Goods from the East, 1600–1800

15
Selling India and China
in Eighteenth-Century Paris
In this chapter, I endeavour to show how Parisian shopkeepers played a
crucial role in the diffusion of ‘oriental’ goods on the domestic market.
This means understanding how productive innovation, consumption
and distribution were connected. One way of understanding this is
to examine how shopkeepers advertised their ‘new’ products (which
sometimes were neither new nor genuine) to a broad range of clients.
Another way is to track goods in their account books.
Shopkeepers, as intermediaries between producers and consumers,
were perhaps centre-stage among market actors – as important as large
trading companies, such as the Company of the Indies.1 And Paris was
quite a good stage. Since the Middle Ages, the French capital has been
one of the major centres of economic activity in Europe. It was, in the
eighteenth century, a key place in the world luxury market, producing
and marketing silverware and jewellery, fine timepieces, book bindings,
textiles and so on.2 Like London, Paris was celebrated for its high concentration of artists and craftsmen.
Trade in Paris consists particularly of useful, fashionable and pleasant objects, such as furniture, jewellery, timepieces, bronzes, gilding,
porcelain, and a mass of other precious objects that we shall describe
as accurately as possible.3
Carolyn Sargentson and Guillaume Glorieux have shown how
diverse suppliers for individual consumers were, and how hundreds
of objects were piled up in the most famous haberdasheries, such as
Gersaint, Lazare Duvaux, Granchez, and Poirier & Daguerre.4 Their
commercial success depended on their ability to meet different customers’ expectations or needs, and to react quickly and flexibly to
229
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Natacha Coquery
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