Choose an event or development in Patterns in World History that interests you. In five paragraphs:

1.Summarize the event or development in your own words
2.Explain its historical context
3.Discuss the most significant contingent factor(s) relating to it
4.Reflect on its historical complexity
5.Conclude by commenting on its significance for our world today.
Ming and Qing China may be said to be at the heart of two innovations of enormous importance to the patterns of world history. The ?rst is one that we have tracked through all of the chapters in this book pertaining to China: the technical and aesthetic development of ceramics culminating in the creation of true porcelain during the Song period (960–1279). The early Ming period saw the elaboration of the use of kaolin white clays with what are called “?ux” materials—minerals, metals, and compounds—that can fuse with the clay under extremely high temperatures to form durable glazes and striking artistic features. Thus, the Song and Yuan periods were characterized by pure white and green celadon wares, some with a purposely created “crackled” glaze on them, while by the Ming period, highly distinctive blue and white ware—the result of employing pigments with cobalt oxide imported from the areas around modern Iran and
Iraq—set the world standard for elegance.
The artistic excellence of Chinese porcelain, like earlier styles of Chinese ceramics, spawned imitators throughout the Chinese periphery. By 1500, porcelain works in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam supplied a burgeoning market both at home and throughout east and Southeast Asia. While these regional manufacturers for the most part followed the designs of the Chinese imperial works at Jingdezhen, some, especially the Japanese ceramicist Chojiro, preferred highly rustic, rough-hewn earthenware designs with glazes that formed spontaneous designs as the pieces were ?red—the famous raku ware. Thus, there was already a highly developed regional market for what was, at the time, arguably the world’s most highly developed technology.The period from 1500 to the mid-nineteenth century brings us to the second great innovation in which China was the driving force: the world market for porcelain. China’s wares had found customers for centuries in nearly every corner of Eurasia and North and East Africa. Shipwrecks have been found in the Straits of Malacca laden with Ming porcelain; traders in the Swahili cities along the East African coast were avid collectors, while Africans farther inland decorated their graves with Chinese bowls. All stops on the Silk Road had their precious supplies of porcelain, while the Ottoman Turks did their best to copy the blue and white Ming wares in their own factories at Izmir.
Before the sixteenth century, a trickle of Ming porcelain also made its way to Europe. With the establishment of the ?rst European trade empires, however, the demand for porcelain skyrocketed. Portuguese, Spanish, and later Dutch, French, English, and (after 1784) American merchants all sought porcelain in ever-increasing amounts. From 1500 to 1800 it was arguably the single most important commodity in the unfolding world commercial revolution. While estimates vary, economic historians have suggested that between one-third to one-half of all the silver produced in the Americas during this time went to pay for porcelain. Incoming ships often used the bulk cargoes of porcelain as ballast, and foreign merchants sent custom orders to their Chinese counterparts for Chinese-style wares designed for use at Western tables. Such was the prominence of this“export porcelain” in the furnishings of period homes that scarcely any family of means was without it .
With the prominence of mercantilist theory and protectionism toward home markets during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is not surprising that foreign manufacturers sought to break the Chinese monopoly. During Tokugawa times, the Japanese, for example, forced a group of Korean potters to work at the famous Arita works to turn out Sino–Korean designs; the Dutch marketed “delftware” as an attempt to copy Chinese “blue willow” porcelain. It was not until German experimenters in Saxony happened upon a workable formula for hard-paste porcelain—after years of trial and error, even melting down Chinese wares for analysis—that their facility at Meissen began to produce true porcelain in 1710. Josiah Wedgwood set up his own porcelain factory in 1759 in England. But Chinese manufacturers would still drive the market until the end of the nineteenth century. And ?ne porcelain would forever carry the generic name of “china” regardless of its origins.