Journée d’études: Diplomatic Gifts and Counter-Gifts: Britain and the Muslim East, 16th to Early 20th Century

Diplomatic Gifts and Counter-Gifts: Britain and the Muslim East, 16th to Early 20th Century



A one-day conference in person at the Centre for Diplomatic Archives, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, la Courneuve, Paris, 27 September 2022

As symbolic commodities circulating within and across cultures, gifts offer rich and multiple perspectives on the conduct of international diplomacy and its corollary cross-cultural transactions. Taking as our focus diplomatic relations between Britain and the three Muslim systems of the Ottomans, Persians, and Mughals over a period ranging from early contacts in the 16th century to the high age of the British empire, we wish to map out the shifts of paradigms and the redefinitions of circuits of allegiance and power through objects over the longue durée. Our comparative approach will cover the three Maussian stages of the giving, receiving, and reciprocating of gifts, as we aim at identifying cultural agreements and disagreements across different systems and contexts over diplomatic gifts and the bonds which they create or disrupt. Particular attention will be paid to the rhetoric and protocol of hierarchy and/or reciprocity in gifts, their metonymic value and its possible repurposing in a changing context, as well as the legal and political personalities of the actors in charge of the transactive process and their various relations to the polities involved.

Organising committee (LARCA, Université Paris Cité): Marine Bellégo, Daniel Foliard, Ladan Niayesh, Stéphanie Prévost

Cadeaux et échanges diplomatiques: Ententes et mésententes entre la
Grande-Bretagne et l’Orient musulman (XVIe-début XXe siècle)

Journée d’études en présentiel, au Centre des archives diplomatiques,
Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, la Courneuve, Paris
27 septembre 2022

En tant que biens symboliques circulant au sein et entre les cultures, les cadeaux offrent des perspectives riches et multiples sur la conduite de la diplomatie internationale et des transactions interculturelles qui en relèvent. En nous concentrant sur les relations diplomatiques entre la Grande-Bretagne et trois systèmes politiques de l’Orient musulman (Ottomans, Persans, Inde moghole) sur une période allant des premiers contacts au XVIe siècle jusqu’à l’âge d’or de l’empire britannique, nous souhaitons cartographier les changements de paradigmes et la manière dont les circuits d’allégeance et de pouvoir se redéfinissent à travers les objets sur la longue durée. Notre approche comparative entend couvrir les trois étapes maussiennes du don, de sa réception, et du contre-don, pour identifier les accords et désaccords culturels entre différents systèmes et contextes autour des cadeaux diplomatiques et des liens qu’ils tissent ou qu’ils défont. Une attention particulière sera portée à la rhétorique et au protocole de hiérarchie et/ou de réciprocité rendu possible par les cadeaux, leur valeur métonymique et sa possible redéfinition dans un contexte nouveau, ainsi que les personnalités juridiques et politiques des acteurs en charge du processus transactionnel et leurs liens divers aux États.

Comité d’organisation (LARCA, Université Paris Cite): Marine Bellégo, Daniel Foliard, Ladan Niayesh, Stéphanie Prévost

diplomatic_gifts_programme

Limning as Gift-Giving: Embellishing Letters to “Eastern Princes” and “Remote Kings” – Anne-Valérie Dulac

An illuminated letter, written by the calligrapher Edward Norgate and dated 9 July 1621, from James I to the Ottoman sultan Osman II, announcing the appointment of Sir Thomas Roe as ambassador to the Porte and the recall of his predecessor Sir John Eyre. Source : https://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/bridge/.

A Royal Warrant dated 10 March 1631 mentions Edward Norgate, one of the clerks of the Signet Extraordinary as having “for many years been employed in preparing for the Royal signature letters to the Emperor and Patriarch of Russia, the Grand Signor, the Great Mogul, the Emperor of Persia, and Kings of Bantam, Macassar, Barbary, Siam, Acheen, Fez, Sus, and other remote kings and princes”.[1] This rather long description makes it clear that diplomatic correspondence with “remote kings and princes” was a matter of specific artistic concern and care. From 1661 onwards, the garnishing of “letters to eastern princes” even became an official appointment.[2] Such discriminate treatment may be due to the fact that “England’s relations with Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Asia were established primarily to further the interests of its merchants. The exchange of royal letters was crucial to the maintenance of such relations; little wonder that establishments such as […] the East India Company, were asked to contribute to the cost of embellishing these missives”.[3]

In 1593, already, we know from the Khasseki Safiye that Elizabeth I had sent her a “special letter, full of marvels, whose paper was more fragrant than pure camphor and ambergris and its ink than finest musk, notifying indescribable and immeasurable consideration and love […].”[4] The Sultana’s lavish description of Elizabeth’s letter immediately and tellingly follows her account of the gifts she received. The fragrant and colourful missive served as a complement and addition of sorts to the gift-giving ceremony.[5] The multi-sensory impression made by the letter mattered as greatly as the words it bore, whose own impact depended upon the mediation of an interpreter.[6] Later beautifully illuminated letters, such as the ones sent by James I to Sultan Ahmed I on 17 January 1617[7], to Sultan Osman II on 9 July 1621[8] or to Emperor Abbas of Persia on 14 February 1622,[9] testify to the ongoing artistic value of diplomatic correspondence with the East. Although the one Elizabethan example I have given above is rather exceptional, thereby confirming the fact that “some letters were more like gifts than others”, such later “exquisitely limned letters were often works of art in their own right”.[10]

Rather significantly enough, the limners who ornamented the English monarch’s letters were sometimes also versed in the art of portrait miniatures, which circulated widely in diplomatic negotiations and are known to have played a significant part in Elizabeth’s own relation with Safiye and Thomas Roe’s negotiations with Jahangir, among others.[11] The flourished vellums[12] of diplomatic correspondence showcased techniques and materials near-identical to those used by limners of precious “pictures in small”, (including the use of liquid gold, precious pigments, watercolour and bodycolour). Edward Norgate’s Miniatura or the Art of Limning, even features a vast array of recipes which could have been used by limners of both letters and portraits in small volume.[13] Portrait miniaturists were then in fact still known as “limners” (the word “miniature” having entered the English language in this sense rather late in the 17th century): not only did they share a name, techniques and materials with embellishers of “patents and commissions of embassadours”,[14] but also equally contributed to asserting the agency of limners in extra-European diplomatic negotiations.[15]

[1] “East Indies: March 1631.” Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies and Persia, Volume 8, 1630-1634. Ed. W Noel Sainsbury. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1892. 125-141. British History Online. Web. 18 May 2022. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/east-indies-china-japan/vol8/pp125-141.

