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
Phantom Whitening: Patterns in the VOC's Acquisition of Indian Textiles for Europe and Indonesia, 1650-1700
My research will investigate the Dutch East India Company's (VOC) textile trade in India from 1650-1700, during which the VOC shifted from primarily trading Indian textiles against spices in Southeast Asia, to sending them to the European market. In European textile history, the prevailing view is that Indian textile artisans modified their designs to have whiter backgrounds; it is assumed that this change was in order to cater to European tastes. One would therefore expect to see a substantial “whitening” of the textiles that the VOC procured between 1650-1700. I’d like to investigate whether and where this “whitening” happened empirically, which has never been done before. To synthesize evidence involving this broad geography, I intend to use GIS to conduct geospatial analysis, in particular, to map changes over time in the textile export trade to Europe.