READING 2
Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton, In the Balance: Themes
in Global History (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998), selections from chapter 15,
“Crucibles of Change: Landscapes, Material Culture, and Social Life after
1500.”
Abstract: This essay continues the theme of exploring social and cultural
change after 1500, but in terms of cultural identity, trade, and material
transformations. Once commodities were marketed around the world after
1500, new products and ideas could substantially alter the fabric of life in a
variety of settings. Such commodities also led to increasing connections
between the peoples of the world, whether these connections were
recognized or not. At the same time, changes brought by the new global
economy were not uniform over space and time, and affected some regions
far more deeply than others.
Introduction
The economic expansion of Europe made possible the distribution of goods to
markets around the world, thus creating a shared global material culture.
Though after 1500 the processes of change throughout the world were
increasingly knit together, some parts of the globe were profoundly affected
by the economic expansion of Europe, while others were not; some were
highly urbanized, while others were not. Regardless of the relationship with
Europe or the degree of urbanism, transformations experienced at the levels
of individual and community throughout the world in the centuries after
1500 were expressed in physical landscapes, material culture, and social life.
Landscapes of Cultural Identity
The most concrete sites of transformation were the physical landscapes in
which people lived, worked, and played and across which they traveled.
Dynamic cultural patterns altered by historical change shaped the ways that
people understood the landscapes they inhabited and how they represented
these landscapes in visual arts and in narrative forms (myths, stories). As
crucibles of change, the landscapes of the period after 1500 may have been
linked together in a new global way through the expansion of Europe, but
people continued to experience and understand them largely according to
distinct cultural orientations.
Chinese Landscapes
The commercial revolution in twelfth- and thirteenth-century China (see
Chapter 11), including the development of the iron and steel industry,
brought about a physical change in the landscape through deforestation as a
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result of the search for fuel to fire blast furnaces, mining, and such things as
the dredging of canals for transportation. The Chinese response to these
changes in the landscape was shaped by concepts deeply rooted in early
thought and shared by people at all levels of society.
Geomancy
From early times in China, a belief in systems of correspondence between the
human and natural worlds governed Chinese understanding of the place of
humans in the cosmos and how humans might achieve harmony within it. By
the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), ideas about correspondence between
the physical forms of the earth and the siting of human dwellings, graves,
and temples were systematized into what is known as “geomancy.” The idea
of correspondence in geomancy meant that, for example, rocks were regarded
as “kernels of energy, bones of earth” and waterways were likened to the
arteries of the human body. Geomancy greatly influenced decisions people
made about important matters—where they lived, where they buried their
dead—at every level of society. Though some scholars criticized the
superstitious nature of geomantic beliefs, geomancy remained an essential
component of the Chinese worldview into modern times.
Fundamental to geomancy is the notion that propitious siting of human
dwellings, graves, and temples enables people to use the positive energy
embedded in the topographical patterns of the earth. Similarly, it is believed
that misplacing graves will ensure misfortune for the heirs of the deceased.
The proper location of the imperial palace enabled the emperor to tap the
energy pattern of the entire empire. Mountains (shan) and water (shui) were
the key elements in establishing the geomantic reading of place: the
topographical composition of mountain and water revealed sites where
humans could access power concentrated in the earth. These two terms used
together, shanshui, came to refer to landscape painting.
Landscape Painting
Landscapes had been the dominant genre of painting in China since its
development in the early centuries of the first millennium. Landscape
painting, and painting in general, was closely related to the arts of poetry and
calligraphy, since poems in elegant calligraphy were often inscribed on
paintings and calligraphy itself was regarded as an art. In the late fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, the city of Suzhou in the Yangzi delta was the home
of a famous school of landscape painting, as well as noted poets and
calligraphers. In addition to regional schools of painters whose work focused
on particular local landscapes, both literary imagination—recalling famous
poets or poems with visual images—and the imitation of earlier masters were
characteristic of landscape painting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Imitation, however, was more than merely copying: it meant grasping
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intuitively the spirit of the ancient painting and reproducing that spirit, rather
than an exact copy of the original.
Gardens
In addition to being the center of a famous regional school of landscape
painting, the city of Suzhou in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was
also famed for its gardens. Landscape painting and the construction of
gardens were closely related. Gardens were attempts to capture all the
elements of nature in a microcosmic setting, with rocks representing
mountains and small streams representing rivers. Plants and flowers were
juxtaposed with pavilions, bridges, and other buildings to create a harmonic
composition, much like the composition of a landscape painting. Both
gardens and landscape paintings were representations of nature as
interpreted by humans, not realistic depictions of the natural world.
