Page 70 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

18-10-2016 15:52 Pagina 5
64 pag:Opmaak 1
roos boek 065-128 d

which heralded the arrival of the telegraph, the obtained status of people in these ‘lower’ classes.
telephone and postal services, the expansion of Chinese export painting studios regularly
colonial empires, the opening of the so-called published lively advertisements in circulating
treaty ports after the first Opium War in 1841, newspapers in the home countries and in
the transition from sail to steamships in the Canton, Macao and Hong Kong. 25
1860s – with ships capable of travelling much Although no consensus exists regarding the
further and more economically than ever before definition of globalisation and its start,
– and the changing of shipping routes following economic historians such as Kevin O’Rourke
the opening of the Suez canal in 1869, are just and Jeffrey Williamson and other scholars like
some of the global changes that occurred. Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez all consider
Furthermore, increasing trading activities yielded the nineteenth century as the era when the 69
new commodity worlds with a spectacular ultimate globalisation took place. 26 As global
decline in transport costs and commodity price labour and migration historian Leo Lucassen
convergence, in turn resulting in the formation argues, global convergence of prices and
of an integrated world market. The growing transport costs, and unprecedented geographical
interconnectedness of the world through trade intercontinental mobility are characteristic of
and travel in this century corresponded to the this period. 27 The limited definition of
integration of local markets into world O’Rourke and Williamson of the term
capitalism. In this regard, trade, with export art globalisation as “the integration of international
as its valuable and ever-associated by-product, commodity markets” counters the proposal of
formed the dominant mode of interconnection in Flynn and Giráldez that “globalisation began
Chinese-Dutch relations, with a constant flow of when the Old World became directly connected
ideas, visual materials, goods, capital and people with the Americas in 1571 via Manilla,” when
between these countries. These trade relations migrants established a world wide web of
were characterised by exchange and not connections. In the article ‘From divergence to
dependence, as is the case for countries with a convergence – Migration and the process of
colonial relationship. globalisation’, Lucassen introduces another
In this same nineteenth century, the increasing viewpoint. 28 He argues that the differentiated
prosperity of Europe and America brought globalisation approach of David Held et al.,
about by industrial production and expanding which distinguishes between intensity, extensity,
imperial and world markets, led to the impact and velocity, offers the basis for further
phenomenon of mass consumption. 23 Appadurai fruitful discussions. 29 Held’s distinctive
articulates this development in Modernity at approach can bridge the gap between, on the
large. Cultural dimensions of globalization as one hand, the rather one-dimensional market-
follows: “Globalization has shrunk the distance oriented approach of economic historians and,
between elites, shifted key relations between on the other hand, the broad definition of
producers and consumers [...], obscured the lines globalisation, which lends itself inadequately to
between temporary locales and imaginary a formal test due to a lack of quantification. One
national attachments.” 24 In the historical China viewpoint, according to Graeber, is that some
trade era, middle-class and working-class postmodern neoliberals are convinced that the
consumers in home countries were increasingly global market is “the single greatest and most
able to purchase ‘exotic’ products. Various forms monolithic system of measurement ever created,
of advertisements and posters were used to a totalizing system that subordinated everything
foster domestic demand for a wide range of – every object, every piece of land, every human
these kinds of products that reflected the newly capacity or relationship – on the planet to a

---
23 Hazareesingh & Curry-Machado 2009, 4.
24 Appadurai 1996, 9-10. Although Appadurai’s statements are about the twentieth century, this view is also
applicable to the increasingly globalising world in the second half of the nineteenth century.
25 English language newspapers in China: Friend of China, Hong Kong Register, Hong Kong Telegraph, Canton
Press, Canton Register, and Chinese Courier. Lee Sai Chong 2005, 202, 219, 239, 244-250. Crossman 1991, 154. The
Illustrated London News in England.
26 O’Rourke & Williamson 2002, 23-50. Flynn & Giráldez 2004, 81-108.
27 Lucassen 2007, 62.
28 Ibid.
29 Held 1999, 17.