"Prisoners in silken bond": obligation, trade, and diplomacy in English voyages to Japan and China.

Publication: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

Publication Date: 22-MAR-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Indiana University Press

Formerly Portugal presented tribute;



Now England is paying homage. They have out-traveled Shu-hai and Heng-chang; My Ancestor's merit and virtue must have reached their distant shores. Though their tribute is commonplace, my heart approves sincerely. Though what they bring is meagre, yet, In my kindness to men from afar I make generous return, Wanting to preserve my good health and power.

--Qianlong, Emperor of China, 1793 (Macartney x)

I

The poem above, composed by the Chinese Emperor Qianlong to mark the arrival of Lord George Macartney's embassy in Jehol, China, in 1793, invokes a cross-cultural language of gift exchange, reciprocity, and obligation that informed early modern conceptions of international trade and diplomacy. In the mind of the emperor and in accordance with a long-standing Chinese cultural self-perception, Macartney's appearance at the Imperial Court, his letter from King George III, and the presents he offers register solely as a tributary offering: the gesture of a barbarian race to acknowledge and to celebrate China's cultural and religious superiority, and to reinforce the emperor's supreme virtue. (1) Acknowledging precedent for the honor by invoking Portugal's diplomatic standing as a country that has recognized China's greatness and therefore gained the privilege of a trading monopoly in Macao, the emperor interprets the gifts Macartney brings as a sign of deference to a more powerful and advanced society, one whose merit has extended across the globe. Although the gifts the English bring are viewed as "commonplace" and their commercial value in China "meagre," the emperor shows respect for the distance the embassy traveled and the tributary offering they transported by making what he considers an adequate and "generous return"--namely, his kindness. The English perceived the emperor's return of kindness, however benevolent and commensurate it appeared from the Chinese point of view, as an unequal exchange. Their mission--although they understood that China expected a tribute--was to gain in exchange for their innovative and scientifically advanced gifts a diplomatic trading treaty, commercial ports of trade, and compensation for the grievances of the English merchants. However, the emperor's language implies that his reciprocity derives solely from a benevolent nature, that he gives in return out of respect, not out of obligation. This distinction slyly displaces momentarily the obligation implicit in any gift exchange; in other words, Qianlong does not consider himself indebted to the English or required to make a return. Yet, almost simultaneously, the emperor does acknowledge an obligation, though not to the English. The emperor's return gift of hospitality is a submission required of him to a divine authority and to ancestral good fortune, both of which have endowed him with the power to give generously. Furthermore, the emperor anticipates a return for this obedience to authority as well--he gives adequately to the English to preserve the kingdom's honor and so that he may maintain in return "good health and power." Thus, the notion of the gift as an ostensibly disinterested gesture of civility--of an equal exchange between reciprocally respectful nations--becomes problematic: what the English viewed as civility the Chinese interpreted as a ritual of subjection.

Qianlong articulates the complex intersections among trade negotiations, diplomatic gift exchanges, and cultural authority. The poem invokes notions of honor, reciprocity, and return, a vocabulary that in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century mercantile and political narratives repeatedly qualifies profit-based concerns in the relationships the English sought to establish and extend in the Far East. The English gave to the emperor in expectation of an equal return, an expectation that they articulated only in order to obligate the emperor to grant their requests. Although the English accepted his gifts and other amenities while in China, their expectation of an equal and satisfactory return necessitated an ongoing diplomatic exchange that deferred the commercial negotiations they sought literally at their own expense. In this sense, the language of the gift, despite its ostensibly disinterested nature, created between the English and their would-be trading partners unequal relations of obligation and domination.

This essay examines the intersections between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions of the gift in commercial trade and diplomatic relations to argue that the Eurocentric ideology of mutually beneficial trade was promoted by a fantasy of equal exchange that sutured over relations of subjection and domination. Rather than establishing relations of equality through disinterested and benevolent gifts, diplomatic gifts are used--by both Europeans and Asian nations--to mask the aggressive and the acquisitive self-interest that characterizes relations of power and domination. I draw on English travel and diplomatic narratives and their representations of gift exchange as well as East Asian conceptions of tribute to examine how both East and West utilized the language of the gift to negotiate competing conceptions of cultural authority. Specifically, I examine the journal of John Saris, the captain of the first East India Company ship to land in Japan in the early seventeenth century, and the published accounts of Macartney, leader of the first English embassy to China in the 1790s.

English tracts on trade during this period, such as Nicolas Barbon's A Discourse of Trade, John Evelyn's Navigation and Commerce: Their Original and Progress, and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, emphasize that successful public trading practices were grounded in the development of personal and disinterested relations mediated by a general gift economy. The gift in these narratives served two functions. First, for philosophers of trade, the rhetoric of mutual exchange displaced motives of self-interest and profit. The language of the gift drew attention to the ostensible benevolence and tolerance of both the English and Far East peoples, positing each nation as rich enough to market in a general economy based on surplus. Secondly, for the English, the mutuality and benefit sutured over the processes of consumption and production that threatened to feminize the English and either strip the Far East of natural resources so as to preserve those at home, or to displace anxieties about the fact that the English literally during the course of the eighteenth century were becoming addicted to tea, porcelain, and later opium. The language of the gift transposed to diplomacy reflects two dialectics. First, each exchange is an end in itself that establishes what are supposed to be "timeless relations": for the English a civilized and mutually beneficial trade; for the Chinese, in 1793, the tributary status of another barbarian country. Yet, secondly, the exchange also promoted an unending obligation so that, in theory, gifts must be exchanged each and every time emissaries meet, and these occasions too are open to radically different interpretations: for the English, ongoing negotiations to transform financial and symbolic burdens and obligations to mutual trade; for the Japanese and Chinese courts, a reenactment of barbarian subjection.

In the accounts of Saris and Macartney, the detailed descriptions of gifts offered to the shogun and the Qianlong emperor seemingly promote an ideal of mutually beneficial trade. Journals such as Saris's are monopolized by discussions of gift-exchange, which stands out as the primary form of diplomacy involved in international relations in East Asia. In fact, the detailing of gifts often overshadows the commercial aspects of such enterprises, including account records, the progress of the factory, and the sale of commodities--those aspects of these missions vital to East India Company officials for profit-based ventures. The prominence of gifts in Saris's journal demonstrates that the role of gift exchange held far greater implications than those associated solely with social customs or diplomatic formalities. The gifts inscribed the English and the Japanese shogun in a network of social debt and reciprocity, one that was much more tenuous and complex than the English may have realized, and which paradoxically held far more severe consequences than the actual business relationships they sought to forge.

This complexity is due precisely to the cross-cultural awareness of the obligatory nature of the gift and its role in mediating a capitalist system. Both European merchants and the courts of the Far East recognized the inherent social aspects of commerce: in order to cultivate a productive business relationship, European merchants and court officials first had to cultivate a personal and political relationship of mutual trust that supposedly would mirror and enact an idealized relationship between an English merchant and his East Asian...

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