Page 51 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

porcelain in a new way. With these contracts, it is possible to tell more about how the

porcelain trade operated. With this information, I am able to demonstrate the

difference between blue and white, enamelled porcelain in price, in their imported

quantities as well as their dealers. It shows us that different types of porcelain were

sold at different prices. More importantly, it shows the EEIC recognised the difference

of blue and white and enamelled porcelain, suggesting they had choices of purchasing

particular types of porcelain. This is an important fact that current scholarship has

ignored.

However, existing scholarship on Chinese export porcelain trade has, to date, paid

little attention to this information. Existing scholarship has used Factory Records on

the studies of the EEIC trade and the impact of trade, private trade, Canton

70
69
merchants, as well as the analysis of export goods. The most read and influential
71
text based on EEIC records is by Hosea Ballou Morse. Morse was an American

69 For studies on the impact of the trade, see S. A. M. Adshead, Material Culture in Europe and
China, 1400-1800: The Rise of Consumerism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997); Kenneth
Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World
Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).Maxine Berg, ‘Asian Luxuries and
the Making of the European Consumer Revolution’ in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds.).,
Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, Palgrave,
2002). Studies on private trade see 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,
1:1 (1957), pp.108-37. Meike von Brescius, ‘Worlds Apart? Merchants, Mariners, and the
Organizations of the Private Trade in Chinese Export Wares in Eighteenth-Century Europe’ in
Maxine Berg (ed.), Goods from the East, 1600-1800 Trading Eurasia (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), pp.168-182. By far the most comprehensive studies on Canton merchants have
been done by Paul A. Van Dyke, Canton Trade: Life & Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-
1845(Hong Kong,2005); Merchants of Canton and Macao: Politics and Strategies in Eighteenth-
century Chinese Trade (Hong Kong: Kyoto: Hong Kong University Press, 2011); Weng Eang
Cheong, Hong Merchants of Canton: Chinese Merchants in Sino-western Trade, 1684-1798.
(Curzon,1995). Chen Guodong, The Insolvency of the Chinese Hong Merchants, 1760-1843
(Monograph Series, No.45, Taipei: The Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, 1990).
70 The most recent example is from Maxine Berg’s project ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries: Trading
Eurasia 1600-1830’. The project from UCL ‘East India Company at Home 1757-1857’, see
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/research/eicah/about/.
71 H. B. Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China 1635-1834, 5
volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926).
35