Tag Archives: World History

April 28, 2025

Salem Silk Swatches

By daseger

Periodically I dip into the papers of Salem supercargo Benjamin Shreve (1780-1839), which offer interesting and insider perspectives on Salem’s early 19th century global trade. Fortunately these sources have been digitized by the Phillips Library, but even before they were available to the general public I had access through an Adam Matthew source collection, to which the Salem State Library has subscribed for quite some time. Benjamin Shreve is interesting, as he is not from one of those old Salem families (nor is he attached to the Shreves of Crump and Low): in the Boston Weekly Magazine for July of 1804, he is described as a “merchant of Alexandria” in the notice of his marriage to Miss Mary Goodhue of Salem, but he quickly made his mark in his wife’s native city. Shreve opens a window into a world of trading logistics and trends through his meticulous commercial correspondence: he’s a numbers guy for sure but also a diplomat of sorts, negotiating the best price and quality for his Salem purchasers back home from his suppliers in South America, East Asia, and Europe. Wherever he goes, he has to fulfill large orders but also buy smaller items for all the wives of his employers back home, as well as for his own. He writes everything down, sometimes in duplicate or triplicate. If I dig into his papers for long my head will start to swirl, so I have to be pretty focused, and this time I was focused on silk. I’m in the exciting stage of research on my next book, which is on saffron in the late medieval and early modern eras, and there are some interesting parallels between it and silk, so that’s where I was coming from, but how I ended up in 19th-century Salem I do not know; I guess it’s just that persistent Salem tug on my time! Anyway, I was looking through a bound book of Shreve’s miscellaneous memoranda from 1809-30 when I came across these cool silk samples in the midst of much drier fare: I was caught!

Benjamin Shreve Papers (MH 20), Trade Memoranda, 1809-1830, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.

These are samples of Italian silks sent to Shreve by a friend in letter packets, with advice on how and where to buy silk in Italy. It’s 1819; Shreve has certainly been buying silk in China for a while, but he was always looking to expand his sources. I think this is so interesting because I have long thought that Salem’s trade with Europe as compared to Asia has been under-represented in the scholarship. Italy and France were great suppliers of silk so why not buy there if the price was right? And Shreve himself is also under-represented in the scholarship! Why isn’t there a book on him, using all of his amazing accessible papers? He is best represented in China Trade expert Carl Crossman’s book, The China Trade: Export Paintings, Furniture, Silver and Other Objects, 1785-1865, which was published in 1972 and reprinted several times afterwords. Crossman knew the collections of the Peabody (now Peabody Essex) Museum and its library very well and drew on them heavily—I learn a ton of stuff whenever I pick up his book. And as I was just reading about Shreve there, I found two other “Salem silk swatches” from the Shreve papers included by Crossman as illustrations: two sheets of silk samples from the Chinese merchant Eshing given by Pickering Dodge of Salem, owner of the Governor Endicott, to Shreve as a buying guide for Canton, and a letter with some strands of raw silk from Dudley Pickman to Shreve–plus a miniature portrait of our man Shreve on ivory! Crossman digs even deeper into some of the Shreve sources for his last book, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade: Paintings, Furnishings, and Exotic Curiosities (1991). Encouraged by Crossman, I went back to Shreve (for just a bit!) and found one more silk swatch among the Government Endicott papers, a sample of black “Levantine” silk.

Not for the first time, my title is a bit deceptive: swatch books from the early modern era and after are numerous and generally refer to sample books offered up by producers rather than buyers. The Victoria & Albert Museum has several in its collection, including my favorite, a confiscated traveling salesman’s book of silk samples from Lyon, reproduced in the amazing book Selling Silks. A Merchant’s Sample Book 1763 by textile curator Leslie Ellis Miller. Shreve’s snippets of cloth, embedded in commercial paper, can’t compare to a comprehensive collection such as this, but they certainly offer some visual insights into the global trade of this conspicuous commodity in the early nineteenth century.