[2] “The writer, flourisher and embellisher of letters to eastern princes was appointed by lord chamberlain’s warrant to the gentlemen ushers, daily waiters. He received a fee of £10 a document until Anne’s reign, when a salary was established of £60 per annum at the treasurer of the chamber’s office.””Salaired tradesmen: Other.” Office-Holders in Modern Britain: Volume 11 (Revised), Court Officers, 1660-1837. Ed. R O Bucholz. London: University of London, 2006. 384-390. British History Online. Web. 18 May 2022. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/office-holders/vol11/pp384-390.

[3] Carlo M. Bajetta (ed.), Elizabeth I’s Italian Letters, 1533-1603. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p. 252.

[4] Lines 15-19 of a letter in Turkish from the Khasseki Safiye to Queen Elizabeth, written in the first decade of Rabi I, 1002/25 November-4 December 1593, translated into English by S. A. Skilliter, “Three Letters from Şāfiye to Elizabeth I”, in S. M. Stern (ed.), Documents form Islamic Chanceries. Oxford, Bruno Cassirer, 1965, p. 119-158, p. 132. The letter is now property of the British Library, London, Cotton MS Nero B. viii, f. 41.

[5] “In relations with non-European powers, royal letters were most commonly delivered at an audience in which a gift was also presented. This gift had often been paraded through the city in which the court was based before being processed through the royal compound to (and even past) the ruler. In such contexts the gift was calculated to convey the wealth of the English monarch and as a sign of the prestige with which they viewed the ruler to whom it was sent. A relatively bare letter, even one with silk threads, would have seemed incongruous when juxtaposed with such gifts”.

[6] Tellingly enough, most accounts tend to confirm that the original letter was presented before its translation. This is the case in Thomas Roe’s description of his presentation of James’s letter to Jahangir, for instance: “After many Complements, I vsed some words to him, deliuering his Majesties letter and showing my Commission, the Coppy wherof (I meane the letter) I then also deliuered in Persian […]” (Letter to the East India Company dated 25 January 1615), in Frederick Charles Danvers (ed.), Letters Received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East. London, S. Low, Marston & co., 1896, p. 10.

[7] Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. hist. b. 172, fol. 57.

[8] The letter can be seen here: https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-1837964.

[9] London, British Library, India Office Records and Private Papers. IOR/A/1/7B.

[10] Tracey A. Sowerby, “Negotiating with the Material Text”, in Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood (eds.), Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World. Oxford, Oxford University press, 2019, p. 203-219, p. 218.

[11] About portraiture ‘(including portrait miniatures) and diplomacy, see Tracey A. Sowerby, “‘A Memorial and a Pledge of Faith’: Portraiture and Early Modern Diplomatic Culture.” The English Historical Review, vol. 129, no. 537, 2014, p. 296–331. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24473825. Accessed 19 May 2022. About Elizabeth’s gift of a portrait miniature to the sultana, see Richard Wrag’s account, “A Description of a Voiage to Constantinople and Syria, begun the 21. of March 1593. and ended the 9. of August, 1595,” in Richard Hakluyt’s  Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehouse and Sons, 1904), 6:94-118, 94. About Jahangir and Roe, see Anne-Valérie Dulac, “Miniatures between East and West: The Art(s) of Diplomacy in Thomas Roe’s Embassy”, Études Épistémè [Online], 26 | 2014, DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.343. William Segar and Edward Norgate are perhaps the most prominent examples of limners who excelled in both the limning of letters and portrait miniatures.

[12] The use of vellum rather than paper was yet another distinguishing feature of letters to “remote kings”. It was also best suited to travelling and changing weather conditions.

[13] The history of this treatise (which survives in two version, one in manuscript form and a later one which was intended for printing) can be read in Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrell’s introduction to their edition of Norgate’s Miniatura or the Art of Limning (c. 1627–8, then 1648), ed. by Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). About Norgate’s contribution to “limning” and the dissemination of terminology and techniques, see Anne-Valérie Dulac, “Miniatures in Translation: Words for a Gentle Art”, in Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin (eds.), Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England. Translation, Transmission, Transfer. Turnhout (Belgium), Brepols, forthcoming, p. 273-292.

[14] I am here quoting from John Fuller’s concise biography of Edward Norgate in The History of the Worthies of England: “[Norgate] became the best Illuminer or Limner of our age, employed generally to make the Initial letters in the Patents of Peers, and Commissions of Embassadours, having left few heirs to the kind, none to the degree of his art therein.” (London: Printed by J.G.W.L. and W.G. for Thomas Williams1662, p. 161)

[15] See Maija Jansson, Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth-Century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far East. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Leiden, Brill, 2015. About limners/miniaturists see chapter 4 “Limners, Printers and Embellishers”, p. 55-67.

Gifts and power: Thomas Roe’s embassy and the English East India Company in Mughal India, 1615-1619 – Robert Ivermee

Thomas Roe being received by Jahangir. Mural in St Stephen’s Hall, Palace of Westminster. William Rothenstein, 1927. Photo credit: Parliamentary Art Collection)

In the first instalment of this blog, Ladan Niayesh identifies two key terms derived from Persian and Arabic that were first used by Europeans in the early modern period to refer to types of gift given and received during their encounters with Eastern courts. First, peshkash, a present made to a ruler in recognition or anticipation of a privilege to be granted, for example a new appointment. Second, khilat, a gift presented by a ruler or another ‘acknowledged superior’ to someone of a lower rank, closely associated with the public display of authority and munificence.

            Both types of gift were important to the English East India Company’s exchanges with Mughal authorities in India from the outset, as Thomas Roe’s visit to the court of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-27) shows. Arriving in December 1615 in the north Indian city of Ajmer, where Jahangir’s court was then based, Roe’s aim was to secure permission to trade for the Company, which had been founded in 1600. Though not the first Englishman at Jahangir’s court – several representatives of the Company had already been received by the emperor – Roe’s visit signalled the intensification of English diplomatic efforts towards the Mughals; serving as ambassador to King James I, his arrival at Jahangir’s court marked the beginning of direct diplomatic relations between the English and Mughal thrones.[i]

            A few days after his arrival at Ajmer, while still recovering from the arduous journey across land from Surat, Roe was summoned before Jahangir. Gifts of an English horse-drawn coach, a scarf and a sword were presented to the emperor, before Persian translations of King James’ letters to him were read. At a second audience a few weeks later, Roe then presented Jahangir with an English-made clock. For reasons which we will explore below, closely related to the role of gifts in diplomatic relations, the English request for trading rights in Mughal territories was not immediately granted. Roe was forced to spend the next three years at Jahangir’s court, during which time he also presented the emperor with a miniature by the celebrated miniature portrait artist Isaac Oliver, before an imperial edict (firman) confirming English trading rights was finally secured.[ii] By this point, the gift-giving had been reciprocated, Jahangir presenting Roe with a gold cup inset with rubies and emeralds. During his stay at the Mughal court, Roe was also gifted one or two of the emperor’s horses and presented with copies of Oliver’s miniature that Jahangir had requested his court artists to produce.

