Page 40 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

and costing 40 taels of silver. The service was commissioned by the Peers family and

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bears their family crest. It was ordered by Charles Peers, Oxfordshire whose son,

also Charles Peers, worked for the English East India Company in Madras (1720-35)

and also traded privately. The Peers family also commissioned another larger, more

expensive Chinese armorial service in enamels with their full coat of arms, rather than

just the crest, as on this service, which was shipped directly to England on 8th January

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1732.
Based on surviving EEIC records, this thesis uses a new approach to examine

the porcelain trade, focusing on how various types of porcelain played different roles

in the trade.

1.3.3. Enamelled Porcelain and Global History

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Since Robert Finlay’s study was first published in 1998, another significant change
has taken place in the study of Chinese porcelain. The importance of porcelain is no

longer only explored by economic historians and art historians, but by global

historians. Chinese porcelain, as a material culture for studies of global connections

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in the pre-modern and early modern period, has become fashionable. The history of

porcelain has proven useful for discussions of the development of a shared global

48 Howard, Chinese armorial porcelain, vol.1, p.174.
49 Pieces from this service are collected in the British Museum, two soup plates in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, a serving plate in the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh
and two large serving dishes on loan from J.R. Peers at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
50 Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World
History, 9,2 (1998), pp.141-187. See also his more recent book, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of
Porcelain in World History (Berkeley, 2010).
51 A brief summary on this subject see Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, ‘Global China:
Material Culture and Connections in World History,’ Journal of World History, 23, 1(2012), pp.3-
8.
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