Page 21 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

set of products which use enamel material and painted enamel techniques that has

been transmitted from European missionaries. I use the term ‘enamelled porcelain’

throughout my thesis because it presents the basic material and the techniques of

manufacture, and was used in trade records between the English East India Company

and China of the eighteenth century. From the point of view that one major part of my

research focused on the trade, I apply enamelled porcelain in order to situate it

historically.

1.2. Main Arguments and Objectives

The principle objective of this thesis is to show that eighteenth-century China was not

merely a place of manufactures and export; rather, it responded actively to the

availability of new technologies and markets. Seeing China as merely a place of

manufacture which exported various commodities is a crucial blind spot in current

thinking about eighteenth-century trade. Indeed, current scholarship has largely

focused on the surviving objects in overseas countries, the large volume of the trade

and how China’s export goods played a role in other cultures and economies globally.

This thesis will move beyond the trends of the existing literature about the impact of

Chinese export trade on world history by asking how this trade influenced China. It

situates the idea that enamel and enamelling techniques were transmitted from Europe

to China during the late and early eighteenth centuries within a broader historical

context, and will show that new enamels and enamelling techniques were quickly

adopted and used for the production of enamelled porcelain. It also reveals that

production expanded from small workshops in the court to a large manufacture site at

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