Page 37 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

VOC records with the EEIC sources I explore below allow for the discussion of the

trade of porcelain at Canton that is central to this thesis to go into more depth.

Historians rely on official records and registers to calculate the volume of

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commodities on board individual ships. H.B. Morse has listed some of EEIC ships’
imports, with the quantity of each commodity. This is certainly valuable for economic

40
historians, in that they can produce a statistical analysis of the trade. They have

situated the China craze of the eighteenth century within the context of long-standing

patterns of trade between East and West, and pointed to the decisive role for Chinese

imports in stimulating many of the innovations in domestic manufacturing and

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marketing techniques that led, in turn, to the Industrial Revolution. Among this

group of scholars, the quantity of imported porcelain and the total amount of silver

that was spent on ‘China wares’ are the main concern. In considering porcelain

together with other imported commodities, scholars have discussed how the China

trade contributed to the world economy system. The trade and commercial activities

of East India Companies proved to be one of the key driving forces in European

39 Earl H. Pritchard, ‘Private Trade between England and China in the Eighteenth-Century (1680-
1833)’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1(1957), pp.108-37. H.B. Morse,
Chronicles of the East India Company in China, Vol. 5. (Oxford, The Clarendon press, 1926-29);
Christian Koninckx made estimates in The First and Second Charters, p.267.
40 For example, Wolfgang Keller, Ben Li, and Carol H. Shiue, ‘China's Foreign Trade:
Perspectives from the Past 150 Years’ NBER Working Paper No. 16550, November (2010), pp.1-
53, available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w16550, accesed on 1 July 2016.
41 See, for example, Jan de Vries, ‘Understanding Eurasian Trade in the Era of the Trading
Companies’ in Maxine Berg (ed.), Goods from the East,1600-1800 Trading Eurasia (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp.7-39. Maxine Berg, ‘Manufacturing the Orient: Asian
Commodities and European Industry 1500–1800,’ in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Prodotti e
tecniche d’oltremare nelle economie europee secc. XIII–XVIII (Prato: Istituto internazionale di
storia economica F. Datini, 1998), pp.385–419; Maxine Berg, ‘Consumption in eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century Britain.’ in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge
Economic History of Modern Britain (The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.357-387.
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