Early Modern Things

Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800

Paula Findlen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032220772
• eBook ISBN: 9781351055727
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects – ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made – came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world.

Now in its second edition, this book taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c. 1500–1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new essays on 'encountering things' to enrich the volume. These look at cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves.

Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early modern world and the history of material culture.

Part I
The ambiguity of things

1 Surface tension

Objectifying ginseng in Chinese early modernity

Carla Nappi

Object lessons: failing to do the history of a global commodity

One night during the reign of Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty (r. 581–604), a man walked out of his home to look for the baby he heard crying his backyard.¹ The man was soon joined by his family and neighbors as they all searched, in vain, for the wailing child that screamed through their Shangdang hometown.² Eventually, they located the source of the crying: it was not an infant, but instead a small herb growing within a mile of the man’s house. They dug a deep pit around the herb and pulled out a root shaped like a man, complete with arms and legs. The crying stopped, though the story continues to ring through the literature of Chinese materia medica.

The root dug up by the Shangdang man, known as tujing 土精 or ‘essence of the earth,’ has come to be identified with the more common name renshen 人 參, popularly translated as ‘ginseng.’ Present in Chinese texts on materia medica (known collectively as bencao literature) from the earliest instantiations of the genre, ginseng became one of the most tightly regulated commodities in early modern China, Korea, and Japan and an extraordinarily important commodity in the contemporary global drug market. Prized globally as a pharmaceutical, ginseng has inspired many attempts to understand the history of this ‘traditional’ medical drug.

The rise of commercialism, commodification, and connoisseurship in the late Ming (1368–1644) and early–mid-Qing (1644–1911) has been widely treated in recent years, and the story of ginseng could be written as one of many object histories in this expanding literature of the material and visual culture of early modern China.³ Early modern ginseng would consequently be a character in a kind of vegetable bildungsroman: the story would trace its development from a very local item of materia medica in northeast China through its star turn as a North American supply of the drug was discovered after Jesuits and other European interlocutors wrote from China and the Royal Society published accounts of its seemingly magical qualities.⁴ Finally, ginseng’s story would close with its triumphant coming of age as it matured into a global commodity with a continuing history into today’s pharmaceutical and consumable market.

Though I had begun this work thinking that I was going to tell such a story about ginseng as a commodity, about networks of exchange and the circulation of objects in global history, there was a problem: all of these ideas presuppose the existence of a stable entity, a coherent object that does the circulating. The main character may transform and morph over the course of its lifetime, but it remains recognizable on some level as the same individual we knew at the start of the story. However, when we attempt to trace ginseng through early modern history and its sources, it starts slipping through our grasp. Indeed, if we consider an object to be a recognizable entity that exists and persists across time and space, there was no trans-historical ginseng. What was there, then, if not a stable object that can be read back into early modernity and beyond?⁵

Early modernity in China was characterized by new modes of thinking about locality, new ways of observing, and new forms of translation. Taken together, these combined to form new ways of identifying objects and thus new kinds of objects. Ginseng as we know it (an object with many varieties and names, a type of thing that can be sought and found in different localities) emerged in this period as a new kind of object.

This chapter is a history of the practices of identification (via location, observation, and translation) that created a new form of early modern objecthood from which ginseng emerged. It explores how what had previously been a collection of stories, images, names, and resemblances coalesced during early modernity into a coherent, individual whole. Whereas before the late sixteenth century, there was an assemblage of names, images, and descriptions linked through statements of resemblance and comparison; by the eighteenth century, we see an ‘it’ with varieties differentiated by locality and by comparison and observation of new, named parts of the object. This change was made possible through new modes of identification and a new system of standards and criteria, along with a shift from identification-through-resemblance to identification through new modes of observation geared toward judgments of quality.

The two main goals of this chapter are first, to introduce a case study that raises important issues surrounding the history and circulation of objects in early modern China, and second, to explore those broader issues as they speak to the larger field of object histories or studies of material culture. The turn to thinking about materiality in object histories, while productive and important, has obscured the need to understand and question the epistemic nature of the ‘object’ itself, considered not only as a physical thing but also as an instantiation of a concept or a class of things. In telling a history of an object, we are always simultaneously creating and re-creating both that history and the object itself. The problem, then, is one of the form of historical practice as well as the context of the historical narrative that such a practice seems to create. This story of the early modern objectification of ginseng is an invitation to think about the instability of objects, the lack of coherence of things, and what this might mean for the study of material culture in early modernity.

