This dissertation uses the French porcelain industry from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries as a case study on the importance of consumer demand in the transition from commercial to industrial capitalism. Based on research in over a dozen archives and museums across France and drawing equally on institutional economics and material culture studies, it explains how the French learned to become consumers and how France became the global leader in luxury goods by examining the variety of ways merchants, manufacturers, and officials worked to create and communicate information about the material and aesthetic qualities of new goods to consumers. In doing so, it highlights the shift in institutional focus from merchants and retailers selling and altering imported porcelain at the beginning of this period to massive manufactories producing and marketing domestic porcelain at the end of this period. Throughout, it emphasizes the crucial role of the state in establishing a reputation for the quality and tastefulness of French porcelain in both domestic and international marketplaces as a tool of economic development and dynastic legitimation. Ultimately, this dissertation reveals how these actions paved the way for the emergence of a consumer society that could sustain industrialization and that led to a distinctive French path toward economic growth rooted in the consumer valuation of luxury goods. This dissertation makes five primary contributions to our understanding of the history of capitalism in early modern Europe. First, it argues for the importance of demand in the early modern economy by showing the intense focus that economic and political actors in this period gave to the problems of consumers and uses material culture studies to unravel what symbolic and physical properties mattered to consumers. Second, this dissertation draws on Old and New Institutional Economics to argue that information about the physical and symbolic qualities of porcelain was difficult to transmit and obtain and that economic actors and policymakers alike considered this a serious impediment to economic growth. Third, this dissertation underscores the crucial role of the state in every stage of the industrialization process: indemnifying and supporting technological development; building an international reputation for taste and quality; and reassuring consumers about the provenance and worth of their purchases. Fourth, this dissertation looks at account books and advertising documents from merchants and retailers and internal records and correspondence from both publicly and privately owned porcelain manufactures to demonstrate changing patterns of business organization, accounting practices, and labor management during this period, particularly noting the vertical integration of porcelain firms in the eighteenth century. Finally, this dissertation combines these elements to depict the shifting center of gravity in institutions involving consumer information from retailers and merchants in the seventeenth century to large industrial manufacturers in the nineteenth century. By doing so, this dissertation reveals the centrality of the qualities of goods, their social uses and meanings, and practices of consumption in the transition from commercial to industrial capitalism.