            Important in these exchanges were not just, of course, the items gifted but the processes of their giving and reception, which were rich in symbolism and ceremony. Roe presented his gifts to Jahangir in the emperor’s audience chamber (durbar), where visitors were usually received, Jahangir looking down on his guests from a throne on an elevated platform, surrounded by members of his court. The later performance of khilat, when Roe was presented with the gold cup, involved the conferring on the Englishman of a golden cloak lifted from Jahangir’s shoulders, a ceremony denoting the acceptance and integration of Roe into the Mughal polity on the part of its highest authority.

What emerges most clearly from the English sources relating to Roe’s stay at the Mughal court, however, is an understanding of gift-giving and receiving as transactional; gifts were considered not as disinterested offerings made through largesse but as contributions towards specific ends, sometimes even as a form of payment. What was gifted was ultimately more important than the processes of giving and reception and what they signified. At Ajmer, Roe worried that the gifts that the English crown had asked him to present to Jahangir – notably the horse-drawn coach – were insufficient to impress the emperor and decided to add the scarf, the sword and later the miniature from his personal possessions, hoping that the latter would pique Jahangir’s curiosity and be appreciated for its rarity.[iii] In parallel, he lamented that he had nothing to offer other influential members of Jahangir’s court, including the empress, Nur Jahan. Roe was right to be concerned. Jahangir, we are told, accepted the presents courteously, and later made use of the coach, but decided that Roe’s presents were insufficient, asking the Portuguese Jesuits at his court why, if the King of England was a great monarch, he had ‘sent presents of so small value’ and letting it be known that what he really expected was some jewels.[iv] By requesting his court artists to make copies of the miniature, the emperor indicated to Roe that the artwork was not so rare or interesting after all, and demonstrated that his artists were equal or superior in talent to their European counterparts.[v] 

To make matters worse, embassies from the Portuguese at Goa and the Safavid dynasty of Persia arrived at Ajmer in early 1616, bearing much more impressive gifts than those that Roe had been able to produce. The Portuguese embassy was a particular problem, given that its object was to dissuade Jahangir from permitting English trade in the Mughal Empire. Before long, Roe was admitting defeat, reporting to the Company’s directors in London that, faced with Portuguese competition, ‘articles of treaty on equal terms I cannot effect; want of presents disgraced me.’[vi] Only with the arrival of a new English fleet at Surat in the final months of 1616, carrying more gifts for Jahangir, did the situation change, renewing hopes of a formal contract with the emperor. When the English delegation transporting these gifts arrived at Ajmer, however, Jahangir reportedly broke with protocol by taking possession of them without first summoning Roe to an audience. The emperor then insisted on keeping all the new objects from England for himself, including presents destined for other members of court, velvet and silk intended for sale, and a hat meant for Roe himself! It was in the diplomatic fall-out from this incident that permission for trade was finally secured, leading Roe, who had at first been angered by Jahangir’s breach of protocol, to conclude that, if the emperor kept his promises, he was ‘happily robbed’.[vii]  

For his part, Roe was not immune to diplomatic faux pas either, suggesting a degree of incomprehensibility on both sides. During his stay at Ajmer the English ambassador had little patience for the intricacies of Mughal court ceremony, seeing for example in the exaggerated servility of the Persian envoy towards Jahangir something undignified. When Jahangir offered him the golden cup, his first reaction was to refuse it, responding that ‘all he desired was that his countrymen, the English, might have a free, safe, and peaceable trade in his dominions.’[viii] Such a response reveals Roe’s lack of understanding of khilat: the ambassador did not realise that by offering a gift to Roe, accompanied by the symbolic conferral of the cloak from his own back, Jahangir was confirming his acceptance of the Englishman – and by extension of all Englishmen – in the Mughal polity. Preoccupied by his conception of the gift-as-transaction (or payment), usually from an inferior towards a superior, Roe failed to comprehend the meaning of the present that Jahangir offered. Only once the misunderstanding was cleared up, and assurances offered that a firman granting trading privileges would follow, were the cup and symbolic conferral of the cloak accepted.

Throughout his time at Ajmer, peshkash remained a more consistent preoccupation to Roe than khilat. Informed by his experiences at the Mughal court, Roe concluded that jewels, swords, knives, works of art, furniture and wine were all presents likely to win favour with Indian rulers. Quality of workmanship was important, he suggested, along with the novelty of the objects gifted. Above all, however, it was the perceived material value of gifts that mattered. To ensure the future of the English company in India, presents would have to be given generously and regularly, not just to the emperor but to his governors in each region of the empire where trade was conducted. ‘It is the custom to change the governors here every year,’ Roe cautioned. ‘New humours must be daily fed; and presents are here expected as due as the king’s customs.’[ix]  

As historians have established, repeated demands for gifts and payments to preserve trading privileges were, by the late seventeenth century, one of the key sources of antagonism between European and Mughal parties in India, provoking war between the English East India Company and the Mughals in the 1680s and contributing to the English decision to establish de facto control over parts of the Mughal Empire, most notably the province of Bengal, in the following century.[x] In this sense, the significance of peshkash to changing European-Mughal relationships of power is understood. In contrast, instances of khilat, in which gifts were offered by ruling authorities to their inferiors, merit further research – not least as, after 1750, Mughal structures of authority were undermined, and relationships of power between Mughal authorities and Europeans turned on their head.

[i] English archival material relating to Roe’s embassy, including the ambassador’s journal and letters, was collected together and published as W. Foster (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899). The spelling and capitalisation of extracts quoted below has been modernised for ease of understanding.

[ii] On the miniature and its significance, see A. V. Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West: The Art(s) of Diplomacy in Thomas Roe’s Embassy’, Études Épistémè, 26, 2014 (https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.343). Accessed 3 June 2022.

[iii] Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West’

[iv] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 1, p. 119. Unfortunately, the Jahangirnama, the key Persian chronicle of Jahangir’s reign, makes no reference to Roe’s embassy. For Jahangir’s actions and views, we are therefore forced to rely on the English sources.  

