"A Secret Lost – and Recovered: Making China Wares in 18th-Century Venice"

“China fever” spread in Europe during the 18th century, following the discovery of the secret of porcelain production by a Saxon alchemist in 1709. Absolute governments financed the setting up of firms producing luxury wares for aristocratic demand, despite their high costs. In Venice, there was only a late and partial State support to those enterprises. However, china manufacture developed in two phases, early in the 1720s and then from the 1760s. Interestingly, skills and technological knowledge about its production were completely lost in the interval.
The role of skilled artisans travelling from place to place is crucial in this story, as it is the overlap of different institutional frameworks regulating their mobility and their employers' access to markets and ownership of kilns and mills. Resorting to the archives of different Venetian authorities and to the notary deeds concerning ceramic manufacturers, it is possible to reconstruct the context of the first failed attempt at establishing a porcelain manufactory in Venice and its aftermath, up to the arrival of a couple of refugees from Saxony during the Seven Years War and the subsequent resumption of their activity by their main creditor. The competition between the latter and the main privileged manufacturer of fine majolica in the mainland for the primacy in china production sheds light on the evolution of industrial policy in the last decades of the Venetian Republic.
The peculiar competitive context created by such a policy is of great interest to understand the operation and meaning of innovation in an ancient-regime context evolving towards a free-market economy. The ongoing reforms heavily affected labour mobility, technological developments and the variety of firm contracts with unexpected consequences, showing that the shift to the modern approach to intellectual property rights was not linear at all and presents many varieties.