Page 119 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 3 Enamelled Porcelain Consumption in Eighteenth-century China

emphasising the importance of the market for commodities and the way in which they

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function as symbols of social status in Ming China. Jonathan Hay takes objects as

decorative arts in material, techniques, patronage and taste to analyse how they

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together form a system that affects every level of decoration in Ming-Qing China.

3.4. Distinctive Values of Enamelled Porcelain

The issue of value has been addressed by historians investigating material culture and

consumer preference. Studies used ‘emulation’, ‘conspicuous consumption’ and

‘distinction’ to generate a wealth of information about the material culture. The

economic historian Jan de Vries, in his study of ‘luxury’, situated in seventeenth-and

eighteenth-century urban centres in northwest Europe, contrasted decorative

silverworks, as ‘new’ luxuries, with ‘old Luxury’, a type of consumption that thrived

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at court and served mainly to demarcate social status and the associated porcelain.
More recently, objects and materiality became the focus, in order to emphasise the

shifting perceptions of luxury or the increasing importance of comfort and ‘sense

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value’. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, for example, reveal a shift in consumer

choice from goods of intrinsic value to goods made from innovative processes of

12 Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China
(Cambridge: Polity Press; Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991 and 2004).
13 Jonathan Hay, Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (London:
Reaktion Books Ltd, 2010).
14 A very good overview, see Neil McKendrick, ‘Introduction: The Birth of a consumer society:
The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England’ in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and
J. H. Plumb (eds.), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-
Century England (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1982), pp.1-8.
15 Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.), Consumer and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe,
1650-1850 (New York: Manchester University Press,1999); Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger
(eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in the Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Oxford, 2005).
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