KHID 2625 - Global history through materiality - some examples from the Louvre and beyond

This series of workshops aims at introducing the students to the material aspects of global history. Materiality often completes textual evidence to help the historian document and understand exchanges between different parts of the world. Written sources and objects, especially artworks have different lives. In some cases, documents related to one period may be completely lost while artworks survive or the opposite. In the case of early modern and modern period, the economic links between different parts of the world are so well documented, from the European side especially that on the opposite, the mass of sources obscures phenomenons that are less documented. In the last decades, many historians have tried to compensate for this bias by looking for "subaltern" or alternative source. The artworks can be considered as one of them. By using the method of biography of objects, we can uncover many aspects of history that would otherwise have been disregarded. The workshops will insist on methodology, tools, and sources for the cultural biography of objects in different contexts (India, China, Europe…) at different periods. NB : most workshops are meant to take place at the Louvre. Due to the COVID situation the location will be confirmed in January.

Jean-Baptiste CLAIS

Atelier

English, French

Spring 2024-2025

The students will work in groups and be asked to choose one historical object and write its cultural biography by underlining the various layers of history in which it was embedded.

Séance 1: Mughal India and the world 16th – 19th century The Mughal Empire reigned over a large part of India from 1526 until 1858. It was extremely open to the world. Besides the local Indian elites (both Hindu and Muslim, one could meet Persians, Central Asians (Turks) and Afghan and even Abyssinians expatriates along with European traders and Ottoman artillerymen. All came there to find employment in local courts. Many other circulations of people and goods were active at the time. European trading networks are well documented. Less known are circuits like the fleets leaving Gujarat to bring Muslim pilgrims for the Hajj in Arabia, or the horse and slave trade between India and Central Asia via the sea and the Khyber Pass, or the distant trade with China bringing in porcelains for the Indian elites. The creation of Mughal arts, a synthesis of Indian, European, Central Asian and Persian techniques and aesthetics, will be at the heart of the discussion. Séance 2: Europe-Asia trade from the 17th to the 18th century and technological exchanges: This workshop will focus on the circulation of porcelain between China, Japan and Europe in the 17-18th centuries and the development of the porcelain industry in Europe in response to the colossal trade deficit caused by this Asian trade. We will speak here of industrial espionage, of Jesuits trying to pierce the secret of porcelain manufacture, but who will also bring chemical compounds to Asia which will become the basis of decorations on porcelain today considered as classics in Japan or China (yellow of kakiemon or purple of Cassius giving birth to the porcelains known as "famille rose"). Séance 3: Asian Art collections in the 19th century: This workshop will talk about the history of collections and then museums of Asian art and how political events (Indian revolt of 1857-58, the opium wars and the sack of the summer palace) by bringing new objects to the market aroused curiosity and the emergence of the history of Asian art, how this marked the organisation of museums. We will also show how the essentialisation of cultures that developed in the middle of the 20th century in museum led to the separation of collections between museums, a watertight vision of cultures, centred on the logic of the pure and the impure, which devalues the objects resulting from hybridisation. We will also discuss how some current political movements tend to reactivate this essentialist thinking that museums have been working to deconstruct for the past thirty years. Séance 4: Geek culture: Geek culture is a mixture of science fiction, fantasy, and fantasy deployed on media ranging from comics to novels, including movies, series, cartoons, and video games. It is a transnational culture, the product of the complex interaction of three poles over time, Europe (mainly France and the United Kingdom), the United States and Japan. We will show students how this culture developed in France and England in literature in the19th century, how the United States took over after the First World War, then the arrival of Japan in these flows in the 1960s and the return of Europe from the 1970s. Above all, we will show how the leading country in a given period draws on the contents of other poles to feed itself. Generally speaking, we will show the students the effects of cross-influence that are constantly being reinforced in this industry. We will show in the rooms of the Louvre the little-known continuity between ancient art and pop culture. How French fantasy paintings from the 19th century, for example, influenced Hollywood sets in the 1980s. Séance 5: The social lives of things, case study 1, Renaissance Jewel in India and back This workshop will focus on the notion of social life of things as conceptualised by Arjun Appadurai through one example. We will draw the biography of a renaissance jewel produced in Europe in the 1580s, arriving in India in the same years probably via Goa, represented in painting by the imperial Mughal workshop (the painting is in an Indian museum today), subsequently bought by a Dutch merchant from Batavia. It returned to Europe with him. The merchant was a supporter of the French in the Napoleonic wars. As his business collapsed with the English trade blockade, he tried to sell the jewel to Napoleon. The jewel was then bought by Charles Setton Guthrie, the greatest collector of imperial Mughal jades who served in India and then exhibited in Paris. After several owners it arrived at the Metropolitan Museum. Séance 6 : The social lives of things, case study 2: the Nepalese knife of Eugène Delacroix The Musée National Eugène Delacroix owns a kukri, a traditional Nepalese knife that used to belong to the painter. He used it in one painting in 1831. The study of this knife and his story in Delacroix's work enables us to see diverse connected histories in the early 19th century: the British colonisation of south Asia, the French-British connection among romantic and Orientalist painters, the fast-evolving views on other cultures and civilisation in the context of the development of colonisation and the international context of weapons collections in the 19th century.