Page 271 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 7 Porcelain Dealers and their Role in Trade

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commercial practices in the early modern period has emerged. The analysis of the

organisations and institutions of a merchant ‘network’ has proved to be useful to

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explain the trade and commercial growth in the early modern period. This literature

shows that networks of merchants have played significant roles in economic and

commercial growth throughout history. Networks were also used to approach the

exchanges of knowledge and ideas, to explore how goods were traded, and trust was

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negotiated. Recently, research by Timothy Davies applied this approach to British
private trade, arguing the importance of regionally situated commercial associations

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for day-to-day functioning of private trade.
In the case of the EEIC, Emily Erikson uses social network analysis to generate

novel insights regarding the decisions of employees and the performance of the EEIC.

Erikson views the EIC's organizational structure as combining hierarchy with

horizontal networks, which are defined as decentralized patterns of interaction and

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communication. By circulating information, the social network also increased the
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number of the ports in trade with the EEIC. Erikson argues such social network

33 For a good literature review on ‘network’, see Bernard C. Beaudreau, Interregional and
International Trade: A Network Approach (Lulu.Com: 2008), pp.42-44.
34 Tijl Vanneste, Global Trade and Commercial Networks: Eighteenth-Century Diamond
Merchants (London and New York: Pickering and Chatto, 2011); Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and
Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks
(London, 2010); Thomas E. Goodman, ‘The Sosolot: An Eighteenth Century East Indonesian
Trade Network’ (Ph.D Thesis, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 2006); David Richardson, Filipa
Ribeiro da Silva, (eds.), Networks and Trans-Cultural Exchange: Slave Trading in the South
Atlantic, 1590-1867 (Brill, 2014)
35 Natasha Glaisyer, ‘Networking: trade and exchange in the eighteenth-century British empire’,
The Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp.451-476.
36 Timothy Davies, ‘British Private Trade Networks in the Arabian Seas,c. 1680 – c. 1760’, (Ph.D
thesis, University of Warwick, 2012); ‘Trading Letters in the Arabian Seas: The Correspondence
Networks of British Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Western India, Genre, 48/2 (2015), pp.215-
236.
37 Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600-
1757(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), p.26.
38 Ibid., p.99.
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