Despite its winding economic narrative (and piles of manufacturing statistics), “Porcelain” is rarely a grind. Ms Marchand writes wittily about subjects from bourgeois views on tableware to Weimar advertising, veering away from tea sets and vases when she spies an interesting vignette. “Fox tossing”, she relates, was a popular pastime for 18th-century courtiers (the animals were hurled into the air until they died). King Frederick the Great of Prussia recruited hundreds of invalids from a state hospital literally to sniff out illegal coffeeroasters in Berlin and Potsdam.

The porcelain-makers themselves were often as fascinating as Bottger. After running away from home to become a cowboy, for instance, Philipp Rosenthal made a fortune in porcelain—before being ruined by the Nazis. Ordinary workers led colourful lives too. One report of 1796 describes how employees at a firm in Furstenberg drank schnapps at work or skived off to go hunting. Their successors in the 1940s spent their time dodging Allied bombs and repairing shattered windows.

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