5 Comments | tags: books, China trade, Consumption, material culture, Phillips Library, Salem History, Salem Sources, Salem Trade, Silk, World History | posted in History, Salem

February 4, 2022

When Nixon went to China and Life Magazine came to Salem

By daseger

For some reason, I’ve been going through the archives of Life magazine over the last month or so: it started with the photographs, and then I had to read the stories too. Life seems like it was a perfect mix of news and popular culture: we don’t have the like now, do we? And I doubt we ever will again with our very diffused and digital media. I’m no twentieth-century historian, but it also seems to represent the collective mindsets of its changing times: it really excels at representing wartime America, of course, but the later decades too. So far my favorite issue bears a beautiful Elizabeth Taylor on the cover on the occasion of her fortieth birthday: but inside the focus is on President Nixon’s imminent trip to China. It was fifty years ago this very month, and a very big deal. For some historical context, Life went to Salem, which emerges as kind of cultural intermediary between the United States and China, as it was the first American city to become thoroughly acquainted with the East. And so we get to read about Elias Hasket Derby and his ships, and see Derby Wharf, and all sorts of “exotic souvenirs” brought back from China by Salem’s daring merchants and later installed in the old Peabody Museum of Salem. It’s all great, but the best photograph is an aerial view of Chestnut Street where nothing much has changed in fifty years.

“When the US Sailed to China,” Life magazine, 25 February 1972. Photographs by Henry Groskinsky.

I think that the Peabody Essex Museum is still playing that intermediary “West meets East” role, although now the perspective is far more global than western. I know that I fault the PEM often for its displaced library and limited local offerings, but their East Asian and China Trade galleries are beyond impressive. I find myself teaching the first half of World History this semester for the first time in a decade, and I really had to do a lot of preparation before I stepped into the classroom (well, first it was on the screen as we had a “staggered” opening). China is the star of pre-1500 world history, and all my “color” comes from the PEM! Its collections are much stronger in later-dynasty objects, but there’s still some wonderful things on display from earlier eras. Much has happened in the past half-century: the Cold War is over, and Life magazine has also concluded its run, but Salem’s “China Cabinet” not only endures, but has been expanded considerably (and we no longer refer to its contents as souvenirs). In fact, aside from Salem’s built landscape, PEM’s East Asian collections constitute one of the largest and most lasting material legacies of “its” history in situ: this seems like an odd statement, but I think it is true.

Yichengyong Picture Workshop, Tianjin. Family celebrating the New Year and welcoming wealth from all directions, 1908-11, reproduction of detail from a woodblock print; Standing official with tablet, Jin dynasty, early 13th century; Guangzhou artists, Tea packer and porter, about 1803; Guangzhou artists, Wu Bingjian, Known as Houqua, about 1835; George Chinnery, detail from Dr. Thomas Richardson Colledge and His Assistant Afun in Their Opthalmic Hospital, Macau, 1833. There’s an emphasis on people and their relationships in PEM’s present galleries, but there’s also the “Great Wall of China” and a transplanted 18th-century Chinese house, Yin Yu Tang, to see.

2 Comments | tags: Art, Chestnut Street, China, China trade, Culture, Current Events, ephemera, Peabody Essex Museum, Teaching, World History | posted in Culture, Salem, Teaching

December 14, 2021

Books for Christmas/Break

By daseger

Classes have just ended and after grading I will attack the big pile of books by my bedside: I’ve already dipped into one or two but I have a full month with very few obligations ahead of me to really indulge. As I’ve been consumed with writing my own book (out in February) over the past few years, along with teaching and everything else, I haven’t had much time to read generally and broadly, so I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks. My list below is about as general and broad as I get: when I don’t have to read history for scholarship or teaching I tend to read histories of periods and places which I do not write or teach about. I’d love to read more fiction over the next month, but nothing has caught my attention except for the sole work of historical fiction below—and only because it’s related tangentially to my next project.

