When one thinks of silk in the early modern world, silk from China immediately comes to mind. Sericulture practices in the Americas and their transcultural connections to Chinese craftsmanship and global markets are, however, somewhat less explored or well-known. In her book An Object of Seduction, the historian Xiaolin Duan discusses the ecological, political, technological, mercantile, aesthetic, and legal dimensions of silk production and consumption in both China and the West, with a particular focus on colonial Mexico and Spain and special attention to Manila as the connecting point between the two worlds.
The book presents a connective and comparative history of silk and its role in early modern globalization on the basis of material, visual, and textual primary evidence. Ecologically informed, it draws on the work of anthropologists, economists, and historians of technology and art. In terms of argumentation, throughout all chapters Duan emphasizes aspects of empowerment through the production and consumption of silk—the empowerment of states and indigenous communities, and of individual laborers, women, and members of particular social groups. She fully uses the potential of visual and material records to nuance official histories of resource and labor exploitation, which often served glorified local ruling elites or foreign colonizers. Duan successfully takes into account the voices of laborers and consumers, writing a story of silk in the early modern world that traverses boundaries between social groups and empires.
The terminology Duan applies evokes certain theoretical perspectives that remain conceptually underexplored in the book. For instance, while the book's title highlights “seduction,” Duan goes no further than using words with seductive connotations in various contexts. She writes of the “global desire for silk” (17), for example, refers to the centuries between 1500 and 1700 as “among the most vibrant and sensual periods in Chinese history” (14), describes how “the circulation of things and people, set in motion by administrative and economic structures, spurred the desire for sensory pleasure” (138), and states that silk textiles were “inducing people to pursue them” (137). Duan's engagement with the agency of objects, for example in relation to the emotional responses they might cause through sensual engagement, seems to be very much in line with ongoing discourses in the histories of art, technology, and craftsmanship. But an explicit engagement with positions in these fields, for example those proposed in Jonathan Hay's study of Ming and Qing decorative artifacts in Sensuous Surfaces of 2010,Footnote 1 would have enriched the book and made it even more relevant, even if Duan ultimately rejected such positions. In the absence of deeper discussion of these theoretical frameworks, one wonders how Duan's understanding of silk as an object of “seduction” can productively be differentiated from silk artifacts as objects of “desire” on the market and silk fashion as an object or perhaps even an agent of “subversion” in terms of social norms and gender conventions.
Similarly, the reader is left pondering how silk's potential to qualify as an “object of seduction” differs from that of other globally traded Chinese products of the time that were imitated worldwide, most notably porcelain. As Meha Priyadarshini has argued, “the development of a colonial ceramic aesthetic” in Mexico was fueled by wares from Jingdezhen, and Puebla ceramics became “a symbol of Mexico's unique appropriation of Asian goods and evidence that the trade with Asia was influential in the making of a colonial Mexican identity that was distinct from that of the metropole.”Footnote 2 The interplay that Priyadarshini analyses in the case of Mexican ceramic production between materiality, artisanship, trade, and governmental restrictions against the background of exchanges between Chinese, Spanish, and indigenous practices through the Manila Galleon Trade, would have made a conversation between Duan's account of silk and Priyadarshini's book on porcelain in transpacific settings particularly fruitful.
In Objects of Seduction, Duan presents an ecologically aware study of sericulture, silk, and fashion in a global context that contributes to the Pacific turn. Both its interdisciplinary approach and its transcultural focus make it a perfect fit for the book series “Empires and Entanglements in the Early Modern World” and a highly useful addition to the rapidly growing literature on the material worlds of the early modern period in a global context.
