PROJECT SUMMARY

The Dutch Republic established its importance on the world stage through its early successes in global trade, becoming for a time the preeminent circulator of luxury and wholesale goods for the European market. This success was due in part to the new country’s nimbleness in adapting to local circumstances to undermine their Iberian competitors, and their financial creativity and business acumen in creating the first multinational publicly-traded stock company, the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and its counterpart, the Dutch West India Company (WIC). Our project is a collaboration between specialists in the VOC and the WIC, who have both worked to establish the centrality of trade and the circulation of goods to Dutch Golden Age art history, and now join forces to bring the previously siloed considerations of these companies, East and West, together, through the examination of different modes of textile circulation.  

The types of textiles that circulated the globe on VOC and WIC ships were varied—ranging from Indian cotton to Haarlem wool to Silesian linen—and their values rose and fell according to demand.  Data on textile circulation are likewise varied and dynamic, often moving (un)easily between quantitative and qualitative categories. For example, whereas textiles frequently circulated as wholesale commodities, they were also presented as diplomatic gifts, whose value was determined by social—rather than monetary—terms. Moreover, beginning as early as the second half of the seventeenth century, textiles were the favored bartering currency in the inhumane brokering of human life known as the Atlantic slave trade, giving them an uneasy status in early modern social and economic history.  Textiles—re-presented as garments in paintings and prints—also became potent signifiers in an increasingly global world, where clothing played a critical role in shaping identity in colonial and European circles. Our project, Batavia and the Gold Coast: Mapping Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market, seeks to make connections between these economic, social, and visual data—which so often exist as discrete epistemological categories—through the development of an open-access database and an interactive map.

While our project was inspired by foundational research questions that engage both art historical and economic methodologies, they are united by factors that are fundamentally spatial: What types of textiles circulated in Batavia and the Gold Coast and where was their point of origin? How were representations of textiles linked to their circulation (either as gifts or commodities)? What were the internal and external factors in each geographic location that impacted the textile trade? What impact did the slave trade have on the trade/circulation of textiles by both the VOC and the WIC?  What role did indigenous communities play in facilitating or hindering the local and global circulation of textiles? Despite the disparate geographies served by the VOC and WIC, how were the Companies linked? The intellectual and spatial breadth of our questions necessitated a project that was both collaborative and digital, one that we hope will provide a model for future work in Digital Art History.

THE CONTENT

The Interactive Map

The richness of our data—which includes visual images, archival data, and geospatial coordinates—requires a robust web-based database upon which other scholars of Dutch trade can eventually build.  We are working closely with a developer to create an interactive map using Leaflet, an open-source JavaScript library, which will visualize our textile data in geographical space.  This platform will enable users to geolocate our VOC/WIC data, which is drawn from published and archival cargo lists, according to variables such as textile type, geographical origin and destination, and time.

Image Database

Beyond the archival sources, we are also compiling a database of images featuring textiles that have been re-presented as garments on both “exotic” and European bodies in a colonial context, such as Albert Eckhout’s famous series of so-called ethnographic portraits in Copenhagen; the three portraits of African envoys also in Copenhagen and attributed to Eckhout; Andries Beeckman’s 1661 Castle of Batavia in the Rijksmuseum; the many portraits of VOC governors that would have originally hung in the Casteel Batavia, also in the Rijksmuseum; and Dirck Valkenburg’s 1706 Slaves on a Sugar Plantation in Surinam, among others.  This database of images will provide what the mapped data cannot: a visual record of the ways in which textiles were closely linked to complex categories like race, gender and economic status.

Visual Textile Glossary

One of the most important contributions of “Batavia & The Gold Coast” is our visual textile glossary—a much-needed resource that is currently lacking in the scholarship of the early modern period. Our glossary will include each textile’s name, a standard definition, and a visual example of that textile—either in the form of internal links to our database of painted images, external links to textiles housed in museum collections, or both.  Our visual textile glossary will also link to the mapped data, so the user can see—alongside the visual material—how particular types of textiles circulated the world as objects of trade.

ADHO 2019: SHORT PAPER PROPOSAL

This project fits well with the ADHO’s theme “complexity,” as it visualizes the myriad ways in which textiles were valued in the early modern global world: as trade goods, as mediators in diplomacy, as garments with profound social significance, and as physical objects comprised of raw material from across the globe. In our 10-minute presentation we will introduce our methodological approach; share our in-progress maps, images, and data; and demonstrate the interdisciplinary importance of understanding the dynamic movements and meanings of textiles in the early modern world.