The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in The English Quest for Japan, 1600–1625 by Timon Screech

Abstract

The Shogun’s Silver Telescope centers Japan within the British East India Company’s history by picking apart layers of archival obscurity and imperial amnesia. Using unlikely gift objects—a silver telescope and cargoes of paintings presented by the English to bewildered shoguns—Screech weaves a riveting history of art with the methods of transnational history. The book argues that the quest for Japanese silver was highly important to the British East India Company in the era of peaceful Euro-commercial rivalry (4). To secure bullion, the English used art to present themselves as trusted trade partners compared to their European rivals, the Iberians, Jesuits, and Dutch.Japanese–British relations before the hostilities of World War II is insignificant to histories of international relations and empire. After the shoguns expelled Iberians and Jesuits when they banned foreigners in 1635, they permitted only the Dutch East India Company (the voc) to operate in Nagasaki. The ban remained in place until Commodore Mathew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy forced Japan to trade with the Americans in 1854. At this point, scholars acknowledge the anti-commercial isolation associated with the Edo ban to be a Euro-centered misnomer. But Britain remains marginal to scholars of the Edo period, nonetheless. After all, evidence of mutual interaction is meager. The dozen or so Company voyages to the “East Indies,” to which Japan was an added destination, ended when the English withdrew from Hirado in 1623. But when a lively historian of art grapples with the dull archives of English cargo, things can, literally, look different.Screech meticulously mines the records of Company voyages usually ignored by all but the connoisseurs of marine trivia for the production, selection, circulation, and reception of art objects. He then elaborates this dense life of art with an impressively close reading of the role of gifts in establishing commercial markets. The English were eager to mark their differences from the “Popish” Iberians and their Jesuit “proxy-agents,” as well as the republican Dutch. They deployed the silver telescope to drive a heliocentric wedge between Iberians and Jesuits and the Japanese elite. Classical nudes and landscapes were intended to distinguish the secularizing inclusivity of the English Church from the proseletyzing Jesuits (104). Furthermore, pictures and rituals concerning the English sovereign intended to reassure the shoguns that, unlike the Dutch, the English were royalists. Indeed, gifts were part of a broader strategy to persuade the shoguns that Jesuits posed an existential threat to their state and that the Dutch were too republican. The British alone traded in peace.The book’s arguments, however, are a little ambivalent. For example, Screech emphasizes that the English branded themselves as peaceable traders, in contrast to their depiction of Jesuits as conspirators, thereby fomenting the Jesuits’ banishment from Edo Japan. But the book also hints that the Company trade in arms may have been decisive in the crucial war between the Tokugawa and the Toyotomi clan (183–184). He finds that many Edo objects and Japan-related discussions are incorrectly identified as “Indian.” That is, the lost archive of Japan is hidden in plain sight. But the mis-filings also imply that early Company voyages to Japan were part of a long history of orientalism barely covered in the book. The research design foregrounds how mistranslated objects can illustrate mimetic relations. Japanese and English codes of art could cohabit and stimulate one another. But the book also suggests that English strategies in Japan were similar to those pursued in the Mughal court. Had Screech acknowledged the wealth of scholarship about art and European courtly encounters in Mughal India, would this stimulating comparison have created a different account of the imperialism of British commerce?The book betrays a mysterious elision. The English withdrawal from Hirado in 1623 coincided with an incident in Ambon, Indonesia, when the Dutch tried several Englishmen and hanged one for conspiracy. Subsequent British mythmaking about the “English massacre” in Ambon anchored British imperialism in narratives of peaceful commerce and accidental conquest. The Dutch “treachery” at Ambon was used to explain the breakdown of Anglo–Dutch relations and the shift in Company interest to India.1 Screech misses the drama of this key imperial moment when he writes that in 1623 “the Dutch saw no further benefit in the English and dissolved the Treaty of Defence” (238).Bilateral accounts of British–Japanese relations tend to emphasize peaceable relations to counter the history of World War II’s hostilities. Screech’s interdisciplinary method offers the potential to subvert that narrative and that of British imperialism as well. That the book does not realize this potential fully, however, should not stop it from being read and studied closely. The Shogun’s Silver Telescope opens up new avenues of research because it leaves readers wanting more.