[v] Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West’

[vi] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 2, p. 346.

[vii] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 2, p. 384.

[viii] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 1, pp. 256-7.

[ix] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 1, p. 94.

[x] See R. Ivermee, Hooghly: The Global History of a River (London: Hurst, 2020), pp. 70-88.   

Circulating Gospel tracts in long 19th-century China: Proselytism Overturned – Alice Decouvelaere

Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary who reached China, at work, translating the first Bible into Chinese. Printing Industry of Chengdu.
Eliza Morrison, 1830s

Clocks, maps, musical instruments, religious paintings, scientific books and telescopes… Colourful images of princely gifts come to mind when thinking about the presents offered to Emperor Wanli (1563-1620) by the Jesuits when they reached China in the second half of the sixteenth century.[1] Chosen to display the superiority of European countries and the ingenuity of Western thinkers, such presents aimed at drawing the Emperor and his court towards Catholicism, by linking Christianity to progress. They also operated as means of informal (imperial) influence. But what did Protestant missionaries bring when they reached the shores of China two and a half centuries later? The failure of the Macartney Embassy (1793), and the apparent lack of interest of the Chinese court in the presents brought by the first British mission to China seemed to show that the trust of the Chinese Emperors would no longer be gained by gifts.[2] Moreover, with travel being costly, missionaries could only take with them the few belongings which were necessary to upholding their faith and to maintaining a lifestyle somewhat similar to what they had known in their home countries. Rather than attempting to convert the country through its elite — which had forbidden the practice of Christianity in China —, missionaries targeted lower classes, in the hope that Christianity would then spread to the top of the system. Rare and expensive gifts were replaced by the diffusion of tracts throughout the country. The culture of the printing press had always been dear to Protestants, especially in their evangelising enterprise. But the use of tracts and various printed materials, that Protestants regularly used on a massive scale, exceeded common measure in China[3].

            The origin of what became the biggest Protestant printing industry abroad is rooted in the Chinese political context of the early nineteenth century. The Canton System (1757-1842), which controlled trade with the West by confining all exchanges to the southern port of Canton, made it impossible for Protestant missionaries to enter the country. Contrary to Catholic missionaries who already had a network of converts and would disguise themselves to reach remote areas, Protestant missionaries needed another way to spread their beliefs. Hence, they turned to printing and found different ways to smuggle their writings into the country. The Bible, which the first Protestant missionary to China, Robert Morrison (1782-1834) had translated into Chinese, was printed on a large scale. However, missionaries soon turned exclusively to tracts, and sometimes journals, because they were easier to hide and smuggle. Such a method was particularly adapted to the Chinese missionary field. Indeed, contrary to most countries in which Christian missionaries worked in the early nineteenth century, a majority of the population was literate enough to read what was written on the tracts[4]. Moreover, despite the profusion of local idioms and spoken dialects in China, written Chinese remained the same in every part of the country. It was however dangerous to print these tracts in Canton or Macao, where most of the missionaries resided. The latter thus turned to peripheral places such as Singapore or Malacca and set up printing houses there. When missionaries were allowed to enter the country as a result of the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) and of the Beijing Convention (1860), they continued to resort to tracts to spread their message. This led to the creation of a profusion of ecumenical literary societies, set in different parts of China, which provided Protestant missionaries with evangelising material.

            It is difficult to assess the exact number of Christian tracts smuggled into China by Protestant missionaries. However, the vehement reaction of their Catholic rivals testifies to the intensity of their endeavour. Catholic missionaries generally accused them of defaming God’s written words by oversimplifying the Christian message and highlighted what they presented as the useless nature of their enterprise. In 1825, a Lazarist priest, called Jean Pupier went as far as writing to his superior in Paris: ‘I myself have heard of a Chinese express his gratitude at being furnished by the Bible Society with paper for a use I dare not specify’, before adding ‘How many houses are there (…) in which the interior partitions as well as the ceiling are papered with pages from dozens and dozens of Bibles’.[5] Such an assertion might have been caused by the rivalry between Catholic and Protestant missionaries on the mission field. However, it might also remind readers of The Good Earth (1931), a novel written by American writer Pearl Buck, who was herself the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries.[6] In this novel, the main character Wang Lu takes a tract handed out by a missionary. Wang Lu looks at the drawing of the crucifixion and concludes that Jesus Christ was certainly a crook who deserved to be put to death. He then uses the tract to repair his shoes. This questions gift-giving and what may be an appropriate gift selection. Thinking in terms of what the sociologist Marcel Mauss called the social contract of the gift (based on the triadic paradigm giving, receiving, reciprocating), the present situation qualifies as a miscounter. The misunderstanding over the nature of the gift results in what the giver (and expected readers) identifies as a misuse of the gift. The gift is thus immediately adulterated and loses its quality as gift for Wang Lu, who fails to reciprocate. The anecdote is also a way for write Pearl Buck to question the tract-giving strategy not only as one which is inoperative, but as one which is a one-way imperialistic move.

            At another level, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth also raises another question, that of the translation of Christian concepts into Chinese. Indeed, as Protestant missionaries from different societies began ordering tracts, they found it very difficult to agree on the translation of central concepts such as ‘God’. Protestants lacked a unifying centralised source of authority, like the Pope for the Catholics. The problem remained unsolved and each denomination went on using a different translation. Printers from the main printing houses thus left blank the spaces where God was mentioned in the tracts and Bibles which they pre-printed. They would then fill the blank spaces with the translation asked by the society placing the order.

            However, one could argue that it was not so much the translation of theological concepts but the way they were presented in tracts which could lead to the distortion of the Christian message. The emergence of the so-called Taiping movement in 1850 is a case in point. Their emblematic leader, Hong Xiuquan (1813-1863) was first acquainted with Christian theology through a series of Christian tracts. Although he then studied for a few weeks with Issachar Roberts, a Baptist missionary working in Canton, most of his understanding of Christianity came from the tracts he gathered throughout the country. The deistic system he created for the Taipings was deeply anchored in the Christian tradition. Hong Xiuquan used a series of Christian concepts such as the Golden Rule, the Trinity and a series of biblical passages, but he rewrote them in order to legitimise his rule.[7] He thus presented himself as Jesus’s younger brother and the fourth person of the Trinity and one of his lieutenants was cast as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Interestingly, Hong Xiuquan chose the use of tracts to spread his message throughout the country, thus demonstrating his belief in the efficiency of tracts, which had contributed to his own ‘conversion’. The use of tracts inspired other sects such as the Vegetarians or the White Lotus sects, which in their turn resorted to tracts. This contributed to the spread of the anti-Christian feeling in China, which would eventually reach its climax with the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901).