The modern ‘ginseng’ category subsumes and erases a vast set of names and objects and ideas and knowledge systems. In contemporary terms, the descriptor is used to name any number of plant species, and in early modernity terms in Chinese, Jurchen, Mongolian, and Manchu texts were also used to describe several different kinds of plants. I’ve decided to use ‘ginseng’ here (when I don’t use renshen or shen to indicate the specific language of some Chinese texts) not to imply that the entities described in this chapter can be unproblematically equated with modern objects and categories, but to give a name to the contemporary analytic object that emerges from the set of practices and enunciations outlined below. To put it another way, this paper is a kind of archeology or genealogy of ‘ginseng.’⁶

The early modern object

Scholarship on material culture reminds us that objects are physical things that exist in space. Less obvious is the fact that objects also exist in time: things are always in flux, and not just on the scale of centuries, but also in a moment. In his work on Shakespearean things, Jonathan Gil Harris emphasizes the ‘diachronic dimensions of materiality,’ describing materiality as a process, and things both in and as motion.⁷ Harris and others have insisted that things always exist – to the extent that we may say that they exist at all – in flux. Conceiving of things in this way, they might be described as parasites or quasi-objects,⁸ as palimpsests,⁹ as multiplicities or machines,¹⁰ and as turbulent fluids or unstable networks.¹¹ Arjun Appadurai has conceived of objects as ‘things-in-motion,’ possessed of lives and biographies that trace the transformations in their meaning and value.¹² Despite their flux, there are still ways to study the histories of such objects. Historians have attempted to do so under the rubrics of historical ontology¹³ or ‘applied metaphysics,’¹⁴ focusing historico-philosophical attention not on some presumed solidity of an object but rather on the coming into being and receding of the thing in historical time.

The trans-historical object does not exist. Even if there is a stable material entity that persists over time, its meaning, identity, and thing-ness change sometimes dramatically in different (historical, geographic, epistemic) contexts.¹⁵ One way to understand this is to understand that the particular ways of being in motion, the particular types of practice that constitute objects, are specific to particular times and place. Each of the authors discussed above acknowledges, on some level, the importance of historically situating their particular studies. However, in thinking about objects, that historical specificity ends to take a back seat to the idea of flux and motion as constituting objects.

A history of objects is a history of practices: in writing the history of a thing, we essentially write a history of resemblances, of practices of identification and similitude, of objectification, of translation, of the forming and re-forming of objects in the context of different rationalities.¹⁶ But these practices emerge in particular historical contexts. This chapter will show that there was a particular way of being in motion, and a new way that the particular forms of motion constituted new modes of objecthood, in China’s early modernity. The early modern object was constituted, I will argue, by practices of identification characterized by new modes of location, observation, and translation.

Identification as location: locating early modernity

An abundant secondary literature treats the role of localities and local histories in early modern China.¹⁷ Among the several types of ‘place’ that acted as coherent entities or identifying categories for the purposes of scientific and medical trade were linguistic communities; named states identified in Chinese texts; and named locations or location-terms that recurred as important textual categories of analysis, including several ways of describing ‘foreign,’ ‘overseas,’ or barbarian goods and peoples. Many of these latter location-terms operated as identifiers of places, peoples, and objects in texts about natural knowledge in the Ming and Qing.¹⁸ Local identity was a crucial aspect of any description of materia medica, for example: place of origin was used to distinguish among varieties of a drug, to interpret its medicinal efficacy, and to determine its market value.

The nature of locality changed over the course of early modernity in China, and the practice of identification of natural objects through location transformed along with it. First, the surfaces of more types of bodies were mapped and used to identify entities – not just geographic bodies, but human and drug bodies as well. In addition, location was used to identify more places upon those bodies. The number of named localities in early modern texts about natural objects increased both on the map of the empire and on the bodies of natural objects themselves, and as a result, objects could exist in new and multiple localities. They also contained new spaces within themselves, and their boundaries and surfaces wer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Acknowledgments to the second edition
• List of contributors
• Preface to the second edition: early modern things revisited
• Introduction: early modern things: objects in motion, 1500–1800
• Part I The ambiguity of things
• Part II Representing things
• Part III Making things
• Part IV Encountering things
• Part V Empires of things
• Part VI Consuming things
• Part VII Epilogue: the power of things
• Index