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Porcelain was invented in medieval China--but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king Augustus the Strong. Saxony's revered Meissen factory could not keep porcelain's ingredients secret for long, however, and scores of Holy Roman princes quickly founded their own mercantile manufactories, soon to be rivaled by private entrepreneurs, eager to make not art but profits. As porcelain's uses multiplied and its price plummeted, it lost much of its identity as aristocratic ornament, instead taking on a vast number of banal, yet 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. Weaving together the experiences of entrepreneurs and artisans, state bureaucrats and female consumers, chemists and peddlers, Porcelain traces 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.
About the author
Suzanne L. Marchand is the Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University. Her books include German Orientalism in the Age of Empire and Down from Olympus (Princeton).
Summary
A sweeping cultural and economic history of porcelain, from the eighteenth century to the present
Additional text
"The remarkable achievement of Suzanne Marchand’s new book, Porcelain, which focuses especially on Germany, is that she moves beyond the celebrated age of discovery in the eighteenth century...to explore modern manufacture and diffusion across a broader consumer society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries .... While Meissen lies at the center of Marchand’s book, one of its great strengths is the broader survey of German porcelain manufacturing."---Larry Wolff, Journal of Modern History
