghanaian students and the RCA students were randomly paired up: one Ghanaian and one RCA student per team. The RCA students were a diverse international mix, coming from over 14 different countries. Of the 30 pairings, the majority said they worked extremely well or well together. It was clear that three teams had some problems collaborating, and that these issues revolved around communication rather than method or creative differences. In terms of method, the Ghanaian students’ approach tended to be more spontaneous and less research-based than the RCA students. Although this contrasted with a slightly more theoretical stance among RCA students, the Ghanaians had very practical experience of making and were able to identify processes and means of assistance very quickly to facilitate prototyping. Both groups had a comprehensive understanding of the technologies for e-commerce. One of the main project challenges revolved around the idea of cultural transfer. If an object presents too much embedded culture then its function and opportunity to fit into a reasonable number of diverse environments is compromised. Conversely, too little cultural transfer results in a more neutral design, which will be seen as a commodity indistinguishable from competitors, and thus unable to leverage its source potential. With the help of the project advisors the RCA and KNUST students were able to balance each other, the former offering advice on the appeal of Western markets and the latter providing rich local sources of inspiration. The final products – 26 in all – were designed and prototyped in the surprisingly short time of ten days, highlighting the speed, quality and energy of the dispersed craft and making networks around Kumasi. Students often communicated designs verbally; using templates and sketch models enabled wider craft interpretation, allowing the artisans room to develop the objects according to their skills and resources. The designs were innovative and provocative, but also referenced local materials and creative influences. These results illustrated how collaborative interdisciplinary projects have the potential to overcome some of the hurdles for generating new export products for developing economies.

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FIGURE 14.1

Examples of project collaboration – the final products

Source: Photo courtesy of the Royal College of Art and KNUST

Discussion of outcomes The very international nature of the students helped the group to embrace the idea of developing products with a global appeal. It was noticed that the Ghanaian students had the same ability to ‘jam’ creatively at the concept design stage as the RCA students, much like musicians performing together in an improvised mode. The ability to ‘jam’ tends to require a relaxed, responsive and inclusive attitude to a fellow collaborator, characteristics considered very typical of Ghanaian society, so this may have been a factor in working style. Creatively, the Ghanaian students readily embraced the benefits of designing and prototyping concepts at high speed, and were prepared to experiment with relatively little concern about design risk. This also may be a cultural trait and is an advantage, as the RCA students were primarily from developed countries and tended to be more risk averse, which can be a significant barrier to innovation in design. The impact of the ‘e-commerce-ready’ design constraint was notable. The artefacts were generally small, and the larger ones (such as a side table) could be flatpacked for transportation. About a third of the designs had an embedded or related web component for users and feature-enhancement, customization or post-sales support and servicing. This feature is unique in allowing a mix of artisanal inter-

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pretation and user-requested customization. The work was considered in the context of an international distribution of potential customers. It is interesting to observe that the global belt between the tropic of Capricorn and the tropic of Cancer has few successful industrialization models. This is true across the African continent. There are many reasons for this, but one of the common themes revolves around culture and inclusion. Historical attempts at modernizing African manufacturing have failed because they have tried to ‘teleport’ Westernized industrial models based on mechanization, homogenization and labour reduction. Sub-Saharan Africa needs more inclusive labour models, with cultural and social tie-ins that connect large numbers of people to the rest of the globe. Our approach sought to use design to refocus the large networks of craft makers spread throughout the towns, cities and countryside who currently supply basic artefacts and repair and recycle mechanical products towards export markets. The inventiveness and speed of makers in this region, for example the Kumasi mechanic who rebuilt three buses into one using an angle grinder and a welding torch, are legendary. The economic imperative for this approach is corroborated by recent developments in the theory of microeconomic structures, which emphasize the importance of urban trade and its role in creating mega-cities in developing economies. Part of this research proposes that craft and small-scale industrial production can be one of the catalysts for agglomeration into dense urban trading zones. At a time when large urban structures in developing economies are rapidly increasing in size, facilitating the creative interface between craft and design with economics can help develop more effective strategies.

Conclusions KNUST have kindly offered to host a GoGlobal design research centre in their newly built university campus museum to focus the research and commercial future of the project, while the UN/UNDP have expressed an interest in supporting and disseminating a successful future enterprise model to other African regions. Although currently only focused on Ghana, the research indicates that contemporary design collaboration used in conjunction with e-commerce models may have the potential to grow the creative industries in developing countries. The scale and rate of this growth has not yet been ascertained and the e-commerce implementation is still underway. This work differs from other similar endeavours, in that it combines the dual elements of design collaboration and e-commerce in a developing country, effectively providing a process for design, production, customer reach and delivery into the markets of developed countries. The e-commerce aspect also had a significant impact on how the design participants responded to the design briefs. At a higher level the ability of educational design projects to operate in new spaces between regional or national policy and on-the-ground implementation promises new opportunities and reflects the historical trajectory of design thinking into ever wider circles.

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Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the participating and supporting organizations for their enthusiastic support in GoGlobal Africa. All our academic participants at KNUST. Bridget Kyerematen-Darko, executive director of Aid to Artisans, and Professor Glenn Lewis for their wisdom and knowledge of Ghana and design, as well as the participating artisans. ShopAfrica53/BSL for e-commerce aspects. Our long-term GoGlobal co-developer: Garrick Jones (LSE). Advice and hosting of events: Edna Dos Santos and her colleagues at UNCTAD; the British Council in the UK and Accra, Ghana. Founding co-partners for GoGlobal research: RMIT University Melbourne, Australia. Background research information: Department of Trade and Industry, Accra, Ghana. Project funding: Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC), UK. Project equipment: Tools for Self Reliance. Special independent researchers and tutors: Genna Wilkinson, Sally Haworth, Elisa Hudson, Nanice El Gammel.

