Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe

Abstract

Historians of central Europe have slowly come to address our hunger for innovative economic and social histories of items of material culture and consumption in the modern period. Following the works of Karin Wurst, Daniel L. Purdy, Ulrike Thoms, Corinna Treitel, and Paul Betts, to name but a few, Suzanne Marchand has now contributed to this growing field. In her newest homonymous work, the author of German Orientalism (2009) and Down from Olympus (1996) uses Porcelain as a ‘means to tell a story about people, about states and markets, and about the changing nature of work and consumption over at least three centuries’ (p. 2). Embedded within the transitions from a mercantilist economy to increasingly capitalist production-landscapes, this history not only details the transformation of ‘white gold’ from an aristocratic luxury good to a middling necessity, but also narrates central European social and economic history in its political context more...