Eug Xu is a third-year undergraduate in the history department working towards a minor in the digital humanities. Eug is primarily interested in global history, merchant and craft economies, and the history of clothing and textiles. For their history honors thesis, Eug is researching patterns in the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) textile procurement in India and export to Southeast Asia and Europe, with an emphasis on how mapping can be employed as a historical technique. In the digital humanities, Eug works as a Research Assistant at Research Data and Digital Scholarship, doing work focused on AI ethics, and is a summer 2024 Price Lab Fellow. Eug can otherwise be found doing miscellaneous tasks for their theater group, iNtuitons Experimental Theatre, or the Theatre Arts Council overall. If you cannot locate them there, they are probably in a Penn History Review meeting.
Eug Xu
Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow
2024—2025 Forum on Keywords
Eug Xu
History
‘Als de drie onderste staalen’: Revealing uncertainty in VOC luxury trade through textile samples and porcelain drawings
This history undergraduate thesis explores the limited extent of the expertise within the Dutch East India Company (VOC’s) in its textile trade in Asia, and makes a case for viewing the surviving textile samples attached to VOC correspondences as a form of bookkeeping in its own right worth comprehensive cataloguing and study. Examining these textile samples, the correspondences surrounding them, and making comparisons between the luxury textile trade and the porcelain trade all reveal the illegibility of the Asian market to the VOC and the therefore massive amount of guesswork and imprecision involved in conducting international luxury trade in the 17th through early 19th centuries. The chapter of this thesis I am submitting for workshopping is the second chapter, which provides an overview of all of the textile samples found in the Dutch National Archives’ VOC-related papers and the contexts in which they are found, thus arguing that there is an urgent need to examine the non-textual data found in the archives of early modern trading companies.