In the mid-eighteenth century, two types of European round tables traveled across the boundary of the city’s trading piers and made their way into local everyday life. Originating in early modern British furniture, these round tables gradually spread from export furniture workshops to Cantonese houses, where they found novel meanings and uses in the forging of a new culture of sociability and utility that emerged during the late eighteenth century. Collating visual, material, and textual sources, I thus show the central role that the flow of goods and ideas along local and global trade routes played in the definition and re-definition of Canton’s cultural identity.

Kyoungjin Bae received her Ph.D. in International and Global History from the Department of History at Columbia University in 2016. Before studying at Columbia, she received her B.A. and M.A. degrees at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, where she majored in European history with a focus on early modern British history and empire. Kyoungjin’s Ph.D. dissertation explores the history of Sino-European exchanges in the long eighteenth century through the lens of the early modern furniture trade. Based on extensive archival research at institutions in the UK, the Netherlands, Taiwan, China, and the US, it places particular emphasis on the interconnections between histories of artisanal craftsmanship, material culture, and the transmission of technical and arboreal knowledge across borders. This research was supported by an ACLS-Henry Luce Pre-Dissertation Grant, an SSRC-IDRF International Research Grant, and a write-up fellowship from the Quinn Foundation. Kyoungjin is very excited about joining the LRCCS for the 2016-2017 academic year and plans to use her fellowship period revising her dissertation and beginning work on a new project dealing with artisans’ instrumental knowledge of tools in Qing China.