The urban material world contrasted sharply with the controlled perfection
and harmony visualized in the nature of enclosed gardens. Like landscape
painting, during the Ming (1368–1644) gardens were associated with the
culture of the literati, who were often amateur painters as well as
connoisseurs of garden design. Though the building of private gardens
originated in the Han and became somewhat prevalent in the Song (960–
1279), a mania for garden building swept through centers of urban prosperity
in the Ming (1368–1644). Retired officials, merchants, and local gentry spent
enormous sums to hire designers, purchase exotic rocks and plants, dredge
ponds, and wall in properties for garden display. Though gardens were
meant in one sense to provide seclusion from the noise and bustle of the city
and the public world of official life, they also became sites of social
interaction. Writing about gardens proliferated in the Ming as owners drew
up guides to their gardens and encouraged their friends to compose verses to
commemorate the gardens. Poetry readings were held in gardens along with
viewings of paintings and other prized possessions, such as jade, antique
bronzes, and porcelains.
By the sixteenth century the material prosperity and accumulated commercial
wealth of Ming merchants enabled them to construct expensive gardens that
could display their refined taste and cultural sensibilities to the literati, whose
cultivated style and status the merchants desired to emulate. The enclosure of
nature in a walled urban garden was a way for wealth in property to be made
acceptable by its transformation into art. By procuring expensive rocks and
plants and hiring artisans to design a garden, a merchant could take part in
cultural activities associated with literati life and gain access to their social
world. By such means merchants could aspire to translate commercial wealth
into social acceptance.
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Real and Imagined Landscapes
In other ways, too, culture shaped the landscape. Literati who traveled to
famous places associated with important cultural and historical figures and to
religious sites such as temples, shrines, or sacred mountains produced travel
diaries and accounts of pilgrimage sites, both maps and drawings. On the
other hand, literati artists often painted famous mountains or other sites they
had never visited, and the representation of such a site was enriched by
meanings embedded in calligraphic renderings of poems on the painting
itself. These paintings, which could be considered imagined landscapes, often
bore little or no relationship to the actual physical space they were said to
represent.
European Landscapes
Landscape painting flourished in Europe by the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, though it was never the dominant genre that landscape
painting was in China and had very different themes and motifs. Chinese
landscapes portrayed huge mountains and misty clouds, distant vistas with
spare detail; human figures were miniscule if they were shown at all.
European landscapes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
represented by the paintings of the French artist Claude Lorrain (1600–1682),
were often imaginative reconstructions—not unlike their Chinese
counterparts—but they were inspired by very different ideas and sources.
Claude Lorrain painted scenes of idealized nature drawn from inspiration in
the antique ruins and scenery of the Roman countryside, where he spent
much of his life. He combined different elements of scenes around Rome and
added to them classical Greek and Roman or biblical figures dressed in
pastoral or antique costumes. Integrating human figures into an idealized
landscape painted in careful detail, Claude Lorrain showed nature as a
harmonious and serene setting for human activities.
The eighteenth-century French painter Francois Boucher (1703–1770) painted
rustic themes for the entertainment of the French court, providing diversion
from the formality of court life by portraying court ladies as shepherdesses in
natural settings. Boucher’s paintings were thus idealized rural scenes where
members of elite society could imagine themselves as Boucher portrayed
them free of the restraints of court life. Eighteenth-century European
landscape paintings, exemplified by Boucher, were compositions of artists
created by selecting the most beautiful elements in nature. Similarly, Chinese
landscapes were artistic compositions that were often constructed through
the use of imagination or literary memory; they were not realistic depictions
of scenes in nature, even when they represented a specific place.
Far more typical of European painting were portraits of people and scenes
from daily life. Already in the Renaissance, for example, wealthy merchants
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could commission a portrait as easily as an aristocrat or a ruler could. As
urban landscapes began to be transformed by new social classes, artistic
interest in rural scenes and peasant life continued. Paintings such as Lute
Player and Card Players by the Italian Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1573–
1610) or Dice Players and Young Fish Seller by the Spaniard Bartolome Murillo
(1617–1682) portrayed ordinary life and pastimes, as did works by the Dutch
painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). In France several members of the
artistic Le Nain family (late sixteenth-late seventeenth century) produced
remarkable paintings of peasant life.
When the middle class in Europe replaced popes and aristocrats as patrons of
artists in the seventeenth century, portrait painting flourished. Dutch
portraits of middle class culture and interior landscapes by masters such as
Rembrandt van Rijn (1616–1669) or Jan Vermeer (1632–1675) contrasted with
the urbanized and industrialized physical landscape outside the domestic
interiors of family life. In contrast, landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain
sought to recapture an idealized natural world that was increasingly
disappearing (or never existed in quite the way he depicted it).
Cross-Cultural Landscapes
As changes in landscapes became more evident in Europe, interest in the
construction of gardens became a popular expression of artistic and cultural
interests, much as the fad for garden construction in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century China corresponded with increased material prosperity
in urban settings. Unlike Chinese gardens, however, eighteenth-century
European gardens reflected global contacts, by the use of plants from Africa,
Asia, and the Americas and by foreign influences on landscape styles. The
botanical gardens that opened at Kew in 1760 played a singularly important
role in encouraging the identification of the new species of plants arriving
from ports around the world.
