Staffordshire Pottery and Its History

This is the foundational history of the industry that made Staffordshire world-famous. Wedgwood traces the remarkable transformation from a craft practiced in households around the 17th century, where families shaped their own pots from local clay, into the mechanized factories of the 19th century that supplied the globe. He identifies what made this corner of England unique: the coincidence of rich coal deposits and the precise type of clay needed for earthenware, along with a tradition of skilled labor that predates the industrial revolution. The book follows the emergence of key figures who built the trade, the introduction of steam power that shattered centuries of handcraft, and the complex social costs of that progress. Originally published in 1913, this remains the essential document for understanding how a regional craft became the first consumer goods industry, and how the pottery towns prefigure every company town that followed. It is, finally, a meditation on what is gained and lost when making things moves from the home to the factory.