Notes 1 Hall, A. and Childs, P. (2009) Innovation Design Engineering: Non-Linear Progressive Education for Diverse Intakes, Proceedings, E&PDE09: the 11th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education, Brighton, 2009, pp. 1–6 2 Jones, G. (2008) ‘Approaching a Massclusive Future, Innovative Mass Products for Niche Markets’, Creativities Unfold. Retrieved December 21, 2009, from . 3 Kuzyk, R. (2005) ‘Online with China’, Blueprint, No. 234 pp. 22–27 4 Nakajma, N. (2006) ‘GoGlobal, A Joint Project Between the RCA and TCDC: “The Pursuit of Thai-ness”’, Axis, Vol. 123 pp. 136–140. 5 ‘The way we . . .’, Elle Decoration, February 2007. 6 Dos Santos, E. (2008) ‘The Challenge of Assessing the Creative Economy Towards Informed Policy-Making’, Creative Economy Report, available at . 7 Kuada, J. and Chachah, Y. (1999) Ghana: Understanding the People and their Culture, Accra: Woeli Publishing Services. 8 Veenhoven, R. (2009) World Database of Happiness, available at . 9 World Economic Outlook Database for October 2007, available at . 10 World Entrepreneur Comparator. Retrieved November 13, 2010, from .

RESPONSE Shannon May

Barker and Hall’s GoGlobal initiative to create e-Artisans in Ghana as a model for other developing countries in Africa has more local and global relevance to longstanding debates in economic development and emerging considerations in design than they may yet realize. Inherent in the premise and structure of GoGlobal Ghana is adherence to an export-led growth model, and a vision of creative design as integral to the creation of value. Barker and Hall’s work should stimulate provocative questions for both practitioners and historians of design alike concerning the effects of networking and trade amongst ideas and goods, as well as the selection of distribution models—or the entrepreneurship of design. As laid out by Barker and Hall, the goal of GoGlobal Ghana “was to consider whether the creative industries in a developing country could be nurtured through design collaborations and an e-commerce model to contribute significant economic growth through increasing the level of international trade.” Their work in fostering design collaboration that seeks to be more than “design tourism” is to be commended, and there is much that this project and analysis of it will continue to contribute to the understandings of how networks affect design production across the globe. In this short response, however, I will focus on the second aim of GoGlobal Ghana: generating wealth through design in developing countries. From the outset of their program, Barker and Hall have made a curious choice for generating significant wealth creation through design in Ghana. They have selected e-commerce as their platform, and the international consumer as their target. Why was the domestic market never considered as a consumer of design and part of the engine of economic growth? In the case of Ghana, was there “a complex regional brief” from the host country to tackle, or was the decision to focus on e-commerce set by Barker and Hall before the collaboration began? Wealth creation in developing countries is, as Barker and Hall, write, more “ambitious, risky, and complex” than craft design itself. Yet this is the task GoGlobal set for itself in Ghana.

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What follows is a discussion of the additional risks GoGlobal took on by focusing on an international consumer of Ghanaian crafts as a source of wealth generation in a developing country. I also raise questions as to how GoGlobal will distribute the value it hopes to create, a critical organizational decision of design entrepreneurs. Like all export-driven growth models, GoGlobal’s focus on “Western markets” for Ghanaian crafts makes the business model vulnerable to both currency exchange fluctuations and economic downturns in the target market. From the time that the costs of production in Ghanaian Cedis are converted into British Pounds, or US Dollars, the producer is exposed to the risk of the value of payment falling in relation to the cost of production. Production for the export market also makes Ghanaian producers vulnerable to sudden foreign economic downturns that lead to the collapse of consumption in the target markets. In preparing for GoGlobal Ghana 2009 this should have been an obvious risk of design production for Western markets. Contrary to Barker and Hall’s assertion, many countries—and their artisans, producers, and families—throughout Africa were severely affected by the economic downturn that swept the globe in 2008, and continues to dampen economic growth. This was even noted by KNUST Pro Vice Chancellor William Ellis in his speech opening the two-week GoGlobal Ghana conference.1 Collapse of consumer spending hits exactly the types of products that GoGlobal was creating: lifestyle accessories such as audio speakers enclosed in calabashes and laptop bags made from recycled bicycle tires. What if GoGlobal had leveraged Barker and Hall’s extensive design and entrepreneurship experience to lead the collaboration amongst RCA and Ghanaian designers for products that solved problems for customers in Ghana? GoGlobal Ghana would not face a currency exchange risk, and would be insulated from sudden foreign demand free fall. GoGlobal would also be able to leverage design innovation to address their development aim in two ways: creating wealth through the profits of value-added production, and reducing poverty by making goods that improve the quality of life of Ghanaians at a price they can afford. Outside oil-rich Angola and Nigeria, it is domestic demand that has supported continued economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa,2 making design for domestic consumption a smart development strategy. The vagaries of fashion fads in international markets are much harder to successfully target than the needs and desires of the almost 50 percent of, or more than 5 million, Ghanaians involved in subsistence agriculture.3 Incongruously for a project with a goal of generating economic growth, and a commitment to producing “ongoing value that lasted beyond the project period,” there is no discussion of how value created would be distributed. There is no discussion of any of the products designed through the collaboration, their production costs, or price-point. There is no discussion of how profits generated would be distributed between the UK and Ghanaian designers involved, the artisans who manufacture the products, domestic transportation providers, international shippers, the e-commerce site host, or the universities and other support organizations involved. Design can generate wealth, but for whom? In the case of GoGlobal Ghana this remains unclear despite the stated goal of nurturing developing countries through