            By no means, did missionaries technically bring the invention of the printing technology to China — it is generally seen as one of the four great inventions of Ancient China. They did however greatly contribute to the rise of Chinese modern printing, without this being their main aim. While it is difficult to assess the real impact of such a development on the diffusion of the Christian message, it could be argued that the advent of the printing industry by Protestant missionaries led to the emergence of a new episteme. Indeed, one could argue that, with the development of modern printing in China, ideas started being spread in a non-vertical way, which contravened the traditional Confucian top-down social order and went along the structural transformations underwent by late nineteenth-century Chinese society. Paradoxically, this side-impact of the Protestant missionary tract-giving enterprise served a different cause than originally envisaged (as no less that the gift of Christianity). Indeed, the reappropriation and resignifying of Protestant missionary tract-giving probably had its main impact after Protestant missionaries were expelled from China, that is when the modern printing industry became one of the preferred weapons of the Chinese Communist Party, thus serving a very different cause than European proselytism.

[1] David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

[2] ‘The Macartney embassy: gifts exchanged between George III and the Qianlong Emperor. An eighteenth century diplomatic mission yielded exquisite gifts’”, Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/trails/the-macartney-embassy-gifts-exchanged-between-george-iii-and-the-qianlong. Accessed on 26/10/2021.

[3] José M. Braga, The Beginning of Printing at Macao. Lisbonne: STVDIA, 1963, pp. 59-60.

[4] John H. Ritson, ‘Christian Literature in the Mission Field’, International Review of Mission, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1915, 204.

[5] Jean Pupier to J. A. Dubois, Annales de la propagation de la foi, III (1830-1831), June 16, 1825, p. 47, in Peter W. FAY, ‘The Protestant Mission and the Opium War’, Pacific Historical Review, May, Vol. 40, No. 2, 1971, 151.

[6] Pearl Buck, The Good Earth. New York: John Day, 1931, p. 102.

[7] Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan.  New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 1996, 12-13.

Offering orchids, selling opium : gifts and profits in colonial botanic gardens (19th century) – Marine Bellego

Botanical things are commonly used as gifts: ornamental plants can easily be turned into presents, terrariums in glass bottles have become fashionable objects to bring to a birthday party, and offering cut flowers remains a codified way of expressing various feelings ranging from compassion to love. In a much more mundane way, the colonial officers who ran imperial botanic gardens in the 19th century commonly used plants and plant-derived products as gifts in their daily professional activity. The small-scale gift economy on which the naturalist community relied, however, contrasted sharply with the large-scale production of plant commodities (tea, opium, cinchona, etc.) meant to be sold at a good price on the global market, an entreprise to which botanical gardens were expected to contribute. By examining the circulation of botanical objects produced by colonial gardens, one can explore the ambiguous status of the plants and plant-derived products that were offered, exchanged and sold within colonial networks of trade and science in the late 19th century.

Imperial authorities funded botanical institutions, such as the Calcutta garden which was one of the most important gardens of the British Empire, investing them with a mission to improve the imperial economy by encouraging profitable trade1 . During the last three decades of the 19th century, for example, the Department of Agriculture of the Government of Bengal strongly encouraged the officers in charge of the Calcutta garden to focus as much as possible on ‘economic botany’ through experiments in acclimatizing, growing and processing profitable species such as tea, opium, rubber or cinchona. Opium, cultivated in the plains of Bihar by peasants who were forced to give up their existing cultures, and then sold mainly to China, became one of the most lucrative commodities for British capitalists in the 19th century.2) Several studies have explored the links between exploitative economic systems, which relied on underpaid human labour, and the plant transfers organized by imperial powers3 . It is therefore interesting to focus on the ways in which scientific practices that took place in such gardens were purposedly kept out of financial transactions.

Gifts and exhanges were central to the practical and symbolic economy that enabled the scientific functioning of cross-imperial networks, of which botanic gardens were important elements4 . Colonial gardens hosted herbaria, namely collections of dried plant specimens that were used for the description and identification of species. The ‘discovery’ of new species was at the heart of what colonial botanists considered to be their scientific mission. In order to find and obtain specimens, the gardens’ directors often relied on the unpaid labour of amateur naturalists stationed in various regions and with whom they corresponded5 . The work of these amateurs was motivated by friendship and collegiality as well as by a search for  prestige and recognition. George King, the director of the Calcutta garden, congratulated himself on his friendship with a colonel named Collett who sent him many interesting specimens from Burma and Assam. ‘It’s a pity that there are no more soldiers than Collett’, he wrote in 1890 to the director of Kew Gardens, near London.6

In order for a herbarium to function and for collections to be used and compared, plant specimens had to be made both accessible and mobile. Once a particular species was discovered or when plant collections were arranged, duplicates were sent to other botanical institutions and no money was ever expected in return. The same was true of living specimens of plants sent from one garden to another, which were meant to contribute to the ornamental or pedagogical dimension of other gardens. Even the nautical transportation of living plants in Wardian cases (boxes made of wood and glass) was kept outside the monetary sphere. The large-scale transport of plants depended on a system of favours between botanists and ship captains, who were often allowed to pay themselves in nature (literally) by eventually appropriating some of the plants they took in charge.

One particular file of the Calcutta garden’s archives bears witness to the fact that gifts and exchanges contributed to define the scientific identity of colonial botanists. Since the 1890s, the Calcutta garden published a prestigious scientific periodical, the Annals. In 1909, the Bengal administration started to object to the cost of these bi-annual volumes, which they deemed excessive. The director of the garden explained that such financial matters could hardly be an obstacle: ‘When the governement sanctioned the establishment of these Annals […] it was decided that, although a few extra copies might be printed so as to be obtained by purchase, it was contrary to the object of Government to treat the issue of volumes of the series as a commercial speculation.’ He added that the cost of these publications was in fact minimal, considering all the periodicals that the garden was sent in exchange for those volumes, and concluded that the government should regard the Annals as a ‘remunerative investment’.7 The financial argument was of course strategic when dealing with the colonial administration, but the director’s main point was the centrality of gifts and exchanges in scientific botanical practice. Sending seeds, plants, specimens and books to similar institutions, without any monetary counterpart, was primarily a matter of prestige and scientific reputation.

