The City of Blue and White

'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

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).

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.