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economic growth. Design is not just the product created; it is the system through which that product produces value. For a project with integral development goals, whether the project leads to equitable distribution of wealth according to labor contributed and risk taken, or whether it encourages wealth hording at the expense of the artisan is not a question external to design: it is the result of design. To take design as a development enterprise seriously, the enterprise itself—and the economic burdens and rewards it distributes—must be included. ShopAfrica53, the e-commerce site named as the host for the GoGlobal Ghana project, has stated that GoGlobal is not one of its merchants, as none of its products ever went into production. No financing or investment capital was provided to the artisans who were asked to produce the designers’ designs for sale to Western markets. The artisans’ unwillingness to take on the production risk of GoGlobal’s designs is a signal that in the eyes of the Ghanaian craftsmen, this design collaboration was not as successful for them, or for the Ghanaian economy, as Barker and Hall imply. Future GoGlobal initiatives in developing economies may want to reconsider the risks implicit in the export-led growth hypothesis, and not only the potential creation of, but also the distribution of, wealth. How was the decision made to invest in the two weeks of international collaboration between RCA, KNUST and other partners, but not in production of the designs themselves? The lessons that should be taken from GoGlobal are not only from what it did do, but also from what it did not do. Probing the assumptions on which the project was based demonstrates how intimately Barker and Hall’s specific case is intertwined with broader questions in the history and political economy of design. For whom does an increase of international networking create value? How are the profits from collaborative design distributed amongst all partners and producers? Does the distribution of value reflect investment risk, or pre-existing prestige? Why are Western (foreign) markets taken as the given target of “designed” goods? Why is an increase of exports—any export—taken as synonymous with sustained economic development? Future GoGlobal initiatives in developing economies—and other designers pursuing similar development projects and the historians who trace the effects of collaboration and production globally—may want to reconsider the risks implicit in the export-led growth hypothesis and what is lost when the domestic market is ignored. Nor should we forget that the story of design and its effects does not end with the creation of a product, and its promise of wealth creation; it continues through the distribution of both.

Notes 1 2 3

Frimpong, Enoch Darfah, “Explore New Ways of Doing Things,” in Graphic Nsempa (Brong Ahafo and Ashanti Regions) Monday June 8–14, 2009, p. 10. International Monetary Fund, “Country and Regional Perspectives” in World Economic Outlook 2008, p. 95. US Department of State, Bureau of African Affairs, “Background: Ghana,” October 2009. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2860.htm

RESOURCE GUIDE Compiled by Elizabeth Bisley

AIGA Center for Cross-Cultural Design The Center was established to foster greater communication between designers across cultures. It is based on the belief that it is imperative for designers to think beyond their national and cultural borders in order to create visual communication that is responsive to the diversity of audiences today. www.xcd.aiga.org

Asian Civilisations Museum The ACM presents a broad yet integrated perspective of pan-Asian cultures and civilizations. One of the National Museums of Singapore, it seeks to promote a better appreciation of the rich cultures that make up Singapore’s multi-ethnic society. www.acm.org.sg

Baltic Connections: Uncovering the Common Past of Countries around the Baltic Sea (1450–1800) The Baltic Connections project is an international effort to uncover the archives of the common past of the countries around the Baltic Sea during the period 1450–1800. The project aims at the compilation of an archival guide focused on themes such as trade, shipping, merchants, commodities, diplomacy, finances and migration. www.balticconnections.net

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BBC History: The Workshop of the World Authored by Professor Pat Hudson of Cardiff University, this web page explores the domination over world trade attained by British manufactured goods over a few decades during the 19th century. www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/workshop_of_the_world_01.shtml

The Black Sea Trade Project An interdisciplinary study of trade systems in the Black Sea over the past 5,000 years and their effects on local cultures and economies. www.museum.upenn.edu/Sinop/SinopIntro.htm

Bodleian Library The main research library of the University of Oxford. It is a copyright deposit library and is related to nine other libraries in Oxford, including: the Bodleian Japanese Library, the Indian Institute Library, and the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House. www.bodley.oc.ac.uk

The Fernand Braudel Center The Fernand Braudel Center at SUNY-Binghamton University was founded in September 1976 to engage in the analysis of large-scale social change over long periods of historical time. It supports a range of scholarly activities including fellowships, conferences, and a scholarly journal. http://fbc.binghamton.edu

The British Council The British Council is the United Kingdom’s public diplomacy and cultural organization. It works in 110 countries and its aim is to connect people with learning opportunities and creative ideas from the United Kingdom to build lasting relationships around the world. www.britishcouncil.org

The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum This museum is the first major institution in the United Kingdom to present the 500-year history and legacy of Britain’s overseas empire. As well as 16 permanent galleries, it offers a changing series of special exhibitions, lectures and seminars. A

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commercial archive uniquely illustrates Britain’s colonial past through film, photographs, objects, documents and sound recordings. www.empiremuseum.co.uk

British Library The national library of the United Kingdom, the British Library receives a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland. Its collection includes 150 million items, in most known languages. Online catalogues, information and exhibitions can be found on the website. www.bl.uk

British Museum The British Museum collection includes artefacts from across the world. They represent the people and places of the past two million years. www.britishmuseum.org

Bulletin of Portuguese–Japanese Studies The Bulletin of Portuguese–Japanese Studies is an English-language academic journal covering Japanese studies in Portugal and Portuguese links with Japan and other East and South-East Asian countries. http://cham.fcsh.unl.pt/pages/Publicacoes_BPJS.htm

Caravane Maritime Caravane Maritime is the term designating the use of Western European/’Christian’ shipping to carry Muslim goods and passengers between ports in the Ottoman Empire, including North Africa. By extension, it can include the inter-port carrying trade in the whole Mediterranean, whether by English, Dutch, French, Venetian/ Italian or ‘Greek’ vessels. This project brings together an international workshop comprising researchers working on the various aspects of the traffic. www.hull.ac.uk/caravane

Caribbean Studies Centre The Caribbean Studies Centre was established in 2002. The Centre’s website is a useful resource for all those interested in the Caribbean, its history, society, culture and everyday reality. www.londonmet.ac.uk/csc

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Central Eurasian Studies World Wide CESWW provides a global perspective on Central Asia studies, and is a key point of access to highly dispersed resources in this field. It encompasses all fields of the social sciences and humanities. http://cesww.fas.harvard.edu

Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University The CCR undertakes collaborative, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural research. In particular the Centre aims to develop new modes of research as well as to use traditional scholarly methods to provide innovative insights into the different ways that cross-cultural relations and histories are constructed and represented. www.anu.edu.au/culture

Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, University of Hong Kong The focus of the centre’s work is on issues of culture and globalization with special reference to Asia, China and Hong Kong. Major research themes include: the cultures of capitalism; culture, media and technology; cities and globalization; new communities, new publics. www.hku.hk/complit/csgc

Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies With an emphasis on history, culture, literature, religion, politics, economics and diplomacy, the Center is committed to promoting interdisciplinary approaches to the study of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives. The Center fosters comparisons and links across the Indian Ocean which connect the people of South Asia with those of South-East Asia and the Middle East. http://ase.tufts.edu/southasian

Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University An interdisciplinary research centre based at Lancaster University, the Centre for Mobilities Research addresses a concept of ‘mobilities’ encompassing both the largescale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life. www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/cemore

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Cook’s Pacific Encounters This website explores the collection of more than 300 Pacific artefacts held by the Georg-August University of Göttingen in Germany. Collected during the three Pacific voyages taken by James Cook between 1768 and 1780, these artefacts provide a rare insight into the Pacific island cultures James Cook encountered. The site also has research essays, an extensive bibliography and links to other online resources. www.nma.gov.au/cook

Design History Workshop Japan The Design History Workshop Japan is a nationwide network of researchers, historians, postgraduate students, designers, craftspeople, curators, promoters, collectors and journalists. Its goals are to build a broad network for mutual interaction and intellectual exchange between members in Japan and overseas. wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/dhwj/index-e.html

Design in Britain Online archive of British designers, architects and design movements that have influenced the development of modern and contemporary design all over the world. www.designmuseum.org/designinbritain

Diaspora, Migration and Identities A trans-disciplinary research programme whose aim is to research, discuss and present issues related to diasporas and migration, and their past and present impact on subjectivity and identity, culture and the imagination, place and space, emotion, politics and spatiality. www.diasporas.ac.uk

Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture Facsimilies and an image database of the Chipstone Foundation, and a list of American decorative arts organizations and resources. http:/decorativearts.library.wisc.edu

Digital South Asia Library The Digital South Asia Library provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia. Material is searchable under the following categories: images, maps,

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statistics, bibliographies, indexes, books, journals and Internet resources. The Library includes digitized historical documents such as The Imperial Gazetteer of India. http://dsal.uchicago.edu

The East India Company: Research Guide This guide is a brief introduction to the Honourable East India Company and material relating to it held by the British National Maritime Museum. It also includes a bibliography of secondary material. www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conWebDoc.604

Eighteenth Century Collections Online ECCO is the most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken. It delivers every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. www.gale.com/EighteenthCentury

Empire Exhibition Scotland 1938 This website offers a permanent resource for the exploration, research and public exhibition of the Empire Exhibition of 1938, seen in the context of Scottish and UK social and architectural history. www.empireexhibition1938.co.uk/index.html

Empire and Postcolonial Studies Research Group The Empire and Postcolonial Studies Research Group promotes research into the history and impact of empires and imperialism. It aims to facilitate collaboration between scholars across the Open University. http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/empire-and-postcolonial-studies/index.html

European Textile Network An exploration of European textiles. Routes are characterized into themes of: buildings, recurrent events, textile heritage, textile production; and education and research. www.etn-net.org

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The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies The Centre was established in 2002 by the Faculty of Arts of the Open University to promote interdisciplinary research into the cultures of Africa and Asia. Its website provides information about the Centre’s projects and networks, links to related sites and an online gallery. http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ferguson-centre/index.html

The Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction An organization of scholars dedicated to the study of the expansion of Europe and the worldwide response to that expansion, from its beginnings in the fourteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. http://uoregon.edu/~dnm/feegi

Fowler Museum at UCLA The Fowler Museum consolidates the various collections of non-Western art and artefacts on campus at UCLA. In addition to active collecting, the museum initiates research projects, fieldwork, exhibitions and publications. www.fowler.ucla.edu

Franz Mayer Museum The Museum’s collection consists of works of decorative art as well as sculpture and painting from Mexico, Europe and Asia dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. www.franzmayer.org.mx

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery The galleries have one of the strongest collections of Asian art in the world, including collections from China, Japan, Korea, South Asia and the Himalayan region, South-East Asia, Ancient Egypt and the Islamic World. Over 6,000 items from the collections can be viewed online. www.asia.si.edu

Gardiner Museum The Gardiner Museum looks at one of the world’s oldest and most universal forms of art and material culture – ceramics. The collection exceeds 3,000 historical and contemporary pieces and spans continents and time. www.gardinermuseum.on.ca

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GLAADH – Globalizing Art, Architecture and Design History The GLAADH project sought to encourage and embed cultural diversity in the Art, Architecture and Design History curriculum. It aimed to identify existing good practice, as well as promote and support emerging teaching and learning strategies in the subject, appropriate to a multicultural society within a global context. The GLAADH website includes information about the project, as well as bibliographies and lists of online resources. www.glaadh.ac.uk

Global Denim Project A project developed to understand the phenomenon of global denim: its history, extent, economics and consequences. www.ucl.ac.uk/global-denim-project

Global Economic History Network The GEHN Network, the product of co-operation across four partner institutions (the London School of Economics, the University of California (Irvine and Los Angeles), Leiden and Osaka Universities), promotes research, teaching and cooperation in the innovatory and rising field of global economic history. www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/GEHN/Default

Global Studies Association The Global Studies Association is a multi-disciplinary scholarly association set up in order to address the vast social, political and economic transformations of global scope which are impacting upon the world today. The GSA provides a forum for scholars to collaborate and explore shared responses to such phenomenon, particularly in the context of globalization. www.globalstudiesassociation.org

Globality Studies Journal Globality Studies Journal is an open access journal committed to interdisciplinary analyses of global history and society, global civilization and local cultures. www.stonybrook.edu/globality

