Porcelain is a material completely not essential for human development. On the contrary, it is a material that quintessentially denotes “luxury”. One might say that it entered the historical stage randomly: had it not been invented, the history of human civilization would not have unfolded very differently.
At the same time, porcelain embodies the first wave of globalization, from the late medieval to the early modern period, better than any other material (other than money, which is a very different story). “Material” is not sufficient to capture the meaning of porcelain: it is simultaneously a material – with complex production processes – but also a prestigious product that signifies good taste, cultural fashions and high-end consumption. In both senses, then, the cross-continental trade in porcelain and its pursuit are among the most significant phenomena in early modern globalization.
Porcelain is a corrective material to Eurocentric narratives of globalization. Even when it is driven by European consumption (in European court societies, in the European cultural of politeness and the domestic Enlightenment, in the Western consumer revolution), this is a story of East-West relations in which the West has a built-in disadvantage, not the other way around. Porcelain is an Asian product that enters European awareness slowly (via the Ottomans) in the 16th century, and then explodes in the 17th century as an unprecedented flood responding to what appeared to be unrestrained and hard-to-explain European demand. While Asian artists did their best to cater for the specific taste of their new European markets, the Europeans on their part made huge efforts to discover how to make porcelain in their own domains, whether by improving imitations made from other materials (Holland, France, Mexico) or cracking the secret Asian code (Meissen in Saxony). In the process elements and tastes from different parts of the globe travelled cross-continentally, mutated locally, and created new composites that have a historical significance far exceeding the mere porcelain itself.
This book project attempts a methodological experiment in the weaving of a unified yet complex historical story through twenty objects.