A note on Wedgwood

From "Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art" by Lothar Ledderose (1998)*...

...porcelain production in China was a highly systematized, sequential process...it involved a strict division of labour...The most detailed account was given by the French Jesuit missionary Père François Xavier d'Entrecolles (1664-1741)...In 1712 and 1722 he wrote two long letters on porcelain production in Jingdezhen, relying in part on information from Christian converts in the porcelain trade. The Jesuit Jean Baptiste du Halde included the two letters in his monumental and influential Description de la Chine, which was published in Paris in 1735-39 and soon translated into other languages...

It seems no accident that it was during the 17th and 18th centuries, which saw the rise of state factories in France and the beginnings of the industrial revolution in England, that Europe admired China intensely and was intent on learning from it...In Europe, the invention and introduction of machines led to the substitution of mechanical operations for manual work on a large scale. Yet machines were not the only factor that brought about the industrial revolution. The organisation and control of the workforce and the techniques of division of labour were also essential.

In 1769, Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) established at Staffordshire, England, the first porcelain production in Europe to enforce factory discipline and make full use of labor. Each of his workers had to be expert in only one part of the production, which was a revolutionary concept at the time. Wedgwood derived the idea from his reading of the letters of Père d'Entrecolles.

*The A.W.Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1998. Published by Princetown University Press. Permission being sought.