H-Empire H-Empire seeks to bring together scholars and others interested in sharing resources, research and questions concerning the origin, development, working and decline of

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empires, rather broadly defined across academic disciplines and professional interests, chronological time periods, and geographical regions. www.h-net.org/~empire

The History of Cartography Project The History of Cartography Project uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine maps in the context of the societies that made and used them. www.geography.wisc.edu/histcart/#Home

Hudson’s Bay Company Archives This site is devoted to the archive of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), the oldest chartered trading company in the world, founded in 1670. The records document the history of the HBC since its inception following the history of the fur trade, North American exploration, the development of Canada as a country and the growth of HBC’s Canadian retail empire. www.gov.mb.ca/chc/archives/hbca

H-World A member of H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine, the H-World discussion list serves as a network of communication among practitioners of world history. The list gives emphasis to research, to teaching, and to the connections between research and teaching. www.h-net.org/~world

Indian Ocean World Center A research initiative and resource base established to promote the study of the history, economy and cultures of the lands and peoples touching the Indian Ocean World – from Africa to the Middle East, India, Indonesia and Australia to China. A complex regional trading system since the 10th century, the Indian Ocean World constituted the first ‘global’ economy. Current research priorities include: the rise and development of the first global economy; human migration and diaspora; slavery, the slave trade and slave diaspora; the exchange of commodities, technology and ideas. www.indianoceanworldcentre.com

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The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online IDP is an international collaboration to compile information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes. Tens of thousands of images along with catalogues, translations, historical photographs, and archaeological site plans are freely available on the IDP database. http://idp.bl.uk

International Exhibitions, 1831–1938 This web resource presents a ‘visual library’ of images and text, designed to support a Glasgow University History of Art course. The library can be searched either by particular exhibition, or by themes such as ‘Architecture and layout’, ‘Empire’ or ‘Souvenirs’ that span the entire period. The emphasis of the site is on Scottish exhibitions. http://www.arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk/int_ex

International Exhibtions, Expositions Universelles and World’s Fairs, 1851–2005: Bibliography An up-to-date and extensive bibliography of secondary sources on international expositions. http://www.csufresno.edu/library/subjectresources/specialcollections/WorldFairs

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World The Atlantic History Seminar’s aim is to advance the scholarship of young historians of many nations interested in aspects of Atlantic history in the formative years. The Seminar’s website includes an extensive list of external links and a database of dissertations in Atlantic history. www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic

Internet Global History Sourcebook The Internet History Sourcebooks provide access to online primary source material. The Global History Sourcebook is dedicated to exploration of interaction between world cultures. It does not look at ‘world history’ as the history of the various separate cultures but at ways in which the ‘world’ has a history in its own right. www.fordham.edu/halsall/global/globalsbook.html

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Iraq and China: Ceramics, Trade and Innovation Originally designed to accompany a physical exhibition, this online resource explores the ways China and India influenced each other’s ceramic decoration from the 8th to the 10th centuries and how these techniques in turn spread to other countries and regions. www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/iraqChina

Islam and Tibet: Cultural Interactions (8th–17th centuries) A research project aimed at providing a historical description of the cultural interactions between Tibet and the Islamic world, as they are evident in the history of sciences of these two cultures. http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/islamtibet/indexit.htm

ITER: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance Includes a bibliography on the period AD 400–1700. Citations for journal articles, reviews, review articles, bibliographies, catalogues, abstracts, monographs and discographies are included. www.itergateway.org

Maisons des Sciences de l’Homme Founded in 1963 upon the conviction that interdisciplinarity is essential for understanding the complex questions facing society and for moving beyond Eurocentrism in order to make sense of diverse cultures, the Fondation MSH’s mission is to act as ‘a facilitating, interdisciplinary, and international incubator’. www.msh-paris.fr/

Maps of South-East Asia: An Organized Collection A website which gives users access to a series of high-quality images of maps of the South Asian region. The maps are chronologically ordered into five sections: early maps, medieval maps, Mughal maps, colonial maps and modern maps. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00maplinks

Maritime Lanka Maritime Lanka is a website detailing the history of maritime archaeology in the bay of Galle in Sri Lanka. The site offers a good history of the East India Company and of trade in the East. http://cf.hum.uva.nl/galle/index.html

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Mediterranean Maritime History Network The MMHN acts as a clearing-house for the exchange of information concerning research currently underway relating to Mediterranean maritime history topics. Centred on the period from the thirteenth century to the twentieth century, it subscribes to a wide concept of maritime history, including: the sea as a means of communication, the carriage of people, goods and ideas, and the structures associated with this phenomenon, such as ports and the communities within which these are lodged. http://home.um.edu.mt/medinst/mmhn

Merchants from the Southern Netherlands and the Rise of the Amsterdam Staplemarket, 1578–1630 This website provides extensive data on merchants from the Southern Netherlands. The data is organized around two major tables. The first table contains the collective biography of merchants from the Southern Netherlands in Amsterdam. The second major table contains the prosopography of some 150 future immigrants around 1585, when they were still living and working in Antwerp. http://192.87.107.12:8080/kooplieden/

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s largest art museums. Its collections include more than two million works of art spanning 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe. www.metmuseum.org

Migrations in History Migrations in History explores the nature and complexity of the movement of peoples, cultures, ideas, and objects. Drawing from the vast and interdisciplinary collections of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, libraries, and archives, this site features the stories and artefacts of migration – what happens when people move, what they take with them, what they leave behind, and how they make their new place home. www.smithsonianeducation.org/migrations/start.html

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology houses worldclass collections of Oceanic, Asian, African and native American art. It supports a

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wide range of research projects, with a focus on cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies. maa.cam.ac.uk

Museum Nasional Indonesia Indonesia’s national museum houses over 100,000 cultural objects. The ceramics collection is of particular use, offering insight into Indonesia’s maritime trade over the centuries. www.museumnasional.org