Chinese gardens influenced European landscape architecture. In 1687 Sir
William Temple, in his Gardens of Epicurus, praised the intricate irregularity of
Chinese gardens that he had visited. Temple’s work, together with Batty
Langley’s New Principles of Gardening (1728), ensured that Chinese plans
would influence European gardens. Sir William Chambers’s Designs of Chinese
Buildings, published in 1757, introduced Chinese styles to English
architecture. The best-known example of Chambers’s work is his pagoda in
Kew Gardens near London.
The fashion for chinoiserie, the elements of Chinese style adapted to European
material culture in elegant garden structures and bridges, produced a design
that derived from the idea that a landscape should follow the natural
undulations of land and the meanderings of streams to provide moods of
enchantment and awe. This style spread all over Europe. In 1774 the French
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king Louis XVI made an Anglo-Chinese park for his queen, Marie Antoinette,
at Versailles; the park’s central feature was the serpentine wanderings of a
stream. However, the place where the elegant style took most permanent root
was perhaps Sweden. At Drottningholm Palace near Stockholm a magnificent
Chinese pavilion built in 1766 with a pagoda and surrounding gardens reflect
careful study of Chinese landscape models.
European gardens had far less influence on Asian landscape gardening, but
Jesuit fathers attached to the Chinese court in the eighteenth century oversaw
the construction of several pleasure pavilions in the Italian baroque style.
They also added towers and fountains in the European manner to imperial
gardens on the outskirts of Beijing.
African Landscapes: Metallurgy and Culture
Few things have transformed natural or cultural landscapes more than metal
technology. Both figuratively and literally, metallurgy provided crucibles of
change. The environmental impact of metalworking activities contributed to
the awesome powers often associated with blacksmiths and metallurgists
around the world. By the sixteenth century few parts of the world had not felt
the tremendous effects of smelting, casting, and smithing operations, which
seriously deforested vast regions. With few exceptions these technologies
required large quantities of charcoal fuel, made from particular species of
hardwood trees. Such trees provided the requisite high temperatures, but
they were slow growing and not easily replaced within each generation.
Deforestation
Deforestation was the inevitable consequence of industrial expansion. In
Europe metalworkers and other artisans sought alternative fuels as early as
the twelfth century. In China coal was used even earlier, though selectively,
as a replacement for charcoal when wood charcoal became scarce. In most
regions of the African continent, iron smelting had similarly deforested large
tracts of land and thus contributed to population movements and eventually
to the need to import cheap metals, since suitable coal supplies were not
available for smelting. Production of pottery, glass, and other household
needs also taxed the available fuel supplies as African urban populations
increased in density.
African societies after about 1650 were witnessing their own transformations,
especially environmental. In general, deforestation as a consequence of
traditional iron industries and the violent depopulation of sub-Saharan Africa
during the slave trade destroyed the conditions necessary for agricultural
growth and indigenous technological innovation. Forests gave way to
deforested landscapes, and urbanization increased in coastal areas, which
functioned as magnets for Afro-European commercial growth and dense
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settlement. Cultural forms, however, remained vibrant and syncretic,
blending the old and new elements in crucibles of change.
Many African societies perceived landscapes as dynamic social and spiritual
as well as physical spaces. Specific landscapes were identified with family
and ethnic history, since ancestors were believed to reside in the earth. The
landscapes important to blacksmiths, who used huge quantities of specialized
trees for charcoal fuel, were particularly subject to transformation. Mande
blacksmiths in West Africa used their knowledge of the physical world and
skills to intervene in and influence certain types of political situations.
Jiridon is the Mande term for knowledge or science of the trees, a specialized
knowledge of the principles related to spiritual, medicinal, and natural energy
that smiths could harness to create change, balance, and harmony. The
activities of blacksmiths, making iron tools and weapons, created the forces of
civilized space. Human-built and natural landscapes were thus altered through
the practice of their technology. Iron tools such as hoes and spades were used
to move earth, convert forests to fields, and literally transform African
landscapes. Metals and metal objects imported after 1500, during the era of
Atlantic trade, threatened to transform these links. Above all, the profound
impact of technological changes in the period reflects the growing recognition
of interconnectedness between Europeans and non-Europeans experienced by
global societies as a consequence of the European industrial revolution.
Changing World Landscapes: Trade, Technology, and
Material Transformations
The frontiers of opportunity created by industrial expansion were not limited
to European shores. The period between 1500 and 1800, the era of the
European intrusion into Africa, Asia, and the Americas, saw the gradual
expansion of world commerce. Until the end of the sixteenth century,
Portugal (through Macao) and Spain (through Manila) were the principal
providers of Asian wares to Europe. Then came the English East India
Company (1600) and the Dutch, who opened a trading factory at Nagasaki,
Japan, in 1600. Successful French efforts date from the reorganized French
East India Company in the 1720s, but transshipment in Europe made Asian
goods available to the French earlier.
Raw materials and manufactured goods from Asia and Europe were
transshipped to Africa and the Americas, creating global access to
commodities. Trade provided products that first introduced Europeans to the
features and styles of African and Asian arts, just as Africans and Asians were
introduced to European goods and styles. Increased production relied on
expanding markets in Africa and Asia. Along the Atlantic coasts, new cities
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emerged to serve these markets, and these cities became centers for the
diffusion of European technology.
