Suzanne L. Marchand Knihy

Porcelain was invented in medieval China--but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king Augustus the Strong. Saxony's revered Meissen factory could not keep porcelain's ingredients secret for long, however, and scores of Holy Roman princes quickly founded their own mercantile manufactories, soon to be rivaled by private entrepreneurs, eager to make not art but profits. As porcelain's uses multiplied and its price plummeted, it lost much of its identity as aristocratic ornament, instead taking on a vast number of banal, yet even more culturally significant, roles. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became essential to bourgeois dining, and also acquired new functions in insulator tubes, shell casings, and teeth

This provocative narrative history dramatically departs from the standard "rise of the West" storyline that has driven world historiography for a century. A stellar group of historians paint a decidedly different modern world history, one in which the rise of the West was not predetermined and where global integration has manifested itself in fits and starts rather than as a smooth process over the last seven centuries. This fresh interpretation, driven by powerful ideas and colorful stories, promises to engage readers for decades to come.