How everyday ceramics normalised imperial ideologies

How everyday ceramics normalised imperial ideologies

History

Chitleen Soor

2025

This essay investigates how everyday decorative ceramics, Spode's 'Indian Sporting' collection in particular, worked as domestic propaganda that normalised the ideologies of empire and romanticised them. Originating from Samuel Howitt's engravings within Thomas Williamson's 'Oriental Field Sports' (1805), Spode's transfer-printed plates transformed colonial hunting imagery into mass-produced household objects to be used daily. Through exoticising landscapes, exaggerating hierarchies and altering the original prints to become spectacles of entertainment, the designs reinforced racial inequality and imperial values while simultaneously presenting the British as heroes for aiding a culture and people that they viewed as 'backward' and untamed. Ultimately, this collection exemplifies how visual culture had political intention and legitimised colonial prospects and authority within the domestic sphere.

Ceramics, British colonisation of India, history