In many parts of the world, power continued to be derived from control over
technology and the valuable trade items that technology produced.
Sometimes technological innovations were stimulated by the expansion of
markets; elsewhere, artistic styles and innovation were valued for their own
contribution to sumptuous urban life as well as to individual or social
identity. Technological innovation and tradition helped create luxury goods
for global distribution. The movement of material goods reflected the
beginnings of a shared global culture.
Consuming Cultures: Europe and the World
The development of world markets significantly involved Africans,
increasingly so after the seventeenth century. Early exchanges between
African and European merchants were limited to coastal interactions in
which Europeans were interlopers in preexisting trade patterns. Some
cultural expressions developed specifically from the interactions. West
African tourist art was produced from Sierra Leone to Nigeria: intricately
carved ivory saltcellars made their way via European sailing ships to great
dining halls in Europe. Elsewhere there were early signs of cultural resistance
to European imports.
Reweaving the Threads of Culture
According to one Portuguese observer in 1505–1508, the first Europeans in
the area of southeast Nigeria bought locally made textiles and other products,
and only later did Europeans sell imported cloth to Africans. Even after 350
years of European trade, it was possible to find an extensive weaving
tradition remaining in Igala, an Ibo community. A later British colonial
official, writing in 1854, identified “country cloth ornamented with
perforations . . . done during the weaving,” a reference to the elaborate
openwork cloth handwoven by women on vertical looms. Their named
patterns referred to ancient titles of rank, and cloths were custom-made for
specific individuals or ritual uses. This example suggests the importance of
the individual cultural contexts into which items of European material
culture and technology were selectively introduced.
Continuities in the meanings and use of material goods were maintained
even when the goods themselves changed. Imported goods were often
incorporated into local culture. For example, European merchants in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sold vast quantities of Asian silks and
brocades on the Gold Coast to Akan weavers, who unraveled them and
rewove the silken threads into the named patterns of traditional Akan kente
cloth. The blacksmiths of northern Ghana raised their forges in a European
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style for the repair and manufacture of guns first introduced by European
traders, but they built those raised forges to resemble female bodies, similar
to the traditional smelting furnaces, which gave birth to iron.
Kingdom of the Kongo
In the kingdom of the Kongo, early European traders found an elaborate
court life, richly enhanced by locally manufactured textiles and other material
culture. The availability of European trade goods after the fifteenth century
provided a new set of status markers for Kongolese royalty and their
dependents. The fabrics brought by Portuguese traders were worn by their
African wives and female trading partners in ostentatious displays of wealth.
An early sixteenth-century European traveler in the Kongo described the
variety of textiles available, including velvets, tissue, satins, taffetas, damasks,
and raffia palm cloth. Local velvets made of palm fibers were replaced by
foreign brocades and silks. By the end of the sixteenth century, a new elite
culture had emerged from the commerce and ideas of the foreigners,
blending Kongolese and European sources of wealth and power.
Asian Ceramics as Cultural Commodities
In both East and West Asia, the skilled production of fine ceramics provided
highly valued commodities of trade. Evidence of both technological and artistic
achievement, such cultural commodities eventually became part of a shared
global material culture. During the late imperial period in China (Ming [1368–
1643] and Qing [1644–1911] dynasties), private kilns produced fine wares in
traditional styles characteristic of earlier eras, such as the celadon (pale green),
white, or colored glazes of the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1367) eras. But
it was the imperial kilns, such as the one at Jingdezhen in the southeast, that
stood at the forefront of technical and artistic development. By the early
fifteenth century, the production of blue-and-white ware had reached a peak.
Imperial kilns, which were protected by an order prohibiting private sale of
this ware, enjoyed a monopoly on its production. Ming blue-and-white ware
stimulated imitation in Persia, where the cobalt blue glaze originated, and
Holland. During the fifteenth century the color range broadened and white
porcelains were decorated with various enamel colors.
By the eighteenth century the height of elaborate design and rich color was
reached. Vast quantities of vessels in different shapes and colors were
produced by the imperial kilns and housed in the palaces of both the Manchu
and the Chinese aristocracy. Designs included writhing dragons in blue on a
white background, elegant multicolored flowers and figures in hues of rose,
green, and yellow, and “oxblood” vessels, highly prized for their deep, pure
dark red glaze. China was the world’s leading porcelain producer before the
eighteenth century, and the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen and Dehua in the
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southeast occupied the premier position in manufacture and export by the
state. The scale of the Chinese porcelain industry greatly exceeded that of
other regions, and Chinese export porcelain dominated Asian markets.
West Asian Ceramics
West Asian pottery was affected by Chinese influence, which reached its
height under the Mongol Empire. West Asian pottery was often extremely
fine, with vessels so thin and delicate that they seemed translucent.
Decoration included floral patterns, various styles of Arabic calligraphy, and
human and animal figures. The colors were brilliant: scarlet, flaming yellow,
turquoise (French for “Turkish” blue). The cobalt blue-and-white pottery that
was believed to have first been made in China actually originated in Iran.