So here we go, beginning with two books that fall into the category of personal history:

Mr. Atkinson’s Rum Contract is an amazing personal history of Richard Atkinson’s own family, including his namesake forebear, a British merchant with considerable interests in the West Indies in the late 18th century who acquired the lucrative contract to supply the British army in North America with rum and other essentials during the American Revolution. This is a “warts and all” family history, as the family fortune was based as much on slavery as it was on sugar and land, of course, and one told in a truly captivating manner. Lotharingia is the last of Simon Winder’s surveys of central European travelogue history, following Germania and Danubia. I liked both of these books: they are rather breezy but still engaging and it’s easy to skip over the occasional boring bits. Lotharingia is the “land in between” established by the terms of the Treaty of Verdun in 843, which divided Charlemagne’s empire between his three grandsons: younger brothers Louis the German and Charles the Bald received lands east of the Rhone River and West Francia, respectively, while the eldest brother Lothar received the imperial title and “Francia Media”, a long strip of territory encompassing the Low Countries, parts of modern Germany and France, Switzerland, and much of northern Italy. A place of shifting boundaries and perspectives, for sure.

Since we are back in the early middle ages, I must admit that I have to do some work over the break: I’m teaching our early world civilization survey for the first time in a decade or so, so I must delve into some global history: Silk Road scholar Valerie Hansen’s The Year 1000 will be very helpful, and I’m hoping that Gary Paul Nabhan’s Cumin, Camels and Caravans, written from a more personal and cultural perspective, will provide me with some great “spicy” anecdotes.

And speaking of spices, I also want to use this break between semesters to do some background reading on my next project: a history of saffron in medieval and early modern England. A storied spice, a wonder drug, used in medical and culinary recipes and as a dyestuff, saffron has many threads to follow—through economic, social, cultural and even political history. I’m going to start with its most obvious attribute, its color, and then expand into some textile history. I’m not sure whether or not Atlantic sericulture will have much bearing on my understanding of saffron cultivation, but I’ve met Ben Marsh so I want to read his magisterial book (and you might know him too, from his family’s viral pandemic rendition of “One Day More”—he’s a Renaissance Man!) And then there is A Net for Small Fishes, Lucy Rago’s fictional account of the “Overbury Affair” in which Mrs. Anne Turner, she of the conspicuous yellow ruff, was implicated in the murder by poisoning of courtier Thomas Overbury and executed in 1615. There’s even a fictional Salem connection, as Nathaniel Hawthorne includes Anne Turner in The Scarlet Letter as a friend of suspected witch Mistress Hibbins, even teaching her how to color her ruffs yellow. Anne Somerset’s Unnatural Murder is a more straightforward account of the murder of Overbury set against the backdrop of poisonous Jacobean court culture.

I think I always include books about gardening on my lists, and this one is no exception. I like whimsical, personal books about gardening as an activity, but also cultural histories of evolving landscapes and horticulture: The Morville Hours is a perfect example of the former, and The Acadian Friends of the latter. It would be nice if someone would buy me the forthcoming Architects of the American Landscape and Nature and its Symbols, a reference book from Lucia Impelluso and the Getty Museum.

Finally, two texts focused on the interpretation of history for the general public, a constant concern and interest of mine. The United States is in the midst of a real reckoning (as opposed to a pandering PEM-esque reckoning) about its history and understanding of slavery, and Clint Smith’s bestselling How the Word is Passed is the very next book I want to read about this important process. Here in Salem, there’s very little reckoning; just an increasing amount of ghosts! All summer long, I was hearing ghost stories on the streets of Salem and I feel like I’m surrounded by their professional proponents. This fall, I went to a talk by a very prominent head of interpretation at a very prominent New England heritage organization and in the Q and A I asked him about ghost stories as history and he replied that ghost stories are history. While I understand and agree with that statement to a point, I’ve gone beyond my comfort level and so want to read up a bit more on dark or “paranormal tourism”: Haunted Heritage is about the scene in York, known as Great Britain’s most “haunted” city, so it should be just the ticket.