Organizer: Hiram W. Woodward, Jr., The Walters Art Gallery
Chair: Louise Cort, Freer Gallery of Art
Discussants: William S. Atwell, Hobart & William Smith College; Richard M. Eaton, University of Arizona
This panel is intended to explore cultural aspects of trade in the centuries before the establishment of European hegemony. By selecting communities in both India and Southeast Asia, two different issues are expected to arise. One is essentially comparative: what kinds of relationships are there between what can be thought of as the local culture and the culture of the imported or exported objects? The second issue involves a search for stylistic definition. In this period, is there an international trade style? If so, what are the Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese elements in it? What kind of connection might there be between such a trade style and structures of power?
Serving as discussants will be two historians, one whose primary interest is Muslim India, the other a specialist in Ming-dynasty China.
Hiram W. Woodward, Jr., The Walters Art Gallery
The ceramic export industry of Thailand, which may have begun in the fourteenth century, flourished in the fifteenth century and gradually came to an end in the sixteenth. Because there is next to no written evidence concerning it, historians overlook the industry, and art historians must rely on stylistic and slowly accumulating archaeological evidence to situate the wares in time.
Surely an important figure in the promotion of ceramic trade was King Borommatrailokanat of Ayutthaya (reigned 1448–88), and ceramic figurines not made for export can be satisfactorily attributed to his reign. The recent study of Buddha images at the Walters Art Gallery has shown how, during his time, stylistic ideals were redefined: the characteristic modes of the early Ayutthaya period were not maintained, and Cambodia and Sri Lanka contributed to the establishment of new identities. Furthermore, the foundries underwent a technological shift, from bronze to brass, suggesting a new international outlook.
What, in the absence of written evidence, and with so little knowledge about the identity of the traders, should we say about Borommatrailokanat’s view of the realm of international trade? One possibility is that still, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ideal internationally traded commodities were looked upon as being like the Chinese Yuan-dynasty ceramics of the fourteenth century. Just as Timurid Iran adopted styles that looked back to the time of a Pax Mongolica, so, in a time of an expanding Islam, other societies between China and the Suez embraced a Yuan legacy.
Ruth Barnes, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
The paper will explore the role Gujarati trade textiles, in particular block-printed cotton cloths, had in some societies of eastern Indonesia. The material to be looked at was produced for commercial purposes in northwestern India; as that it was extremely successful, and became a desirable trade item in many parts of the Indian Ocean littoral. Evidence for the trade to Egypt, Nubia, the Yemen, as well as South-East Asia will be explored, and recent radiocarbon dating results will show the transmission to be well established long before Europe became involved. The C–14 dates show that some of the textiles found in Indonesia have a 14th-century origin, which challenges previously held assumptions regarding the age of textiles in South-East Asia. This means that the material presented can be integrated with recent historical research on the world of eastern Indonesia between 1400 and 1600. It also confirms the importance of textile goods as items of prestige and signs of political and spiritual power. The interface of cultures is to be stressed, and the different interpretations given to the material in local context and in its place of origin are to be explored. Although made for commercial purposes, these textiles nevertheless can be shown to make use of artistic motifs then current in Gujarat, so that they became significant distributors of Indian designs. Evidence from eastern Indonesia shows the manner in which these designs are incorporated into the local repertoire, often with it reinterpretation of iconography taking place.
Phillip B. Wagoner, Wesleyan University
One of the titles used by rulers of the south Indian state of Vijayanagara was purva-pascima-samudradhipati, "Lord of the Eastern and Western Oceans." Yet, throughout most of the 15th and 16th centuries, Vijayanagara remained essentially an inland state, and had little direct political or economic involvement in the littoral zone of south India, where some of the major entrepots of the Indian Ocean trading system were located. This paper explores the nature of Vijayanagara’s involvement with the Indian Ocean trade, in the hope of resolving the apparent discrepancy between rhetoric and reality. If the littoral zone remained imperfectly incorporated into the Vijayanagara state and economy, then what was the sense of these rulers styling themselves as "Lords of the Eastern and Western Oceans"? I suggest that one useful way of approaching the question is to start by surveying the various commodities imported into the Vijayanagagara cultural sphere, and analyzing the patterns of their consumption. To this end, I will review the available literary and archaeological evidence, which suggests that some of the key commodities imported—blue and white export porcelains and satin textiles from entrepots in south China, and war horses from Hormuz and other centers in the Persian gulf—bore important functions as social markers for the political elite of Vijayanagara. In view of the symbolic importance of these imported commodities within Vijayanagara’s material culture, the rulers of this state employed various strategies to procure them, not all of them understandable simply in terms of market exchange.