National Art Library The National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum is a major public reference library. Its strength lies in the range and depth of its holdings of documentary material concerning the fine and decorative arts of many countries and periods. www.vam.ac.uk/nal

National Library of Australia Pictorial Collection This catalogue contains descriptions of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and three-dimensional objects held in the Pictures Collection of the National Library of Australia. The emphasis is on Australian material, with other material relating to New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. The main time period covered is late eighteenth century to the present day. www.nla.gov.au/catalogue/pictures

New France – New Horizons on French Soil in America New France is an online exhibition and database dealing with French colonial history in Canada, 1604–1763. The database of digitized archival documents, which are in French, is searchable, and users can also access 350 of the documents through a themed exhibition. The themes cover departure, navigation, discovery, encounter, settlement, foundation, daily life, administration, trade, worship, warfare, and survival. www.archivescanadafrance.org

New Global History New Global History employs conceptual thinking and empirical research, utilizing an historical perspective, to advance understanding of the multi-faceted dimensions of globalization processes. www.newglobalhistory.org

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New York Public Library Digital Gallery Over 520,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of the New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, and printed ephemera. http:/digitalgallery.nypl.org

Nineteenth–Century Art Worldwide A scholarly e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe. Open to various historical and theoretical approaches, the editors welcome contributions that reach across national boundaries and illuminate intercultural contact zones. www.19thc-artworldwide.org

Norwich Textiles The Norwich Textiles project examines the development of textiles in the city of Norwich from medieval times to the present day. The website provides a detailed history of textiles in Norwich through the ages, including manufacture, trade, economy and fabrics and fashions. www.norwichtextiles.org.uk

Pacific Asia Museum Pacific Asia Museum has a collection of over 14,000 works of art including paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, jades and textiles from all over Asia and the Pacific Islands, and a research library containing more than 7,000 reference volumes relating to Asian and Pacific art and culture. www.pacificasiamuseum.org

Peabody Essex Museum The Peabody is a museum of art, architecture and culture located in Salem, Massachusetts, and founded in 1799. It holds collections of American decorative arts; Asian, Indian, Oceanic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, African and Native American art, plus Asian export art, early American architecture, maritime art, rare books and manuscripts and photography. www.pem.org

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Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection includes more than 250,000 historical and contemporary maps, covering all areas of the world. More than 11,000 map images from the collection are available online and the website provides links to other useful map sites. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps

Pitt Rivers Museum The Pitt Rivers Museum was founded in 1884 when Lt.-General Pitt Rivers gave his collection to the University of Oxford. The Museum displays archaeological and ethnographic objects from all parts of the world. The General’s founding gift contained more than 18,000 objects but there are now over half a million. Many were donated by early anthropologists and explorers. www.prm.ox.ac.uk

PotWeb An online catalogue of the Ashmolean’s entire ceramic collection. The collection is divided into four sections: Early Europe and Near East; Classical to Medieval; Europe from 1500; Oriental and Islamic. www.ashmolean.org/PotWeb

Public Culture: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Transnational Cultural Studies A reviewed, interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year by Duke University Press. Public Culture seeks a critical understanding of the global cultural flows and cultural forms of the public sphere which define the late twentieth century. The website allows access to article titles and abstracts. www.publicculture.org

Reconstructing the Quseiri Documents The RQAD project was set up to study a range of Arabic documents unearthed at Quseir al-Qadim on the Egyptian Red Sea coast, dating back to a period of Islamic occupation in the 13th to 15th centuries. Translations of the documents provide a look into a network of commercial and religious activities in Quseir, and its trade links with the hinterland, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/rqad

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Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History The Ricci Institute is an interdisciplinary research center that promotes the study of historical cross-cultural encounters and dialogues between China and the West. The Institute facilitates and engages in research on the history of Chinese–Western cultural exchange and the history of Christianity in China through scholarly research programs, publications, conferences, and public events. www.usfca.edu/ricci/

Rijksmuseum The Rijskmuseum has a very extensive cultural history collection. The items comprise hundreds of thousands of objects from the past, which together give a visual account of the Netherlands’ history within a global context. www.rijksmuseum.nl

Russia Engages the World, 1453–1825 Based on a New York Public Library exhibition of the same name, Russia Engages the World is organized into five sections, each of which considers Russian and world history during a given period. Each section offers an overview, with brief summaries and selected images. http://russia.nypl.org/home.html

Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Culture Promotes the study of material and visual cultures of the Japanese archipelago and aims to act as a catalyst for international research in the field. www.sainsbury-institute.org

School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Research Online Part of the University of London, SOAS is the UK’s leading research institution for Asia and Africa in all disciplines. This free, publicly accessible repository of the institution’s research output contains both full text papers and descriptive records. https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/information.html

The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith The website of a British Library exhibition on the Silk Road, which opened in May 2004. The site provides five illustrated themes related to the Silk Road: the development of the book and the invention of printing; languages and scripts of the

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eastern Silk Road; Buddhas and bodhisattvas; play on the Silk Road; and the Silk Road sky. www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/silkroad/main.html

Society for Renaissance Students The main academic association supporting the study of the Renaissance throughout Europe. The website includes an extensive list of online resources. www.rensoc.org.uk

South Land to New Holland: Dutch Charting of Australia (1606–1756) South Land to New Holland celebrates early Dutch exploration of the Australian coast, drawing on the rare maps and other resources from the collections of Australia’s National, State and Territory libraries. http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/southland/index.html

South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760–1800) An online information resource for the history of European voyaging and crosscultural encounters in the Pacific between 1760 and 1800. The website allows access to important historical documents and literary works from the period; historical images and rare maps relating to eighteenth-century voyaging in Australian and Pacific seas; and online editions of works illustrative of indigenous Pacific cultures before and during the years between 1760 and 1800. http://southseas.nla.gov.au

