During the 17th and 18th centuries, a wide variety of products from overseas caught on across Europe. Foodstuffs, including spices, sugar, cocoa, coffee and tea, corn (maize) and potatoes; raw materials and partially processed products for industrial use, such as leather, pelts, dyes, cotton and silk; and manufactured products like white or painted cotton fabric, silk fabric, porcelain, lacquerware, medicinal drugs gradually came into common use by Europeans. The term overseas (ultramarin in French) is a more inclusive description than either exotic or colonial for these items that arrived in Europe from the Americas, Africa and Asia via long-distance intercontinental voyages. Some of them came from temperate or cold regions of the globe (e.g. beaver and other furs from North America) or from countries that had not been colonized (China, Japan). While some of the products were new to Europe, many others were known but had only been available in far smaller quantities. The period being discussed is one in which there was a significant rise in the volumes being imported, the diversity of the products’ varieties and provenances, and in their adoption for everyday use.
Increased Quantities Circulating in Europe
The gradual increase in the quantities circulating in Europe was tied to the intensification of long-distance traffic and its corresponding decrease in its cost. From the 1660s-1670s to the 1750s, the number of cotton fabric items shipped to Europe by European East Indian Companies went from approximately 100,000-200,000 a year to 1.4 million a year. As for trans-Atlantic trade, tobacco exports from the Chesapeake colonies to Europe grew at about 5% a year from 1622 to the 1750s. The historian Jan de Vries has evaluated growth in trade between Europe and Asia at 1.1%. That is far slower than growth in trade with the Americas, which has been evaluated at twice that.
Those imports did not catch on across Europe evenly. Nations, especially western European ones, that had colonies received those products directly, then redistributed them towards Europe’s interior. Records from the Sound, which allow historians to measure the evolution of trade in the Baltic region, show that, over the course of the 18th century, imports of overseas products increased twenty-fold, accelerating noticeably from the 1760s on. Sugar imports, for instance, went from 0.4 tons to over 2 a year. As trade hubs, port cities like Seville, London, Amsterdam and Lorient were known for the abundance of overseas products available. In Lorient, striped or blue-, red- or white-checked handkerchiefs from Bengal and Machilipatnam appeared in many of the inventory appraisals performed upon the death of the town’s inhabitants.
The extension of European colonization contributed to the intensification of imports, due to vast expanses of previously uncultivated land being farmed to benefit the colonizing nations’ economies. Coffee was imported from Mocha, Yemen in the 17th century. Then the geography of the coffee market was radically transformed by the development of coffee-plant cultivation on estates in Java and Bourbon Island, and then, in the 1730s, in the Antilles. By the 1780s, only 10% of the coffee being exported to Europe came from Arabia or Java. European consumers could choose by then from amongst various provenances, qualities and prices for their coffee.
Changing Tastes and Consumer Habits
The spread of products from overseas contributed to changes in European material cultures. The importation of porcelain, lacquerware and painted cotton fabric introduced consumers to Asian motifs, which soon became fashionable. In France during the reign of Louis XIV, interest in Chinese material culture was fanned by visits from the ambassador of Siam (in 1684 and 1686), who presented the king with over 1,500 items including porcelain, hand-painted wallpapers with floral and bird patters, and Chinese and Japanese lacquerware furniture. European artists created art with Chinese subject matter, or came up with new ones inspired by illustrated texts about China. In 1759, for example, the cabinet-maker Gilles Joubert (1689-1775) presented Louis XV with a flat, red-and-gold-lacquered desk with a pattern of pagodas and Chinese landscapes.
Europeans’ eating habits were also transformed, with the introduction of sweet, hot drinks. Coffee and tea were enjoyed daily by nearly everyone. Even a lowly porter could afford to buy a cup of café au lait for his breakfast from one of the women selling it in the street. Consumers also acquired the utensils needed for the new rituals developing around serving and enjoying the beverages, which were catching on quickly. In 1791, a modest baker named Tobias van Belle, in Aalst, between Brussels and Ghent, owned two coffeepots, one tea kettle and eight tea cups with matching saucers.
The popularity of the best-known products often started with a trend amongst the wealthiest classes. That was the case for both porcelain and coffee. The first cafés, including Le Procope (which is still open for business, making it the oldest café in Paris), opened in Paris in the 1670s-1680s. They gradually spread from cities to the countryside, from rich areas to poorer ones. The muslin-seller Louis Simon (1741-1820) is often quoted on that topic. He describes how he saw the trend for cotton fabric spread around his part of the Haut-Maine region in the following terms, “The richest ladies attired themselves in them first, then common women, and finally, even servants and the poor. Then fabrics from Orange, and Indian prints also became fashionable.” Other products’ popularity grew in less visible ways. In the 16th century, corn was used as animal feed in southern Europe before catching on for porridge and flat-cakes among lower-income families facing famine. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that it began to appear on the tables of the elite.
Transformations in Industry and Trade
The expanding popularity of products from overseas was enabled by sellers’ efforts to introduce them to a wider clientele. Dry-goods shops sold porcelain tea sets presented on lacquered serving trays, as well as small, decorative figurines portraying grotesque Asian characters. Some shops played up their exoticness, choosing evocative names like “À la Pagode,” “Au Corail des Indes,” “Au Roi de Perse” (At the Pagoda, Indian Coral, The King of Persia). But other overseas products came to be adopted on an everyday basis. In 1683, the merchant Ralph Edge owned a shop in Tarporley, on the road to London. In addition to dry goods and hardware items, he had in stock several different qualities of tobacco and spices; indigo and logwood, for dying; as well as pipes and pieces of printed cotton fabric.
The manufacturing sector gradually came to adopt overseas products. Cochineal, indigo and woods used for dyes, such as logwood, found their place inside dyers’ vats. Silk from Persia, India and China was used in the silk factories in Lyon; raw cotton from the Levant and the Americas went into handkerchiefs that were then sold by peddlers all the way into the Alps, and bolts of white cloth from India were known in French as indiennes de traite (“slave-trade Indian fabric”), because the painted and printed cotton fabric was exported to West Africa and exchanged for slaves.
Asian artisans’ craftsmanship attracted the admiration of Europeans who tried to imitate and adapt their techniques. Based on observations made by Jesuits in Chine, they identified kaolin (a.k.a. China clay) as the raw ingredient in porcelain and founded the first European hard-paste porcelain manufactory in Meissen, Saxony, in the 1710s. So the spread of products from overseas eventually spurred a process of innovation in European industry, in order to replace importation.