Page 137 - 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

As I have argued in the previous section, enamelled porcelain embodied three

distinctive features that favoured eighteenth century Chinese consumers’ taste. I shall

continue to ask: to what extent, however, was enamelled porcelain consumed in the

domestic market in eighteenth century China? To what extent can enamelled porcelain

be considered as a ‘luxury’? And what can social lives in China tell us about Qing

consumer culture and society?

Discussions on luxury, luxury consumption and their impact on the eighteenth

century have attracted global and economic historians alike. Luxury items were

considered as consumption goods that had played a role in stimulating the growth of

consumer revolution of eighteenth century England. 43 It was stated that ‘the

44
consumer revolution… clearly preceded the Industrial Revolution’. Maxine Berg
has traced the nature of luxury items, which were mainly imported goods from Asia

that have stimulated the technological invention, as well as the economic growth of

43 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The
Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982), pp.9-
33. Over the past generation of scholarship, the history of luxury consumption and material culture
has emerged as a rich subfield of European history. From Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough’s
ground breaking anthology, The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical
Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) to Daniel Roche’s monumental
History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600-1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,1997 French ed., 2000 English trans.), scholars of consumption have
deepened our understanding of modern European law, politics, art, and culture through detailed
attention to the goods that mediated social relationships.
44 Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p.15. Maxine Berg, 'Luxury, the Luxury Trades and the
Roots of Industrial Growth', chap. 9, in Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook on the
History of Consumption (Oxford, 2012), pp.173-212.
121