Blue-and-white ware was also a favorite of the Ottomans.
In the sixteenth century Ottoman kilns at Iznik in western Anatolia produced
a beautiful series of large dishes, mosque jars, ewers, and bowls in these
colors. In the following century a lively red was sometimes added. In
addition to vessels, potters in Iran and Anatolia also specialized in making
glazed colored tiles, beginning in the thirteenth century. They were especially
used to cover the walls, domes, and prayer niches of mosques; the domes and
walls of tombs; and the walls of madrasas and palaces. Outstanding examples
dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries can today be found in
Isfahan and Istanbul.
Trade and Transformations
There was great demand in Europe, Africa, and Asia for high-quality
imported ceramics. Chinese glazed ceramics and their European derivatives,
which were major trade items, were carried over long distances and were
considered items of great value and status. In West Africa, members of royal
families acquired German and English-made china, even broken pieces, and
incorporated them into the architectural features of their houses. Chinese
celadon has been excavated from eastern and southern African archaeological
sites such as Great Zimbabwe dating from the twelfth to nineteenth centuries.
Porcelains produced in Southeast Asia, especially in Thailand and Vietnam,
occupied a major place in Southeast Asian trade, supplying a substantial
portion of the market in better quality imported ware.
Imitation China
Soon after Asian goods became plentiful in Europe, Chinese porcelain became
so much in demand that Europeans began to imitate it. To this very day,
porcelain is called “china” in English. By the mid-seventeenth century both
the Dutch (by 1614) and the French (by 1640) were decorating faience, a
glazed earthenware, with Chinese motifs, and these designs quickly spread
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throughout Europe. Within a century Japanese porcelains were also being
copied in Europe. The great German porcelain factory at Meissen opened in
1710, and its earliest wares were decorated in the Chinese style.
European production did not curtail importation of large quantities of
porcelain from China and Japan. At the same time that European potteries
were imitating East Asian motifs in response to the eighteenth-century taste
for the quaint and exotic, Asians produced porcelain in European shapes,
decorated in the Western manner with Western scenes. Similarly, the styles
and demands of distant world markets from Accra to Zanzibar dictated the
shapes of British iron implements and other European manufactured goods.
Lacquerware and Wallpaper
Lacquerware was another import from Asia that had great influence on
European art and crafts. Much was imported, but it was soon also being
copied in Europe. The Dutch and the English made lacquerware furniture
decorated with Chinese motifs, and the Martin workshop in France, famous
for its imitation of Chinese lacquer, became a state factory in 1748. Martin
lacquerware was so admired and in demand that a branch of the factory
opened in Berlin. Chinese wallpaper was another import in such great
demand, especially in England, that it had an important impact on European
crafts.
Technology, Textiles, and Trade in Asia
More than European technology helped to determine many of the qualitative
aspects of human experience around the globe. In many parts of the world,
power continued to be derived from control over technology and the valuable
trade items that technology produced. Sometimes technological innovations
were stimulated by the expansion of markets; elsewhere, artistic style and
innovation were valued for their own contribution to sumptuous urban life as
well as to individual or social identity. Technological innovation and
tradition helped create luxury goods for global distribution. The movement of
material goods reflected the beginnings of a shared global culture.
The biggest imports to Europe from Asia were raw and woven silk from
China and linens and cotton muslins from India. The fast colors, fine
weaving, and especially the imaginative designs of “Indian cloths,” as all
Asian fabric came to be known in England, made it popular and subject to
imitation all over Europe. The influence of Asian fabric designs extended far
beyond silk, linen, and muslin.
Chinese Silk
In China sericulture, or silk production, was the major textile industry. There
was a high demand for silk, not only by the court aristocracy but also by
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wealthy merchants who populated the prosperous cities of the Yangzi delta
region. Picture patterns were woven on silk, and silk garments were highly
prized. The organization of labor in the Chinese silk industry was specialized
and had some similarities to that of the European textile industry. The textile
industry in Europe was directly fed by merchants who had capital at their
disposal and would use it to advance raw materials to craftsmen. In China
such capital support was most visible in the silk industry, which needed
costly raw materials. In a typical Chinese silkweaving workshop, the workers
might be members of a household who received yarn from wealthy
commercial firms; or they might weave as either piece-rate workers or with
their own materials. By the eighteenth century commercial forces in the
Chinese silk industry had reduced many highly skilled urban weavers almost
to the status of daily wage workers completely dependent on export demand.
West Asian Textiles
In West Asia, in addition to the interest in ceramics, enormous attention was
also given to the production of textiles, especially after 1500. Silk, linen,
cotton, and wool were the raw materials. Satin, brocade, and velvet were the
products. From diaphanous gowns to thick felt cloaks, the choices, as
reflected by a vast technical terminology, were astonishing. Clothing and
fabric became major items of international trade during the expansion of
maritime commerce after 1500. This trade brought to other parts of the world
such words as damask, sash, muslin, chiffon, cotton, and taffeta. Cotton and
silk woven in all major urban areas of West Asia were supplemented by a
woolen industry based on the manufacture of carpets and coarse materials.
