Bøger i Europe's Asian Centuries serien

Imported from India, China, the Levant, and Persia and appreciated for their diversity, designs, fast bright colours and fine weave, Asian textiles became so popular in France that in 1686 the state banned their import, consumption and imitation.

This book links the trade of the Danish and Swedish East India companies to the British taste for tea, a Scandinavian craving for colourful Chinese silk textiles, import substitutions schemes and natural history in the eighteenth century.

It asks why people valued gems, how they determined the value of a given gem, and how the value of a gem was connected to its perceived place of origin.

The rivalry for trade in tea and textiles between the English and Dutch East India companies is very much a global history. This trade is strongly connected to emblematic events such as the opening of Western trade with China, the Boston Tea Party, the establishment of British Empire in Bengal and the Industrial Revolution.

Goods from the East focuses on the fine product trade's first Global Age: how products were made, marketed and distributed between Asia and Europe between 1600 and 1800. It brings together established scholars as well as new, to provide a full comparative and connective study of this trade.