Page 89 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 2 The Production of Enamelled Porcelain and Knowledge Transfer

procedures. Innovations occurred in the process of making enamel colours and

applying enamel colours to porcelain ware. I will show how the innovation took place

and how knowledge about these procedures reached local manufacturers.

2.4. Technological Innovations and Knowledge Transfer

‘Useful knowledge’ has, in the past decade, become a term of choice in historical

debates on the relationship between economic growth and technological change. For

economic historians, the application, distribution as well as organization of ‘useful

knowledge’ in the early modern Europe have created favourable environment for

technological changes thus eventually leading to the Industrial Revolution. Economic

historian, Joel Mokyr differentiates between two types of useful knowledge: what he

calls “propositional knowledge,” which focuses on how nature works; and

“prescriptive knowledge,” which focuses on how to use techniques. The former is not

embodied just in science but in all kinds of knowing about how the world works. The

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latter is embodied in technical manuals, but also in the technologies themselves.
Mokyr argues that before 1800, much of the technological progress was in the

area of prescriptive knowledge, which only led to singleton techniques. It was the

“widening of the epistemic bases after 1800” that signalled “a phase transition or

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regime change in the dynamics of useful knowledge.” It was not necessarily that
scientific breakthroughs led to the Industrial Revolution, but rather that more easily

33 Joel Mokyr, The gift of Athena: historical origins of the knowledge economy (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), p.5.
34 Ibid., pp.19-20.
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