Eurasian trade was an essential part of global economic history in which commodities travelled to Europe from Asia across Eurasia and linked the East and the West. With the development of advanced maritime transportation technologies, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and the British East Indian Company (EIC) became powers that dominated global trade. Hanna Hodacs, in Silk and Tea in the North: Scandinavian Trade and the Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth-Century Europe, addresses another story: Scandinavia-China trade. Hodacs asks how did the Scandinavian states’ trade with China compete with their European counterparts? This book fills a historical gap by addressing how Scandinavia built trade connections with China and the ways it, at the same time, engaged the European market.
Danish Asiatic Company (DAC) and the Swedish East Indian Company (SEIC) first engaged in direct trade with China in the eighteenth century. This profitable trade, which was driven by the demand for pricy Chinese luxury commodities, swept across Western Europe. Hodacs traces the tea and silk business from Canton in China to Gothenburg and Copenhagen in Sweden and Denmark, from the 1730s to the 1760s. Hodacs not only addresses DAC and SEIC trade in tea due to British demand but the Scandinavian desire for colorful Chinese silk textiles in the eighteenth century. The author discusses the wholesale market for Chinese goods in Gothenburg and Copenhagen, how they impacted taste and fashion in the blending of tea, and the types of colored silks destined for European markets. The significance of this book is its focus on the “northerly responses” of Scandinavian trade connections with China and to connect them to inter-European trade networks that highlight the role of Scandinavia in the context of European and global trade (36).
The monograph consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 focused on the eighteenth century when the EIC and the Ostend company dominated tea supply to Europe. It addressed the similarities between Demark and Sweden. These similarities make it possible to view Scandinavia-China trade as part of a single historical frame both Gothenburg and Copenhagen functioned as entrepots for Asian goods. Chapter 1 also shows how Scandinavian trade operated by importing Chinese goods and then exporting them to the European market. It argues that for these reasons the Scandinavian-China trade can be analysed as a singular topic (41).
Chapter 2 revolves around the tea trade. Hodacs first explores the principal reason for the Scandinavian companies’ involvement in the tea trade. This reason is initially related to the high demand for tea in Britain, but it was also the case that the Scandinavian people had tea drinking habits. Since tea became a “national drink” in Britain the market for it in Britain was large and rapidly expanding. The EIC accordingly monopolized the tea trade, which exported its product from Canton (51). Hodacs traces the Danish and Swedish trade of tea in Canton and the movement of tea chests from China to Gothenburg and Copenhagen from the 1730s onwards. She argues that the critical reason for which Scandinavia exported tea to the British market was the low price, which she corroborates by illustrating the numbers of various tea types imported by DAC and SEIC. At the end of the chapter, Hodacs concludes that DAC and SEIC were transit organizations importing Chinese tea from Canton and re-exporting them to the British market. This conclusion reveals how the Scandinavians’ tea trade operated and effected tea trade to Britain (e.g., enhancing the taste for cheap black tea by blending and packing it in a way that corresponded to different demands).
Chapter 3 centers on the silk trade and provides a careful examination of the types of textiles that made up Scandinavian silk imports. On the one hand, DAC and SEIC imported cheap raw silk produced in Canton to the Scandinavian market, which served the market segments competing for more expensive French and Scandinavian silk. On the other hand, the Danish and Swedish states began to invest in silk manufactures to satisfy the demand for silk. Colour nomenclature is another issue addressed in this chapter. Hodacs argues that the various colorful silks imported from Canton brought assorted colours and terms to European markets (e.g., sky blue), although it seemed to have little relation with the eighteenth-century European fashion trends. In this chapter, Hodacs further concludes that tea and silk, in somewhat near equal measure, provided the modus operandi for the SEIC, in comparison to the quantities of tea and silk the SEIC imported (135).
Chapter 4 demonstrates the effects of tea and silk on Scandinavian states. Hodacs states that Asian goods affected Europe in many ways not reflected in the distribution of East India Companies’ goods and trade statistics (175), which indicates a shift in the author's angle of view from global to local history. Hodacs takes the case of Carl Linnaeus and addresses his attempts to grow tea in Sweden and to substitute Chinese tea with domestic plants to break the Chinese tea monopoly. Linnaeus’ attempts failed but his endeavors in taxonomic reforms, as well as the links between natural history and political-economy he developed, had a prolonged effect in Europe. The chapter also reveals that local Swedish plants offered alternatives of colour pigments for textiles. The significance of this fact not only relates to the disintegration of the early-modern connection between dyes and colours but also the rise of a more fashion-conscious public before the arrival of synthetic dyes on a large scale in the middle of the nineteenth century. It also allows us to link early-modern material culture to the chemical and industrial development of synthetic dyes.
This book ends with a short fifth chapter that concludes by addressing consumption patterns of tea and silk in Scandinavia and the northern response to the British market. Hodacs provides many details describing the complicated background situations in the introduction part, but it would be more reader-friendly if the last section on the high demand for exotic Asian goods in Europe were at the beginning of the introduction. The book could have better organized too. Parts of the chapters’ narratives are both independent and repetitive, which requires making more historical linkages that the readers can frequently follow. The terminology used in the book is also not coherent. The author abbreviates the Danish Asiatic Company to DAC, but it is not proper to use the terms the “Danish Company” (36) and the “Asiatic Company” (34) at the same time. None the less, the book is original by highlighting the maritime powers of Scandinavian states, and their internal trade competition against the background of a declining “old” Europe in the face of a booming “new” Europe during an era in which maritime trade dominated the world economy.
