“A Sort of Picture or Image of My Self”: Amoy Chin Qua's Almost Ancestral Portrait of Joseph Collet
It was 1716 and the British East India Company merchant Joseph Collet (1673– 1725) found himself at a crossroads that had brought him from the “lowest depth of adversity” to “an eminent height of prosperity.” He was departing the English East India Company’s Fort Marlborough at Bencoolen (present-day Bengkulu City in Sumatra) for Fort St. George at Madras (present-day Chennai), where he would soon ascend to the Presidency of the Madras Council, one of the most lucrative of the Company’s positions in the East. That was the prosperity he could look forward to, if a little sardonically. For the adversity that brought him to this point was the sudden death of his eighteen-year-old son, John, who had joined him in Bencoolen after years of effort but died of malaria after only a month after his arrival. Such was Collet’s despair that personal letters to his family ceased for nearly a year.
In Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century, 2023
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