Within colonial botanic gardens and around them, the tension between the realm of economic profit and the sphere of collaborative scientific exchange manifested itself through the vexed question of the free distribution of seeds and plants. Colonial botanic gardens were public institutions and one of their initial roles was to spread the culture of useful plants in environments where they did not grow spontaneously. This enterprise was integral to the imperial rhetoric of improvement and civilization. The tabular annexes to the Calcutta garden annual reports show that the distribution of plants and seeds was one of its main missions: in the 1860s, hundreds of thousands of young plants were sent each year to prisons, hospitals, offices, train stations, municipal parks and gardens, official buildings and monuments, and even individuals. As local nurseries began to develop, however, this free distribution began to be seen as unfair competition by Indian nurserymen. The free distribution of plants therefore became limited, in theory, to ‘public purposes’. Files from the archives show that this principle was difficult to apply, because the Calcutta garden’s officers in charge of sending plants had a rather accomodating conception of what a ‘public purpose’ meant. Any British person who lived or had lived in India could be seen as serving or having served the colonial mission and therefore receive plants as a matter of ‘public interest’. In 1911, when a retired Bengal chaplain wrote from to Calcutta from Loughton, in Essex, to receive ‘very small quantities’ of local varieties of roses for his garden, he was sent the seeds freely and was even exempted from paying the post charges.8

Regulating the giving and sending of plants was a complicated matter, not only because rules were open to various interpretations but also because the behaviour of individual botanists and gardeners was often unpredictable. A close reading of the archives show for example that many young gardeners who stayed in the Calcutta garden as ‘probationer gardeners’ often fell victims to psychological illnesses. Alcoholism was widespread among them. In 1883, a probationer gardener named James Craig, in one particular ethylic bout, offered numerous and precious orchids from the garden to a London collector who worked for a private nursery. He was later dismissed for ‘drunken behavior’.9

One of the functions of the gift economy that prevailed among naturalists was to distinguish the scientific sphere from the merely economic one. However, the case of the Calcutta botanic garden shows that the two realms were far from being hermetically separated. Whatever the efforts of naturalists to define scientific credit through a collective gift system independent from trade, colonial botanic gardens remained institutions designed to serve the economic interests of imperial capitalists.

Marine Bellego

  1. Lucile H. Brockway, 1979, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens, New York, Londres,Toronto : Academic Press []
  2. See for example the novel Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (2008 []
  3. Richard Drayton, 2000, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World, New Haven, Londres : Yale University Press ; John Tully, 2011, The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber, New York : Monthly Review Press. []
  4. Thérèse Bru, 2017, Circulations scientifiques : les naturalistes et leurs données entre les mondes britannique et français, 1700-1836, Thèse de doctorat, Université Paris 8. []
  5. Dominique Juhé-Beaulaton et Vincent Leblan (dir.), 2018, Le spécimen et le collecteur : savoirs naturalistes, pouvoirs et altérités (XVIIIe – XXe siècle), Paris : Museum d’Histoire Naturelle. []
  6. Kew Gardens, DC/156/848, 6th October 1890. []
  7. Acharya Jagadich Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, Uncatalogued archives, ‘Annals of the Royal Botanic Gardens’. []
  8. Acharya Jagadich Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, Uncatalogued archives, ‘Seeds sent to retired Bengal chaplain’. []
  9. Kew Gardens, DC/156/614, 8th May 1883 []

A horse, a horse, my garter for a horse! When Queen Victoria met Sultan Abdul Aziz, London, 1867 – Stéphanie Prévost

While fans of the PBS Victoria series fret about the possibility of a fourth season, conjectures are building up as to its contents, notably as season 3’s cliff-hanger ending foreshadows the tragic death of Prince Albert in December 1861 and Queen Victoria’s early widowhood. How much Victoria shall leap forward in the 1860s is also under discussion…

In the margins of the 1867 Reform Act, which was eventually to grant some representation to urban skilled artisans in British politics for the first time, lies a long overlooked, yet crucial moment of Victorian diplomacy. On 12 July, 1867, Britain was to welcome the first non-Christian head of state for an official State visit on her soil: Sultan Abdul Aziz, who had inherited the Ottoman throne but six years earlier. As the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Stanley, confided in Queen Victoria’s private secretary on 22 May, 1867: ‘This visit will be memorable as the first which any sovereign of the Turkish empire has ever paid to the capitals of the West. It may also have important political results. English influence is at present greater than that of any other power at Constantinople. To maintain it is important.’1To reach that objective, Britain – in the person of her Sovereign – was to offer the Sultan a magnificent and friendly welcome during his visit (12-23 July) – that is at least as lavish as Napoleon III’s welcome to Sultan Abdul Aziz during his French visit (29 June-10 July) on the occasion of the Paris Universal Exhibition. At stake, was also the award to Sultan Abdul Aziz of the Order of the Garter, the most senior and the oldest order of knighthood in Britain, which he made a requisite of his English visit.

The investiture of Sultan Abdul Aziz with the Order of the Garter onboard the Royal Yacht on 17 July, 1867 by Queen Victoria is now best remembered due to George Housman Thomas’s representations (1867), two of which are in the Royal Collections, and a third one is on display at Weston Park (Shropshire). Little do they say about the weeks-long drama preceding the award. Queen Victoria had demurred from the minute she heard of the Sultan’s visit in May: he had invited himself at the last minute, which, to her, forbade his having any grand expectations – especially receiving the Garter, which she alone could decide to give. Indeed, the Queen felt little inclined to welcoming him at all, and arguing that her ill-health forbade it, she sent her son Prince Edward to meet him at Dover. Her government, otherwise busy with the passing of the 2nd Reform Act, urged to avoid a diplomatic fallout. Yet, but two days before the ceremony, the Queen was still very hesitant as she ‘cannot help feeling the anomaly of bestowing a Xtian order on a Mussulman [sic]’.2 The Queen asked Lord Northcote, then Secretary of State, and Lord Stanley, to consider an acceptable alternative, which the Sultan eventually turned down as inadequate (according to the Ottoman honours system). In so doing, Queen Victoria had sought to restore a more classical/Western power dynamics in ceremonial gift-giving, whereby the giver freely has the choice of the gift. It nonetheless became clear that ‘the Sultan would consider himself slighted if he were given anything but the Garter’.3 The insignia had been conferred upon his predecessor, Sultan Abdulmecid I, by the British ambassador at Constantinople, Lord Canning, there at the Embassy in 1856. Besides, the British press had also announced in June 1867 that the honour was about to be given to the Czar by Queen Victoria. Eventually conceding that it might be difficult to shrink away from bestowing the Order of the Garter upon Sultan Abdul Aziz without jeopardizing Anglo-Ottoman relations, the Queen did consent to award ‘her Oriental Brother’ this mark of special distinction.4 As his English visit came to a close, the Sultan ‘expresse[d] himself as highly pleased with his whole reception in this country which he greatly prefers to that which he met with in Paris. But nothing has given him half as much pleasure as the receipt of the garter and especially the mode in which it was conferred’.5 The investiture reasserted – at least symbolically – the status of the Ottoman Sultan as a full-fledged member of the Concert of Europe – a status stipulated in the 1856 Paris treaty, which had put an end to the Crimean War.

