Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe

A sweeping cultural and economic history of porcelain, from its invention in medieval China to its role in bourgeois dining and its endurance in Germanys twentieth century, Porcelain traces the story of "white gold" from its origins as a princely luxury item to its fate in the country's cataclysmic twentieth century.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 544 pages
Publication date: 24 May 2022
Publisher: Princeton University Press

A remarkable achievement, according to Edmund de Waal, the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, is the book on porcelain that we have all been anticipating.

A comprehensive cultural and economic history of porcelain, from the eighteenth century to the present, is provided in Porcelain.

Porcelain was created in medieval China, but an alchemist working for the Saxon king Augustus the Strong first replicated its secret formula in Europe. However, the secret ingredients of porcelain could not be kept secret by the Saxonys revered Meissen factory for long, and soon scores of Holy Roman princes established their own mercantile manufactories, which were soon rivaled by private entrepreneurs who were more interested in making money than art. As porcelain's uses expanded and its price dropped, it lost much of its identity as an aristocratic ornament and instead took on a vast number of banal but even more culturally significant roles. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became essential to bourgeois dining and also acquired new functions in insulator tubes, shell casings, and teeth.

Porcelain weaves together the experiences of entrepreneurs and artisans, state bureaucrats and female consumers, chemists and peddlers, to trace the remarkable story of "white gold" from its origins as a princely luxury item to its fate in Germany's cataclysmic twentieth century. For three hundred years, porcelain firms have come and gone, but the industry itself, at least until very recently, has endured. After Augustus, porcelain became a quintessentially German commodity, integral to provincial pride, artisanal industrial production, and a familial sense of home.

Porcelain tells the story of porcelain's transformation from a coveted luxury to a household necessity and flea market staple, offering a fascinating alternative history of art, business, taste, and consumption in China.

Weight: 590g
Dimension: 133 x 203 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780691204239