Abstract
During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, commerce was increasing between Europe and China. In England, demand for Chinese goods, notably tea, porcelain, lacquerware and silk, was strong, and the English East India Company (EIC) responded by sending ships to the East, trying to establish trading posts on the Chinese islands of Amoy (Xiamen) and Chusan (Zhoushan). For connoisseurs and natural philosophers this raised the possibility of obtaining items of considerable interest from far-flung, exotic locations. James Cuninghame (c. 1665–1709), a Scottish surgeon, travelled to Chusan with the EIC and would prove invaluable to keen collectors of specimens of animals and plants (of potential economic, ornamental, ‘scientific’ or curiosity value) in England.
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Notes
- 1.
J. Petiver to J. Cuninghame, 1698, Sloane MSS, British Library, 3333, 113–116.
- 2.
J.E. Dandy, The Sloane Herbarium: an annotated list of the Horti Sicci composing it; with biographical accounts of the principal contributors (London: The British Museum, 1958).
- 3.
L. Plukenet, Amaltheum botanicum (London: for the author, 1705), t.390, f.2.
- 4.
Sloane Herbarium, Natural History Museum, London, HS 94, 192.
- 5.
J. Petiver, Musei Petiveriani (London: S. Smith & B. Walford, 1699), 44.
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Jarvis, C. (2016). The Chinese Tallow Tree: From Asset in Asia to Curse in Carolina. In: Craciun, A., Schaffer, S. (eds) The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_22
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