According to Marcel Mauss, giving necessarily entails receiving and counter-giving. Diplomatic correspondence between the Ottoman ambassador in London and the British Foreign Office reveals that Sultan Abdul Aziz intended to reciprocate by giving Queen Victoria seven purebred Arabian horses, both as acknowledgement (as from equal to equal) and display of munificence. Gifting an Arabian horse to another head of state was part of a long-standing Ottoman tradition and a highly valued one. The gift was meant to be gender-neutral, but was not read in that way by the Queen, who was about to turn down the present for fear of overarching consequences. When disclosed at the Royal Academy in May 1867, Sir Edwin Landseer’s commissioned portrait Queen Victoria at Osborne (1865-1867) had raised suspicions about the true nature of the widowed Queen’s relationship with her Scottish servant, John Brown. The Sultan’s gift was thus conceived as an embarrassment by Victoria and her entourage, who believed that accepting it would cause rumours of impropriety to resume.

To ease relations and avoid a diplomatic break, Lord Stanley worked closely with the Ottoman ambassador in London to bring the view across to the Sultan that ‘horses [were] not appropriate for her use’, but that she was not refusing the gift proper.6 Four Arabian horses were given by the Sultan to her son Prince Edward instead and were eventually accepted in November 1867.

The visit is usually regarded as a success for both Britain and the Ottoman Empire, but actually gives to see two rather asymmetrical gift-giving systems in contact on British soil and at the risk of incommensurability (e.g. over the role the Garter performed). It also shows the agency of diplomatic intermediaries in bridging it, as they acted as intercultural brokers (especially the British Foreign Secretary, the British ambassador at Constantinople, the Ottoman ambassador to St James’ Court and former Grand Vizir Fuad Pasha, who accompanied Sultan Abdul Aziz to Europe and had been secretary at the London Embassy in 1840). Finally, the episode serves to remind us that the meaning of a gift, its value and acceptability is fluid and highly context-dependent.

Stéphanie Prévost

  1. Lord Stanley to General Grey, 23 May 1867, Royal Archives (RA), Windsor, VIC/MAIN/B23, f. 69. []
  2. In Widdall to Lord Stanley, 15 July 1867, RA, VIC/MAIN/H/1, f. 117. []
  3. Robert Wilson, The Life and Times of Queen Victoria, Volume 3, London : Cassell & Co., 1887, 294. []
  4. Grey to Stanley, 10 July 1867, RA, VIC/MAIN/H/1, f. 111. []
  5. In Derby to Grey, 20 July 1867, RA, VIC/MAIN/A/36, f. 5. []
  6. In Stanley to the Queen, 20 September 1867, RA, VIC/MAIN/H/1, f. 158. []

Gifting the Harem: Gendered Gifts Between the Ottoman Sultana and the English Queen – Mathilde Alazraki

“If She will never cease from (sending) such letters which foster the increase of sincerity and love (…) I shall endeavor for Her aims.” This sentence concludes the letter that the Ottoman Sultana Safiye (c. 1550-1621) wrote to Elizabeth I in 1593, in response to the English Queen’s own letter and gift that were sent to the Ottoman harem earlier in the same year.

            When thinking about the exchange of diplomatic gifts in the early modern period, one rarely thinks of women as active senders and receivers of gifts, and even less of women sending gifts to each other. And yet, looking at the remarkable example of the correspondence between Elizabeth I and Safiye can tell us how gendered gifts, offered by and specifically aimed at women, facilitated diplomatic relationships at a time when the rest of Europe and the Ottoman Empire were at odds on a religious, cultural, and linguistic level.

            To fully grasp the influence of gendered gifts in the economic and diplomatic partnership between England and the Ottoman Empire at the end of the sixteenth century, it is first necessary to understand the uniqueness of the period that led to the correspondence between Elizabeth I and Safiye. The Ottoman Sultana, favorite concubine of Murad III (r. 1574-1595) and mother of his heir Mehmed III (r. 1595-1603), ruled the harem as Hasseki (favorite) and Valide Sultan (mother of the Sultan) during the “sultanate of women”, a time in Ottoman history when the Hasseki and Valide held unprecedented political power in foreign and domestic affairs between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries1.Safiye herself was known to correspond with European actors such as the Venetian ambassador in Constantinople2, and even with Queen Catherine de Medici3, making the harem a true place of diplomatic exchange. Thus, when Elizabeth I, freshly excommunicated by the Pope in 1570, initiated a trade deal with the Ottoman Empire to fight the Catholic Habsburg hegemony around the Mediterranean, her ambassador Edward Barton suggested that the Queen send a gift to the Sultana in order to win her favors. Befriending Safiye would allow Elizabeth and her ambassador in Constantinople to achieve their political and economic goals in the Ottoman Empire more easily, and it is with this hope that “a jewel of her majestie picture, set with some rubies and diamonds4 was sent to the royal harem.

            Critics like Tracey Sowerby have written on the mnemonic and metonymic role that royal portraits played in early modern gift-exchange5. The portrait, through its metonymic function, represented a part of Elizabeth and her kingdom which would be displayed in the royal harem of Constantinople, visually signifying the diplomatic ties between England and the Ottoman Empire. But this portrait also served an even more straightforward purpose: by looking at it, Safiye would know what Elizabeth looked like, making the English Queen and their friendship commensurable – to build on Subrahmanyam’s idea of “commensurability”6 – in spite of the geographical, linguistic, cultural and religious gap separating them.

According to Richard Wrag, an Englishman who arrived in Constantinople aboard the same ship as Elizabeth’s gift, Safiye enjoyed the picture so much that she immediately sent for the English ambassador Edward Barton to have her own gifts and letter brought to Elizabeth. The gifts included “a sute of princely attire being after the Turkish fashion”.7 It is here significant to point out that, though Muslim tradition prevented Safiye from sending back her own portrait, she still chose to send an Ottoman costume, which served the same mnemonic and metonymic function as the royal portrait, bringing a part of the Ottoman harem to the English court in London. The luxury gift of the Ottoman dress thus allowed Safiye to become equally commensurable to Elizabeth, who would be able to see and wear in London the same type of clothes as the Sultana in Constantinople.

