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