Page 33 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

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commodity so as to illustrate its trade history. Apart from the examination of

Chinese porcelain that has survived in collections, an important contribution of this

group’s scholarship is the archival resources they have revealed.

It should be noted that during the eighteenth century, EEIC and the Dutch East

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India Company (hereafter VOC) were the two leading companies who traded with
China, although there were other companies who traded at Canton, such as the

Swedish East India Company, the French East India Company and the Danish East

India Company. However, comparing studies on the trade of tea and textiles, studies

about the porcelain trade relating to these companies are relatively fewer in number.

Recently, global historians have explored more comprehensively the trade of tea,

textiles and silk of the French East India Company and Swedish East India

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Company. However, studies on the porcelain trade of French East India Company
30
are only partially known. Michael Beurdeley has contributed substantially to the

existing literature on the subject of Chinese export porcelain from several points of

view. In his book, Porcelain of the East India Companies, Beurdeley provides

valuable descriptions of the East India Companies, with a focus on the porcelain

markets of each company. In terms of the porcelain trade of the French East India

27 Volker, Porcelain and the Dutch East India Company; Jörg, The Dutch China Trade; Mudge,
the American Trade.
28 When referring to the Dutch East India Company, the following part of this thesis will use
VOC as an abbreviation for Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie.
29 Felicia Gottmann, Global Trade, Smuggling and the Making of Economic Liberalism, Asian
Textiles in France 1680-1760 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Hanna Hodacs, Silk and
th
Tea in the North: Scandinavian Trade and the Markets for Asian Goods in 18 Century Europe
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
30 For the French East India Company trade, Louis Dermigny, La Chine et l’Occident: le
commerce a ̀ Canton au XVIIIe sie ̀ cle, 1719-1833, 4 vols., (Paris,1964); Donald C. Wellington,
French East India Companies: A Historical Account and Record of Trade (Lanham: Hamilton,
2006). For the porcelain of the French East India Company, more recent book is the companion
catalogue to the exhibition at the Company museum in Lorient in 2002 by Louis Mézin, Cargoes
From China: Porcelain from the Compagnies des Indes in the Musée de Lorient (Lorient: Musée
de la Compagnie des Indes, 2002).
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