Josiah Wedgwood

The Radical Potter by Tristram Hunt brings together design, experimental manufacture, marketing and eighteenth-century politics. Wedgwood is rewarding because an ordinary object, a piece of pottery, leads into changes in consumption and industrial organisation. His abolitionist commitments sit within a commercial world entangled with empire. This is a lively starting point for someone who wants business history to explain a society rather than merely celebrate a founder.