Tatau/Tattoo Embodied Art and Cultural Exchange c. 1760–2000 The website of a research project into the history of body arts as an aspect of the flow of Oceanic–European cultural exchange. www.vuw.ac.nz/tatau

TANAP (Towards a New Age of Partnership) The TANAP programme brings together institutions that hold VOC (Dutch East India Company) archives. Bringing VOC initiatives into one programme, it seeks to facilitate an historical approach that blends the use of both VOC and local sources to inform upon a broad range of Asian and African subjects. www.tanap.net

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Te Papa Tongarewa – The Museum of New Zealand Housing national collections of art, design, and material culture, Te Papa preserves and presents the taonga (treasures) of New Zealand’s peoples and interprets the country’s heritage for national and international audiences. www.tepapa.govt.nz

Textiles Collection The collection of world textiles at the University College for Creative Arts at Farnham consists of over 3,000 artefacts, including: woven Coptic textiles from CE 800–1000; British woollen cloths; Kashmir shawls; African strip weaving; English and French engraved roller prints from 1750 to 1850. www.vads.ac.uk/collections/ST.html

Tjibaou Cultural Centre The Centre was established to promote and preserve Kanak archaeological and linguistic heritage; to encourage contemporary modes of expression within Kanak culture, particularly in the fields of crafts, audiovisual presentations and artistic creativity; to promote cultural exchanges, particularly within the South Pacific region; and to carry out research programmes. www.adck.nc

Trading Places – The East India Company and Asia 1600–1834 The website of a British Library exhibition, Trading Places – The East India Company and Asia follows the rise and fall of the Company over 200 years. The exhibition also looks at the lasting impression that the Company made in both Britain and Asia and its legacy is a story of today. www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/trading/home.html

Transnational Society Project A Worldwide Universities Initiative, the project examines the multiple ties and interactions that link people, institutions, and cultures across the borders of nation states. www.wun.ac.uk/tnsproject/index.html

University of Leeds International Textiles Archive ULITA collects, preserves and documents textiles and other related design material from most of the major textile producing areas of the world. The website provides

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details of the collections, information on exhibitions and events, details of educational resources and publications. www.leeds.ac.uk/ulita

University of the Arts Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation A forum for historical, theoretical and practice-based research in architecture, art, communication, craft and design. www.transnational.org.uk

USC Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute The USC Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute supports advanced research and scholarship on human societies between 1450 and 1850. The Institute’s range is global, aiming to advance knowledge of the diverse societies in and around the Atlantic and Pacific basins. http://college.usc.edu/emsi/

Victoria and Albert Museum V&A South Kensington is a museum of art and design, with collections unrivalled in their scope and diversity. The collection, including ceramics, furniture, fashion, glass, jewellery, metalwork, photographs, sculpture, textiles and paintings, is entirely searchable online. http://collections.vam.ac.uk

Victorian Database Online Indexes books, articles, dissertation abstracts published 1945 to the present in every field of late nineteenth-century studies, with particular emphasis on history and literature. Also a ‘critic’s choice’ of recent publications and comprehensive lists of recent books and articles. www.victoriandatabase.com

Virtueller Katalogue Kunstgeschichte A meta-search engine of holdings in European libraries of art historical materials. Covers books, periodicals, conference papers, festschriften, exhibition catalogues. Links to the indexed library catalogues. www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/vk_kunst.html

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Warburg Institute Library The Warburg’s 350,000 or so volumes are classified in four sections: social and political history; religion, history of science and philosophy; literature, books, libraries and education; history of art. There are 2,500 runs of periodicals, about half of them are current. Other resources include a complete microfiche edition of the 4,800 pre-1800 volumes in the Cicognara collection, Vatican library, numismatic libraries, and the working papers of Aby Warburg and other key art historical figures. www.sas.ac.uk/warburg/mnemosyne/entrance.htm

Warwick Global History and Culture Centre The Centre promotes a global approach to historical questions and research and aims to develop the new field of global history and culture. www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc

Winterthur Library The best library in the US for American household goods and their use, decorative arts and design and the material culture of everyday life in America from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. http:/library.winterthur.org:8000/cgi-bin/webgw

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures actor-network theory (ANT) 4, 153, 163–164 advertising 63, 66, 77, 85, 86, 87–88, 91, 94, 95–96, 111, 115, 116, 153–157, 163–164 Africa 13, 14, 34, 41, 72–81, 142, 168, 175–177, 180–188, 189–191 aluminum 112, 121–122 anti-globalism 1, 8, 120 Antwerp 13, 17 architecture 8–9, 76, 77, 82, 100, 124–126, 135, 166–173, 174–179 artisans see craft Australia 76, 138–149, 150–152 automobiles 102, 112–113, 121–122 Bauhaus 100, 107–109, 135 Benjamin, Walter 65, 85, 87, 93 Bhabha, Homi 73 boundaries 7, 12, 22, 54, 61, 90–92, 169 Britain 37–45, 47–49, 65–66, 69–70, 72–81, 82, 98, 110–118, 168, 182–183 British East India Company, see English East India Company Butler, Judith 73, 82 calico see cotton canton 34–35

carpets (see also textiles) 11, 14–15, 15, 174 Castells, Manuel 170, 172 centre/margin dichotomy 7, 18, 54–55, 63–68, 69–71, 176 ceramics 17–18, 23, 38–39, 50–59, 60, 111 China 4, 22, 25–32, 34–36, 37, 49, 50–59, 60–62, 91, 139, 153–162, 163–165, 177, 181 chinoiserie see China, exoticism, stereotype clothing see fashion le Comte, Louis Daniel 25–26, 31 competition 40–44, 48, 51, 56, 64, 69, 98, 101–102, 110–111, 185 conflict 18, 23, 74, 102–103, 108–109 Constantinople see Istanbul corporations 8, 91, 112, 127, 130, 159, 166–167 cosmopolitanism 23, 174 cotton (see also textiles) 22, 34–36, 37–45, 47–49, 111 courts 9, 25–27, 39, 63–64, 69 craft 9, 26, 63, 69, 75–76, 98, 110–111, 119, 123, 134–136, 140–141, 150–151, 180–188 department stores see retailing deterritorialization 90 drawings 13, 26, 43, 91