Carpets
After the Turkish invasion of West Asia, carpets became major items of
international trade. In their homes most West Asians sat on stools or sofas
covered with textiles and ate and slept on the floor, making themselves
comfortable with carpets, cushions, and mattresses. The textile industry
therefore provided important products for daily life. Carpets in particular
were utilitarian as well as decorative. The appearance of Turkish carpets in
European paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries demonstrates
their significance as an item of trade. Persians rapidly adopted the art of
carpet making from the Turks and then made their own innovations,
producing some of the finest carpets ever made. The Persians, in turn,
stimulated carpet production in Mughal India.
From the sixteenth century on, Iran and Ottoman Turkey emerged as
producers of highly prized wool or wool and silk rugs and carpets, which
were produced not as part of the nomadic economy but as an urban industry,
located especially in Bursa, Tabriz, and Isfahan. A similar pattern of regional
concentration of textile industries was found in the Indian subcontinent,
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which remained one of the greatest exporters of cotton goods to the world
market. The four significant industrial regions of India specializing in the
manufacture of cotton fabrics for the world market were Punjab, Gujarat, the
Coromandel coast, and Bengal.
Southeast Asian Textile Trade
Situated between the world’s two major sources of fine cloth—India for
cotton and China for silks—Southeast Asia became known as a consumer
rather than producer of textiles. There was high demand for Indian cotton
textiles in Southeast Asia, though cloth was still Southeast Asia’s major item
of manufacture, and cotton was the leading agricultural product after
foodstuffs. European traders showed great interest in the dyestuffs of both
Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, importing indigo and other techniques for
their own textile industries.
The Indian Calico “Crisis”
Synonymous with changing European cultural values in the late seventeenth
century was the increasing popularity of Indian calicoes, printed cotton
textiles manufactured in India and imported into England. Indian calicoes
looked like the elite fabrics of Europe, but they were more practical: they
were easier to wash, and they were cheaper. Furthermore, they were popular
with all classes. This worried local textile manufacturers in England, and
many called for restraint in the purchase of foreign imports. By 1719
mutinous weavers in London rioted and actually went through the streets
tearing calicoes off the women’s backs. In 1720 the British government passed
a bill to prohibit the consumption of multicolored printed cotton fabric. In
spite of this act, the taste for calicoes continued. Imported Indian calicoes
were smuggled into England and worn by stubborn and fashionable women
until the British textile industry finally succeeded, later in the eighteenth
century, in developing mass production and the complex printing and dyeing
technology needed to produce the desired fabric.
Social Landscapes: Transformations in Community and
Cultural Life
Performance arts, performed types of cultural expression such as drama,
dance, and festival, were powerful reminders around the globe that however
individualistic the new urbanized, industrialized world encouraged people to
be, the weaving and reweaving of the social fabric was a communal
undertaking. Shared values continued to be constructed and reconstructed in
the face of changing material conditions brought about by global trade or
commercialization and industrialization. The successful maintenance of
community was even more necessary as the density and diversity of
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populations increased in urban environments. There were many forms of
social interaction in which peoples around the world found amusement and
entertainment and through which individuals redefined themselves in
relation to the changing material world.
European Popular Culture and Community Life
The various ways in which ordinary women and men expressed and amused
themselves in the early modern era were, like almost everything else in
Europe, influenced by institutional Christianity and changed as that influence
waned. Individuals tended to amuse themselves differently in their homes
and with their families than they did in their communities, in public,
although at times the distinction between public and private activities became
blurred. In European cities and towns, both new and traditional cultural
forms shaped the social time enjoyed by their inhabitants.
Games and Amusements
The most widespread and common examples of popular culture were games
and similar amusements in which Europeans participated as individuals. The
community festivities were occasions by which Europeans jointly marked
and celebrated annual events. Aspects of both forms of popular culture were
variously gender and age separated. The games and pastimes of individuals
or families remained fairly constant over the centuries. They ranged from
sedentary activities, such as storytelling and being read to or reading, to
games requiring skill or luck and activities of a physical nature.
Oral recitation was the most common form of popular literary activity and
remained a fashionable genre even after printing made books more available.
It did not require literacy, only attention; informative as well as amusing, it
was a major means of influencing and educating ordinary people. Gambling
and games of chance, especially playing dice, were popular amusements, as
was dancing. People of all ages played games that provided physical exercise,
such as hide-and-seek, blindman’s bluff, and the frog game, a game of
catching those who pushed a seated player around. More vigorously physical
activities, such as wrestling and racing, were primarily the province of ablebodied males. Otherwise games were not gender restricted on the whole:
both men and women danced, gambled, and listened. Nor, after the sixteenth
century, were there age restrictions on most forms of popular culture: adults
and children played the same games, together and separately.
Elite amusements were transformed during the post-Columbian era. During
the reign of King James in the early seventeenth century, the British
monarchy supported elaborate productions, keen on demonstrating the
pinnacle of worldliness, military prowess, and technological achievement
over which they ruled. In 1613 on the Thames in front of Whitehall Palace, the
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poet John Taylor staged mock battles featuring a wood and paper version of
the North African port of Algiers, Turkish galleys, Venetian caravels, and
fireworks, to the delight of James and the huge crowds on the riverbanks.