            Subrahmanyam tells us that “there is a tendency to think of cultural incommensurability as particularly acute at moments of encounters, when two disparate (and perhaps historically separated) politico-cultural entities come into contact.”8 And yet, looking at the exchange between Safiye and Elizabeth can help us see how two historically different powers came together in the early modern period through common economic and political interests against the Catholic Habsburg hegemony, and how female gift-giving practices helped strengthen diplomatic relationships between Protestant England and the Ottoman Empire. While diplomatic studies in the English language have historically been permeated by a Eurocentric tendency to think of cosmopolitanism in the form of a white Christian man reaching out toward the rest of the world, Elizabeth and Safiye’s correspondence is a perfect example of how two women from different cultural, religious and even linguistic worlds fostered curiosity, friendship and peace-building through the gifting of gendered luxury items on a global scale.

Mathilde Alazraki

  1. Maria P. Pedani, ‘Safiye’s Household and Venetian Diplomacy’, Turcica 32 (2000), pp. 9-32, p. 10. []
  2. Luca Molà, ‘Material Diplomacy: Venetian Luxury Gifts for the Ottoman Empire in the Late Renaissance,’ in Global gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia, ed. Biedermann et al., (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 73-77. []
  3. Pedani, ‘Safiye’s Household’, p. 16. []
  4. Richard Wrag, ‘A description of a voyage to Constantinople and Syria,’ in Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques And Discoveries Of The English Nation, ed. Richard Hakluyt (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1904), vol. 6, p. 102. []
  5. Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Negotiating the Royal Image: Portrait Exchanges in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Diplomacy,’ in Early Modern Exchanges, Dialogues Between Nations and Cultures, 1550-1750, ed. Helen Hackett (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 125. []
  6. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 4-6. []
  7. Wrag, ‘A Description’, p. 102. []
  8. Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters, p. 7. []

Oriental Gifts and the Commensurability Question: Starting with the Terminology – Ladan Niayesh

“Fetch me the handkerchief: my mind misgives!” (William Shakespeare, Othello, act 4, sc. 3). This exclamation by the Moorish hero of Shakespeare’s tragedy of cultural meltdown has always struck me as the epitome of the misunderstanding around his ill-fated love gift to Desdemona. As she sticks to her talk of Cassio in the desperate hope of changing the subject of the lost handkerchief, she does not realise how the two are one and the same in her husband’s “misgiving” mind.

The example of Othello’s “mis-given” Egyptian gift going the wrong way down the interpretation lane draws our attention to how much gifts are by essence not just material objects and commodities. Rather, they are symbolic objects in performance, whose safe journeys and successful receptions depend, in the words of Felicity Heal, on a “proper understanding between the transacting parties”, or at least “a measure of ‘cultural agreement’” between them if they hark from different cultural spheres, like the emblematic Moorish-Venetian couple of Shakespeare’s play.[1]

In effect, gifts exchanged in a transcultural context open up material “contact zones” – to use Marie-Louise Pratt’s linguistic analogy[2] – where opportunities for understanding or misunderstanding the Other can arise. Behaving like full-fledged actors of social relations, metonymic gifts like Othello’s handkerchief perform and negotiate the terms of inclusion or exclusion of the parties they represent.

Taking the measure of the interpretive protocol which characterises a transcultural gift beyond its sheer material form takes us to the heart of the “commensurability” debate with which Sanjay Subrahmanyam opens his Courtly Encounters, devoted to forms of interstate and interimperial relations in early modern Eurasia.[3] The larger problem of the compatibility of standards between politico-cultural entities coming into diplomatic contact in the period – if such is the way we understand “commensurability” in that context – is too vast to deal with in the short span of this blog entry. But for the purposes of launching the reflection on Oriental gifts, one preliminary we need to examine is the compatibility of standards in terminology, so as to be aware of matches and mismatches.

A one-size-fits-all term, “gift” does not necessarily cover the wide array of social and hierarchical performances inscribed in its counterparts in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal realms in the early modern period. For the sake of brevity, I will restrict my examination to the examples of two widely used terms in that context, “Peshkash” and “Khilat”, but conclusions reached about those two can be extended to other similarly specialised terms.

“Peshkash” is defined by the OED as “a fine or present made to the ruling authority on receiving an appointment or an assignment of revenue”, with a first attested usage in 1619 in documents related to the East India Company. It thereby suggests the practice of gifting as a circuit of bribery that the Company needs to enter in order to secure trading privileges in the East in the tough economic context of global competition. But looking at the term’s Persian etymology opens up a different avenue, involving not just value for money, but a hierarchical performance, since the term literally means “drawing, carrying forward” a gift, hence implying a protocol of humility for that special “gift presented by an inferior to a superior”. “Peshkash” is therefore more aptly to be understood, not as a neutral “gift” of value in a monetary transaction, but as a symbolic tribute or mark of fealty towards a ruler and a system. “Peshkash” thus creates a form of bonding and becomes a rite of integration for the newcomers in the system, who place themselves under the protection of the sovereign and get tolerated in the land by his special favour. Failure of the protocol and the performance of ritual going with the gift would mar its symbolic value and social function.

At the opposite end of the social spectrum of performance, “Khilat” is defined by the OED as “a dress of honour presented by a king or other dignitary as a mark of distinction to the person receiving it; hence, any handsome present made by an acknowledged superior”, with a first attested usage in 1684, taken from the English translation of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s account of his travels to Mughal India. Here again, we need the Persian and Arabic etymology to see the performance beyond the gifted robe, since the Arabic radical Khal’ involves emptying out and disrobing. The ritual suggested here is that of the ruler bestowing a garment just taken off his own body. This metonymic gift is therefore to be understood as part of his public persona of power and authority that he accepts to share with an acknowledged vassal. The gift of the khilat thus opens up the “imagined community” – to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase –[4] around the sovereign to make room for the foreign element getting formally naturalized and integrated.

Gifts, like languages, are about sharing, understanding, and bonding. Rhetoric of service and symbolic performance are part and parcel of the function of a gift in situ, and we need to take them into account systematically when addressing the specificity of Oriental gifts in our larger project for this blog and any future research derived from it. Failure to fully do so would lead us to the same communicational dead-end as Shakespeare’s “misgiving” Moor of Venice.

Ladan Niayesh

[1] Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 23.

[2] Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Profession (1991), pp. 33-40.

[3] Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 4-6.

[4] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).