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This article traces Charles Irvine’s and his extended family’ s engagement with the Swedish East India Company between 1731 and 1770. It shows how changing international and domestic conditions influenced the opportunities British subjects had to cross company lines and national borders and engage in different parts of the Asian trade. Considering the context of the family structure, the article also discusses how immediate and future family interests shaped the agents’ interactions with Asian markets. Covering a period of nearly forty years, the article brings to the fore how adaptable the family was to changing circumstances; its members positioned themselves inside and outside the company in ways that allowed them to maximize profits and minimize risks. The results of the study point to the need to consider the mutual dependency that existed between charted companies and flexible families in East Indian trade.

This article examines the effects of globalization on changing notions of the ‘savage’. We compare discussions taking place in different contexts in the late 18th century concerning two Swedish scholars and travellers to Africa: Anders Sparrman (1748–1820), a naturalist and Linnaean disciple, and Carl Bernhard Wadstro¨m (1746–99), an engineer and economist. Both moved in Swedish Swedenborgian circles, and both became involved in the British abolitionist movement. Nevertheless, their images of African ‘Others’ diverged in crucial respects, reflecting differences in their ideological outlooks, institutional affiliations, and understandings of how the world was changing. More specifically, we argue that the perception of global change brought about by a new economic framework of production and consumption provides a key for reading and comparing Wadstro¨m’s and Sparrman’s texts. Comparing their divergent uses of ‘savagery’, the article also highlights the versatility of the savage as a tool for presenting distant parts of the world to a domestic audience.

The multifunctional role of fieldwork in Sweden in the eighteenth century is here elaborated upon. Linnaeus’s methods for teaching outdoors in the early modern period are explored, as also are the significant overlaps between using the field for the purposes of education and for exploration. Alternative, extra-scientific motives for studying nature outdoors are also discussed, including the social implication of fieldwork, the formation of a scholarly community and the enhancement of careers, as well the connection between politics, economy and the outdoors in eighteenth-century Sweden and elsewhere.

My paper will discuss the use of binomial names in the trade with natural history specimen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Natural history specimen were typically sold at auctions. The preference for auctions is generally strong among sellers of perishable goods (e.g. fruit), or goods which are hard do price. Art objects but also natural history belong to the latter category, selling prices can typically fluctuate reflecting rapidly changing interests among buyers.

Linnaeus’s new nomenclature, introduced to an international audience in Species plantarum, published 1753, soon became accepted across Europe. It replaced the longer and instable diagnostic names, providing a short and easy to remember nomenclature for all living things to a growing audience of naturalists. In my paper I will explore how the new nomenclature made its way into the trade with natural history specimen and collections; foremost how it was used listing and grouping specimen in auction catalogues. The paper will draw on examples of Swedish and British catalogues printed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including the catalogue listing the belongings of the Duchess of Portland, put up for sale in 1785. The Duchess owned one of the largest collections of shells in Europe. Shells had long been hot collectors’ item, shell traders were also, as Peter Dance put it, among “the tardiest converts” to Linnaeus’s new names. The catalogue listing the Duchess’s collection also illuminate the tension between different consumers of natural history, between those who ‘loved order’ and those who ‘loved variety’.

Focusing on trade, materiality and consumer culture, this chapter explores the trade in collections with a Linnaean provenance. An assessment of the value in money of Linnaeus’s conserved plants and animals is mapped in the first section of this paper. The second section focuses on the material dimension, foremost on aspects of preservation,presentation and fashion. The third part of the chapter discusses how, in late eighteenth-century London, evaluations of specimen collections Linnaeus had used in his taxonomic work changed, and how it reflected Linnaeus’s shifting status in the history of natural history. The final section explores the market and the use of binary names when selling natural history specimens at auctions in eighteenth-century Europe, particularly in Sweden and England.

This article explores the large Scandinavian trade in cheap and colorful Chinese silk textiles between 1731 and 1761. Most pieces brought from Canton (Guangzhou) to Denmark and Sweden were monochrome, with discreet designs and patterns. What stood out was the wide color assortment, shades named with a nomenclature shared by the European East India companies. Changing quantities of different shades of red and blue silks reveal shifting Scandinavian consumer demands. The lack of new colors in the assortment of cheap and cheerful Chinese silks suggests, however, that Canton only played a limited role as a fashion leader.