Religion and Popular Culture
Though gender and age may not have influenced individual participation in
popular activities, both social position and organized religion did. Both
Catholic and Protestant churches condemned games of chance as immoral
and parlor games as indecent; they closed theaters and banned dancing and
brutal physical sports, which often did degenerate into brawls. In sixteenthcentury Geneva, under the influence of the religious ideals of the Protestant
leader John Calvin, expressions of popular culture such as dancing, gambling,
drunkenness, profanity, singing bawdy and licentious songs, and reading
immoral secular books were considered misdemeanors and punished by
censure, fine, or imprisonment.
Such prohibitions sometimes had an economic impact as well. In the sixteenthcentury German city of Strasbourg, when Martin Luther closed down the
brothels, prostitutes petitioned against this decision on the basis that they
pursued their profession for bread, not because they liked it. In England
Cromwell’s government (1649–1660) used military patrols to control traditional
forms of popular culture and enforce a rigid code of Puritan morality. Horse
racing, cock fighting, and bear baiting were strictly forbidden; noisy gatherings
on the Sabbath were broken up; use of profane language was punished; and
strolling minstrels and stage players were arrested.
Communal popular culture was closely tied to institutional religion until at
least the eighteenth century, though religious control and influence tended to
diminish in proportion to the growth of secularism. For example, the Church
originally monopolized and utilized the theater, sponsoring mystery plays as
effective instruments of popular religion. As theater became more
secularized, both Catholic and Protestant churches opposed and became
hostile towards it. Actors were denied the sacraments and thus excluded
from the body of believers; in some Protestant communities, such as Calvinist
Geneva, theaters were closed and actors prosecuted. Yet theater continued as
a major form of popular culture, the seventeenth century being an especially
great age for drama. The flourishing of theater, performance, and opera was a
reflection of the vigor of an increasingly secular society that enjoyed this form
of popular culture and of powerful rulers who not only enjoyed it but also
patronized and protected it.
Festivals of various sorts, relying on collective social bonds, were frequent,
with all members of a community—children and adults, rich and poor, urban
and rural—often taking part on equal footing. In Europe the most common
expressions of collective popular culture were Twelfth Night (much more
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celebrated than Christmas until modern times), Shrove Tuesday and Mardi
Gras (pre-Lenten celebrations), and All Souls Day (which is celebrated as
Halloween in modern America). In rural areas special events revolved
around seasonal activities such as harvests and also reflected the church
calendar; urban festivals were connected with the specific guilds that
organized and sponsored them and, since each guild had a patron saint, with
the Church calendar as well.
These popular festivals took a variety of forms, such as masquerades,
parades, and carnivals. They might last several days and were means to
release social tensions as well as being sources of entertainment, frivolity, and
popular activities. These community events were occasions for role-playing,
cross-dressing, and generally inverting the social order. Carnival goers
frequently became unruly, angry, and violent, thus giving the carnivals the
character of popular social and political protest.
Community and Cultural Performance in West Africa
Performance arts helped to define—and sometimes expand—the cultural
boundaries and conventions of society. For example, in West African
masquerades such as the Yoruba gelede, men assumed the roles of women
and demonstrated aspects of proper and acceptable behavior in their
dramatic performances. Masquerades also functioned as sites of cultural
transformation. In the context of traditional community events, people gave
interpretive performances of the transformations they were experiencing in
their changing cultural and social landscapes. West African masquerades
register the processes of borrowing in their incorporation of cultural items
ranging from dress to musical instruments to dance styles. These
masquerades involved pantomime, acrobatics, costume, sculpture, dance,
poetry, satire, reverence, and resistance; they served a variety of social,
religious, and political purposes and provide historians with valuable
information about how people viewed their changing world.
African-Caribbean Cultural Performance
An example of the process of cultural borrowing and transformation is the
popular Caribbean masquerade known as Jonkonnu, which dates to at least
the eighteenth century. From Jamaica to the Bahamas, colorful, costumed
dancers in street celebrations and African-derived festivals of harvest and
new year combined with the Catholic pre-Lenten carnival form of European
origin. The far-flung fame of John Konny, an African trader born in West
Africa in the 1660s, may also have inspired the original masquerade.
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Cultural Performance in East Asia
Performances of dramas set to music—operas—were popular with audiences
in China’s towns, cities, and countryside. By the late imperial period, many
forms of folk songs and local traditions contributed to distinctive regional
operatic forms. Highly stylized makeup and acting, along with high-pitched,
emphatic singing, evolved into the familiar Chinese or Beijing opera of
modern times. The drama of the commercial urban theater, which first grew
out of local opera troupes that performed without fixed scripts or theaters,
was combined with regional opera traditions. There was a continuous
transmission of urban drama into the countryside, as opera troupes
performed at temple festivals. Drama was an important means of cultural
integration and transmission between urban areas and the countryside. Both
the themes, which were based largely on historical fiction, and the
performances themselves were related in an interlocking way with
storytellers, acrobats, and other kinds of street entertainers, who used some of
the same story cycles.
