In his major new history, Paul Greenhalgh tells the story of ceramics as a story of humancivilisation, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. As a core craft technology, potteryhas underpinned domesticity, business, religion, recreation, architecture, and art for millennia.Indeed, the history of ceramics parallels the development of human society.This fascinating and very human history traces the story of ceramic art and industry from theAncient Greeks to the Romans and the medieval world; Islamic ceramic cultures and theirinfluence on the Italian Renaissance; Chinese and European porcelain production; modernityand Art Nouveau; the rise of the studio potter, Art Deco, International Style and Mid-CenturyModern, and finally, the contemporary explosion of ceramic making and the postmodernpotter. Interwoven in this journey through time and place is the story of the pots themselves,the culture of the ceramics, and their character and meaning.Ceramics have had a presence in virtually every country and historical period, and haveworked as a commodity servicing every social class. They are omnipresent: a ubiquitous art.Ceramic culture is a clear, unique, definable thing, and has an internal logic that holds ittogether through millennia. Hence ceramics is the most peculiar and extraordinary of all thearts. At once cheap, expensive, elite, plebeian, high-tech, low-tech, exotic, eccentric, comic,tragic, spiritual, and secular, it has revealed itself to be as fluid as the mud it is made from.Ceramics are the very stuff of how civilized life was, and is, led. This then is the story ofhuman society's most surprising core causes and effects. This is an extraordinary accomplishment. It animates the history of world ceramics in amanner that has not been achieved before. It is full of remarkable insight and beautiful detailsand will reach a huge and appreciative audience. Edmund de Waal, artist and writer, UK