Chinese Indians: a James Gillray print, Covent Garden’s The Loves of Bengal , and the eighteenth‐century Asian economic ascendancy
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10509580802030276
ISSN1740-4657
Autores Tópico(s)Chinese history and philosophy
ResumoThis essay examines a James Gillray print, A Sale of English‐Beauties in the East‐Indies (1786), and Edward Topham’s Covent Garden farce, Bonds without Judgment; or, The Loves of Bengal (1787) in the light of the implications of André Gunder Frank’s ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998 Frank, André Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley, CA and London: U of California P. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000 Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton, NJ: Oxford: Princeton UP. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) which outline the global economic ascendancy of China in the period up to 1800. The Loves of Bengal coincided with the impeachment of Warren Hastings. While it strikingly borrows a number of specific visual motifs from Gillray’s print and incorporates them into the farce’s comic action, Topham introduced two completely novel Chinese characters (Japan and Nankeen). Their dominant role in the play, together with the relationship of Topham’s drama to the anti‐slaving plays Inkle and Yarico (Colman, 1787) and Harlequin Mungo (Bates, 1787), reveals the presence of the underlying economic templates which both determined China’s premier role in the world economy and Britain’s marginality relative to it. Late Georgian London theaters presented remarkably nuanced representations of China in conformity to the general propositions concerning economic history pre‐1800 set out by Frank and Pomeranz.
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