Gender and Theater
By the early eighteenth century, actors had their own guild in the capital, and
public theaters were open to audiences from all classes of society. Both
imperial and merchant patronage played key roles in the growth of theatrical
institutions, but in China as elsewhere actors and the theater were often
subject to social, or even legal, restrictions by moralizing censors. Like the
onnagata, the female impersonators of the Japanese kabuki drama, female
impersonators in Chinese opera could be immensely popular with male
audiences, and the sexual overtones of dramatic performances evoked moral
outrage from some critics. The popularity of female impersonators in the
eighteenth century conferred a new stylishness on homosexual relationships.
In contrast, the Tokugawa state in Japan, fearing homosexual and
heterosexual promiscuity and prostitution, tried to control the social
influence of the theatrical world by passing legal prohibitions against the
participation of male youths or women.
Cultural Continuities
Cultural performances also provided an expression of the continuities of
traditional forms of authority and power relations, including those of gender.
Whether in urban settings or in rural villages, people in China marked the
passages of life with specialized rituals and ceremonies. Weddings and
funerals were the most important of these, and both were carried out by
wealthy elites according to elaborate Confucian prescriptions carefully
recorded in ritual texts, though in the countryside and among the poor much
simpler forms naturally prevailed.
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Community holidays were celebrated at the New Year and at other seasonal
occasions, such as the mid-autumn festival celebrated on the fifteenth day of
the eighth month by eating “moon cakes” and viewing the moon. The spring
festival was a time for people to visit and tend family graves, thus renewing
their link with their ancestors. In contrast, a festival held in the seventh
month to appease the spirits of the untended dead was a community event
and required the services of both Buddhist and Daoist priests.
Japanese Drama
Merchant patronage in urban centers such as Osaka in eighteenth-century
Japan supported the development of popular dramatic forms that drew large
audiences. Unlike the “Punch and Judy” puppet shows in Europe, bunraku is
serious drama, not comedy, in which three highly skilled and trained
puppeteers manipulate elaborate and lifelike puppets. Like Chinese opera
and in contrast to the religious-inspired Noh drama that developed in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the kabuki theater makes use of flamboyant
costuming and elaborate makeup (rather than masks as in Noh), as well as
exaggerated gestures and vocal effects to dramatize the feelings and
responses of characters in the stories. The dramas performed in both bunraku
and kabuki theater were based on themes that ranged from historical events to
domestic tragedies drawn from the everyday life of the townspeople; these
dramas had the power to move audiences composed of samurai, merchants,
and commoners.
Culture and Community in Southeast Asia
Community festivals in Southeast Asia had many features in common with
festivals in other parts of the world—a religious core, sense of community,
gambling, theater, buffoonery, and the lifting of usual taboos. In contrast to
other parts of the world where festivals were an opportunity to alter
temporarily the order of things, the public festivals of Southeast Asia appear
to have reinforced, rather than challenged, traditional hierarchies. Disorder,
sexual license, and social mixing might occur around the periphery of
festivals, but there is little evidence of the structured role reversals that are
observable elsewhere.
Royal and religious festivals were occasions for political authority to reinforce
its power through displays of pomp and grandeur. In Southeast Asia the
display of high status was accomplished with processions of elephants,
horsemen, soldiers, and slaves. Leather shadow puppets were used for more
humble entertainment, telling the stories of the Hindu gods and heroes in the
Mahabharata or Ramayana. Music was a permanent presence in theater
spectacles as well as in royal processions. Varieties of percussion instruments
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as well as stringed instruments made up orchestras for the performance of
folk music as well as royal ceremonial music.
Summary
The expansion of Europe after 1500 had profound effects on landscapes,
material culture, and social life around the globe. As technology transformed
the physical landscapes and trade transformed the material world, people
experienced these changes and responded to them in culturally distinctive
ways. The material advantages that resulted from exploration, conquest, and
the establishment of overseas empires was quickly apparent to Europeans.
Contacts in Asia made fortunes for those engaged in the spice and tea trade.
The European-African-American Atlantic connection and its subsequent
extension into the Pacific opened a colonial treasure chest of natural resources
such as precious metals (especially silver), furs, fish and timber, and the
products of slavery and plantation production, such as sugar, tobacco, and
cotton.
At the level of daily life, global contacts provided ordinary Europeans such
mundane things as new foods: tea from China and coffee from Africa;
potatoes, tobacco, maize, chocolate, tomatoes—altogether more than 100
crops—from the Americas. The material results of European global expansion
obviously contributed to reshaping the lives of all Europeans. In East Asia,
however, contact with Europe had relatively little real impact, apart from the
indirect, though long-lasting and profound, effects of new food crops. In other
parts of the world, such as West Africa or the North American continent, contact
with Europeans brought new goods that were integrated into the cultural and
social worlds of inhabitants or new technologies that altered traditional patterns
of life, such as horses and guns for the peoples of the Great Plains.
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