Hyperbox Club: Porcelain Quest "The cultural and technological shifts that accompanied the rise ...

1. Cowrie

2. Meaning of Porcelain

2.1. Shell Money

3. Cabinet of Curiosities

3.1. Voyages of Curiosity

4. The 13th Cent Fonthill Vase

5. Shiny Curvy Things: A Jade Snake

6. International Trade Develops

7. Chinese porcelain was imported into England during fifteenth century but little came into Europe until after 1577 when the Portuguese East India Company founded a trading settlement at Macau near Canton on the Chinese mainland.  The Dutch competed for this monopoly and in 1615 a single ship unloaded 70,000 pieces at Amsterdam. By the 1630s the British East India Company began importing Chinese porcelain on a grand scale.

7.1. 17th Cent Chinese Export

8. Craak Ware

9. The story of Capt. Mike Hatcher, the celebrated shipwreck salver, is a rare and interesting insight into social history on an international scale.  Hatcher was responsible for two of the biggest shipwreck finds of the 20th century, the cargoes of which have both attained high prices at auction and provided valuable scholarly data.

10. Emergence of the World Econmy

11. The Cambrian Pottery: Swansea.  Cabinet cup and saucer, glassy porcelain, painted with Convulvulus, attributed to William Billingsley.

11.1. Swansea Museum

12. In 1487, the sultan of Mamluk Egypt sent a gift to Lorenzo de’ Medici of exotic animals and “large vessels of porcelain, the like of which has never been seen.” By the mid 1500s, the Medici family’s porcelains, most from China, numbered in the hundreds. Italian potters were able to create a soft-paste imitation of porcelain, and in 1574 Francesco de’ Medici established two ceramic workshops in Florence to produce these wares. Today, some seventy examples of Medici porcelains are known, including this flask, possibly used for oil. The above flask is an example of Medici Pottery was made circa 1575/1587, or slightly later imitation porcelain (a version of soft-paste porcelain), Widener Collection, 1942.9.354

13. Rouen Pottery: 1673-96

14. Early European Potteries: copy of interactive list taken from Rouen Pottery Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouen_manufactory

14.1. 1756: Sevre Pottery

14.1.1. Meissen. 1710

15. Hard and Soft Porcelain

16. Lowestoft: 1757 to 1802

16.1. Bow. 1747

16.2. Derby. circa 1750

16.3. Worcester. 1751

17. 1813. Arrival of William Billingsley at the Welsh village of Nantgarw to set up his own pottery tp produce high quality porcelain,

18. Mining China Clay

19. Archeological Ceramics: The art of manufacturing pottery was discovered about 12,000 years ago in the Old World and about 5,000 years ago in the New World. Pottery manufacture generally accompanied the transition to food production and increasing sedentism in the prehistory of most parts of the world. Pottery has been of enormous benefit to humanity in the form of the most common everyday objects—water carriers, food storage vessels, cooking vessels, and serving vessels. Precisely because of the intimate relationship among everyday activities such as food storage, preparation, and consumption, pottery has long been one of the primary types of artifacts collected by archaeologists. Ceramics are not limited to utilitarian wares, however, and include fine wares for ceremonial functions and trade as well as other types of objects such as figurines, jewelry, and even toys. One of the enduring benefits of clay as a raw material is its plasticity, allowing the artisan to shape and form it to myriad functional and imaginative requirements. In addition to formal and functional characteristics derived from the plasticity of the raw material, pottery often conveys additional information about its makers and users in the form of painted designs and illustrations. From simple geometric patterns to the elaborate illustrative decorations of Maya or Chinese ceramics, artisans added important stylistic and even political and mythological information to their pottery for millennia. To this day, few people fail to be stirred by the wonderful painted decorations of Classical Grecian urns or the marvelous zoomorphic creatures on Mimbres pots. From their first invention and on through the ages, ceramic objects served crucial functional, aesthetic, and informational purposes for peoples all around the world.

19.1. Beaker Cultures

19.2. North American Pottery

20. Anglo-Chinese Trade Agreements.  Anglo-Chinese trade agreements were the products of the era of early globalisation prompted by the desire of colonial powers to seek new markets for their manufactured goods as well as to conquer new colonies to obtain raw materials for industry. While a wave of British manufactured goods flooded Chinese shores, shiploads of objects from China (such as tea, silk, porcelains, ceramics, textiles, lacquers, furniture, wallpapers, silverware, prints and paintings) also flowed into Britain. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Britain became the biggest importer of Chinese commodities in the West

21. Listening Ecologically to Objects