Any information on old(?), heavy(!) wood box

You know I'd never thought of it like that, I was sure these items were bought within India and I know of the same sort of items (horoshiapur) were sold in the UK by big London firms like Selfridges & liberty's but I did think they were only large items like tables because they were too large for tourists to take back on ships. To my knowledge small items like boxes were strictly only tourist ware but I could be wrong? When these labels first appeared I don't know but I do know when they stopped (1947) it's also the date India stopped using ivory. I will admit these labels are never on older horoshiapur or on boxes dating to the mid 19th c or before so my comment about labels isn't correct I should have said if it was pre 1947 and post 1900 it's likely to have a label but this style of chest wouldn't have been exported to another country back then even if it were old as plenty of chests like this were everywhere back then.

 

Don’t forget we had a massive colonial civil service and commercial company presence in India. So not tourist pieces, but commissioned things and stuff that people shipped back at the end of their tour of duty.

 

Yes I agree after 1900 more UK paid/residents in India could have afforded something small to bring back but the more ornate pieces would have still been out of the reach of normal workers, some pieces took weeks, months or over a year to produce and would have only been for the very rich. Today the art of horoshiapur has been taken over by dealers and middle men who don't pay the craftsmen well but still you can expect to pay £10,000 for the finest works at the workshops, far more with the dealers and that's with easy plastic inlays. Back in the day each inlay would have been shaped from off cuts from other ivory crafts making the process far far longer, they were highly regarded for their craft and paid more respectively. To be a tourist back in the day you would have had a 3 month steamship vouge followed by a land journey taking around the same time, you would have had a number of people working for you to carry all the stuff you needed ect, it would have cost far more than a normal worker could afforded. Today we think of tourist pieces being cheap and poorly made but some of the best works of art were produced to be sold to very rich travellers who would go to far flung places and bring back these works to confound their friends on how they could have been possibly produced, Italy, India, Persia all had these works.