224 Index

Dutch East India Company 31 dyes 13–14, 41, 44, 48, 141–142 east/west dichotomy 21, 37, 150–151 economic expansion see growth embroidery 38–39, 42–43, 47, 64, 141–142, 143, 144, 146 empire see imperialism England, see Britain English East India Company 6, 35, 38–40, 43–44, 48 ethnicity 6, 17, 73–74, 97, 130, 138, 140–142, 145, 150, 166–169, 183 eurocentrism 4, 6, 167, 169 exchange see trade exoticism 6, 22, 26, 44, 47, 49, 66, 75–76, 78, 116, 140, 147, 150–152 exploitation 141, 150, 191 expositions 72–81, 82–84, 98, 100, 119, 174 fashion 37–45, 63–68, 69–71, 124, 138–149, 150–152 film see media and mediation flow see networks food 1, 32, 35, 55, 61, 181 France 40, 64–67, 69–70, 127 furniture 111, 123–133, 130, 131, 134–137 Gandhi, Mahatma 110, 119, 121 gender 40–41, 70, 73, 141, 147, 151, 155 Germany 98–106, 107–109, 134 glass 12–13, 26, 38–39, 60 gold (see also metalwork) 64 graphics 90–91, 114, 116 great divergence 4, 12, 44 Great Exhibition of 1851, see expositions growth 12, 56, 70, 88–90, 103, 123, 165, 180–183, 187, 189–190 Holland see Netherlands hybridity 5, 17–18, 48–49, 74–78, 116, 151, 168 imitation 13, 17, 55, 60–61, 139, 159 imperialism 7–8, 66–67, 72–81, 102–103, 120, 145, 147 import substitution 40, 50–59, 60–62 India 4, 30, 37–45, 47–49, 60, 110–118, 119–122, 138–149, 150–151

industrial design 98, 112, 134, 184 industrialism and industrialization 4, 6, 92, 98–106, 110–113, 123, 136, 169, 174, 181–184 International Conference on Design History and Studies (ICDHS) 3 internet 67, 140, 153–162, 163–165, 180–188, 189–191 Istanbul 13, 14, 29, 102, 123–133, 134–136 Italy (see also Venice) 11–20, 40 Japan 31, 37, 50–59, 60–62, 92, 111, 181 language 4–5, 35, 48, 74, 83, 113, 182 literacy see language local 5, 54, 127, 136, 149, 150–151, 166, 168–169, 174–176, 183 Loos, Adolf 99–100 magazines see media and mediation maiolica see ceramics Manila 18, 22–23 mass production see industrialism McLuhan, Marshall 95–96 media and mediation 1, 63, 66–68, 70, 84, 85, 96–97, 121, 154, 177, 181 merchants (see also yrade) 12–14, 22, 26, 31, 42, 48, 51–54, 56–57, 61, 101, 124, 140 metalwork (see also aluminum, gold, silver) 16–17, 39, 60, 127–129 Mexico 13–14, 18, 147 Middle East 12, 14, 29, 34, 142, 170, 176 modernism 2, 98–99, 108–109, 123–133, 134–137, 145, 168–170, 174 museums 1, 8, 35, 77, 179, 187 music 49, 78, 186 Muthesius, Hermann 98–100, 103 nationalism 9, 64, 74, 108, 121 Netherlands 30, 62, 76 networks (see also actor-network theory) 1, 3, 4, 88, 153–162, 163–165, 170–171, 184–195 novelty 39, 40, 55, 83, 139–140, 185–186, 190 Nubia 175–177 otherness 23, 87, 96–97, 138, 150–152, 167–168

Index 225

Ottoman Empire see Turkey performativity 73–79 Persia 13–14, 37 Pevsner, Nikolaus 6 porcelain (see also ceramics) 23, 25–32, 28, 29, 34–36, 61 Portugal 13–14, 25, 30, 43 post-colonialism 2, 67, 73, 145 primitivism (see also stereotypes) 66, 76, 87, 126–127 railroads 96, 172 raw materials 38, 63, 75, 78, 85, 89–92, 103, 170, 185 retailing 9, 65–67, 126, 129–132, 135, 184–185, 191 silk (see also textiles) 13–14, 22–23, 25, 39–42, 92, 140, 142 silver (see also metalwork) 16, 23, 39, 52, 60, 100 Sinocentrism 25 skill see craft South Africa 72–81, 82–84, 121, 183 speed see temporality Sri Lanka 168 steel 102, 112–113, 113, 119, 128, 169 stereotypes (see also primitivism) 6, 27, 68, 70, 76, 141 Syria 15 Tagore, Rabindranath 119

tea 50–59 technology 9, 13–14, 18, 51, 85–94, 95–97, 117, 153–162, 163–165 telephones 85–94, 95–97 television see media and mediation temporality 70–71, 153–154, 158, 186–187 textiles (see also carpets, cotton, embroidery, silk, wool) 13–14, 66, 111, 112, 119–120, 140–142, 144, 147, 150 tourism 7–8, 65–66, 116, 127, 140, 147, 172, 180, 189 trade 1, 4, 7, 13, 17, 21, 30, 34–35, 51, 62, 89–90, 103, 142, 167, 182–184, 189 translation see language travel 1, 7, 22, 27, 37, 51, 69, 88, 135, 140, 168–172 Turkey (see also Istanbul) 11, 14, 123–133, 134–137, 142 United States 65–66, 77, 85–94, 96, 125, 127, 134, 176 Venice 12–14, 40, 60, 147 Victoria and Albert Museum (London) xv, 5, 119 warfare see conflict weaving see textiles Werkbund (Deutscher Werkbund) 98–106, 107–109 wool 38, 39, 48