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Look Inside The City of Blue and White

The City of Blue and White
Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World

$39.99 (G)

Author: Anne Gerritsen, University of Warwick

Date Published: May 2020
availability: In stock
format: Hardback
isbn: 9781108499958

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We think of blue and white porcelain as the ultimate global commodity: throughout East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean including the African coasts, the Americas and Europe, consumers desired Chinese porcelains. Many of these were made in the kilns in and surrounding Jingdezhen. Found in almost every part of the world, Jingdezhen's porcelains had a far-reaching impact on global consumption, which in turn shaped the local manufacturing processes. The imperial kilns of Jingdezhen produced ceramics for the court, while nearby private kilns manufactured for the global market. In this beautifully illustrated study, Anne Gerritsen asks how this kiln complex could manufacture such quality, quantity and variety. She explores how objects tell the story of the past, connecting texts with objects, objects with natural resources, and skilled hands with the shapes and designs they produced. Through the manufacture and consumption of Jingdezhen's porcelains, she argues, China participated in the early modern world.
- Provides a new way of approaching global history by connecting the global and the local
- Demonstrates the key role of Chinese porcelain in the circulation of global material culture
- Examines the long history of China's connections with the wider world
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Reviews & endorsements
‘This is a necessary and a valuable book, as well as being readable and engaging throughout. It deserves a wider readership in its illustration of the more general point that ‘global history can only be written by taking the local seriously'.' Craig Clunas, University of Oxford
‘The City of Blue and White is an authoritative, comprehensive, and riveting account of the natural and human ecologies of porcelain-making in Jingdezhen from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. If a cultural historian, a craft hobbyist, a curious student, or a historian of technology asks me to recommend one book on Chinese ceramics, this would be the one.' Dorothy Ko, Author of Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China
‘A masterwork of accessible, interdisciplinary scholarship that tells the fascinating story of the world's great porcelain – producing centre, Jingdezhen. The extensive, complex history of this city and its primary product is told here from a new, global and local perspective which illuminates the multiple reasons for the rise, dominance and subsequent decline of this manufacturing powerhouse.' Stacey Pierson, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
'… beautifully produced and a pleasure to handle as well as read.' Norma Clarke, Times Literary Supplement
‘A truly stimulating work, it will fruitfully serve as a thorough entry point into the very large and diverse scholarship surrounding porcelain and to Jingdezhen’s central role in that history, and, more broadly, as a demonstration of a new and very fertile approach to global history.’ Susan Broomhall, Parergon
‘This is a beautifully written book …’ Michael Yonan, Art History
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Product details
- Date Published: May 2020
- format: Hardback
- isbn: 9781108499958
- length: 354 pages
- dimensions: 254 x 179 x 20 mm
- weight: 0.9kg
- contains: 4 b/w illus. 53 colour illus. 8 maps 1 table
- availability: In stock
Table of Contents
1. The shard market of Jingdezhen
2. City of imperial choice: Jingdezhen, 1000–1200
3. Circulations of white
4. From Cizhou to Jizhou: the long history of the emergence of blue and white porcelain
5. From Jizhou to Jingdezhen in the fourteenth century: the emergence of blue and white and the circulations of people and things
6. Blue and white porcelain and the fifteenth-century world
7. The city of blue and white: visualizing space in Ming Jingdezhen, 1500–1600
8. Anxieties over resources in sixteenth-century Jingdezhen
9. Skilled hands: managing human resources and skill in the sixteenth-century imperial kilns
10. Material circulations in the sixteenth century
11. Local and global in Jingdezhen's long seventeenth century
12. Epilogue: fragments of a global past.
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Author
Anne Gerritsen, University of Warwick
Anne Gerritsen is Professor of History and directs the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick. Since 2013, she has also held the Chair of Asian Art at the Universiteit Leiden where she teaches at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) and the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS).