Page 24 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

1.3. Research Context

This research touches upon several historiographies, ranging from art history, to the

history of Chinese export porcelain, to the history of the Chinese export trade at

Canton. Below, I first consider the current studies of enamelled porcelain from the

perspective of art history, which focuses on enamelled porcelain as a separate category

of object. I shall argue that this method of approaching enamelled porcelain as a

separate category is useful in understanding the nature of surviving objects on the

basis of their style and decoration. Nonetheless, this work limits our understanding of

the historical context in which enamelled porcelain was made and traded.

Second, I consider existing scholarship on the Chinese export porcelain trade at

Canton and its influence on other markets beyond China. Considering Chinese export

porcelain as a type of commodity helps economic historians approach the

development of the economy of eighteenth-century Europe. It also helps global

historians to explore the role that certain commodities have played in different parts

of the globe. However, by focusing only on enamelled porcelain as export porcelain

and on the impact of its trade on other overseas places, many other aspects have been

ignored. We know little about how the global trade of porcelain changed China itself,

and how trade changed the local port city at Canton. Such questions are indeed

important, since they lay the foundations for understanding how China responded to

the world beyond its own boundaries. Almost all research I refer to in the following

sections ignores the connection between external developments in consumption and

trade and technological innovation in China. For example, in his remarkable research

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