Wedgwood British pottery & U.S slavery

Portrait of Josiah Wedgwood

painted by Joshua Reynolds, Wiki

Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) lived in Stoke-on-Trent. His family were potters in Nth Staffordshire & by the mid-1700s, the closeness of clay and coal helped turn that narrow Midlands valley into a success­ful ceramics centre. Smallpox swept through Burslem in the 1740s and the Wedgwoods were harmed. Josiah’s right knee was badly dam­aged, permanently stopping him using the pot­t­er’s wheel pedal. Instead he was attracted by the design, in­novat­ion and busi­ness aspects of the pottery trade.

 
Wedgwood’s success advanced the Potteries region in Stoke-on-Trent into an industrial revolution centre, and started to make his name well known. Wedgwood’s fusion of art and industry depended partial­ly on great glazes, while he was a junior partner to Thomas Whieldon (1754–9)

His key breakthrough came in the mid-1760s with cream-ware. Building on the work of Enoch Booth, Wedgwood designed a clean, functional and el­egant alternative to Chinese ceramics. The smooth, fine-textured body, cov­ered with a bril­l­iant glaze, also allowed for easy decoration by paint­­ing with enamels. Thus his pottery could fol­low fashion.

Bentley medalllions of King George III and Queen Charlotte, 1777

E & H Manners

With rising incomes, the challenge for Wedgwood (and partner Liverpool merchant Thom­as Bentley) was how to get the cream­ware noticed by a smart public. Here was where Wedgwood’s marketing skills stepped in. Fashion was much superior to merit in many resp­ects, he believed; one had only to make choice of proper sponsors. And his best sponsor was German Queen Charl­otte, whose patronage of his tableware service turned cream­ware into Queens­ware and raised Wedgwood to Her Majesty’s Master Potter.

Most techniques in modern salesmanship, from prod­uct placement to the use of influencers, were utilised by Wedgwood and Bentley. Their West End showroom was more commercial gallery and show space than shop.

The first modern factories in Stoke-on-Trent ensured efficient delivery of ornamental pott­ery and tableware, and new levels of quality prod­uct­ion. Then came Black Bas­alt and Pearlware. Finally Jas­per was invented in the mid-1770s, the most orig­inal of all Wedgwood’s ceramic mater­ials. The pale-blue Jasper body with white neo-classical reliefs show­ed his years of ex­per­im­entation with clays, kilns, cobalt and iron ox­ide, in his base­ment laboratory. It won him a Fellowship of the Royal Society!

Beautiful Jasperware teaset

Sunday Times

  
Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) had co-founded the Lunar Society in 1765. It met monthly at Matthew Boulton’s Soho House in Birm­ingham, to debate the first discoveries and observ­at­ions. Along with poly­maths Joseph Priestly and James Watt, this was a dis­cuss­ion group where intellectuals, thinking industrial­ists and natural philos­ophers could get together in a rad­ic­al environ­ment. Wedgwood was a good fit for that rad­ical circle of C18th thinkers, keenly ex­amining minerology, ast­r­onomy and med­icine. Apparent­ly the origins of the Engl­ish Enlightenment were not in Oxford or Cam­brid­ge, but in the Midlands. However The Lunar Society never discussed party politics, even though its members were largely sympathetic to liberalism and internationalism.

In 1780 Wedgwood joined the Society for Constitutional Information and became friendly with new reformers. This organisation of social reform­ers was dedicated to publishing political tracts and educating cit­izens on their lost ancient liberties. It promoted the work of camp­aig­ners for parliamentary reform eg Tom Paine.

Wedgwood’s politics were born of radical patriotism: a deep love of  his country along a fearful sense that the promise of Great Britain (liberty under the law, Protestantism and progress) was being undermined. As a democrat, Wedgwood supported the rebel MP John Wilkes in his campaigns for parliamentary reform and franchise spread.

When the Bastille was stormed in 1789, Wedg­wood was excited by the pros­pect of radical change in France. The pol­it­icians thought that as a man­uf­act­urer, Wedgwood would be ruin­ed if France had her liberty, but he risked it. Wedg­wood stopped mak­ing his Jasper medallions of Queen Marie Ant­oi­nette, favouring a new figure of France embracing Liberty.

His most lasting contribution to C18th radicalism was probably his camp­aign ag­ainst the Transatlantic slave trade. Strange, since for decades Wedg­wood & Bent­ley’s success had been closely intertwined with the rich­es deriv­ed from the Atlantic slave economy! Not only was the grow­ing wealth of the Georgian consumer market buoyed by slavery’s prof­its, but the tea rit­uals Wedgwood supplied were linked to slave owners’ estates.

Still, by the 1780s Wedgwood was convinced of slavery’s innate evil. Voted onto the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, he used his design and marketing skills to create the defining symbol of anti-slavery activism: white Jasper with an enslaved African in black relief. This symbol was called the Em­ancipation Medallion. Whether worn in bracelets or as hair pins, fashion promoted the cause of justice and freedom. By displaying the extent of public support for the anti-slavery movement and by reminding civil soc­iety of the suffering endured by Af­ric­­an sl­av­es, the medallion actively participated in the abolition campaign. [Slavery in the British colonies was abol­ished in 1807] 

Em­ancipation Medallion

Am I Not a Man and a Brother, 1787

In Sept 1792, Earl Macartney left Britain aboard HMS Lion, via Cape of  Good Hope to Tientsin-Tianjin, the Chin­ese port city. The passeng­ers included c100 of Georgian Brit­ain’s finest scientists, nat­ur­al phil­osophers and draught­smen. There were also c600 crates of objects carefully chosen to showcase Britain’s industrial might. Mac­artney’s mission was to convince China’s Celestial Court to open their huge markets to British imports, to excite a taste for Eng­lish workman­ship. The Wedgwood vases prom­oted Britain’s belief in its design and manufacturing prowess even further.

Since Macartney sailed to China (1790s), Wedgwood’s pottery earned nat­ional pride for British art and des­ign. His tech­nol­ogy and de­sign, ret­ail prec­is­ion and man­ufacturing efficiency trans­for­med prod­uction and ushered in a mass consumer society. All the C18th’s great themes were em­bedded in his art: enlight­en­ment, liberty and nat­ional identity. Now his prog­ressive int­er­nationalism may also become a source of patriotic pride

Read Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Trans­formation of Britain, Allen Lane, 2021.