The Glass Bathyscaphe by Alan Macfarlane

Author:Alan Macfarlane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

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The story of what did not happen outside western Europe has an interesting theoretical implication. For most of history there has been little reason to develop clear glass. Consequently, there is little point in trying to build careful arguments as to why the making of uncoloured glass did not develop. There was no reason why it should develop. It is only when we look backwards at history from our latter-day perspective and see the enormous, but originally subtle, difference that glass has made to the western world that we wonder at its non-existence in other civilisations. History written in a rear-view mirror has its dangers. For, until the very recent advances in reliable knowledge had been made fortuitously as one accidental aspect of the presence of glass, there is not the slightest reason why we should be surprised that glass did not develop much in India, China or Japan.

The major use for glass until the last few hundred years had been for containers. The Chinese and Japanese had excellent containers made of clay. So they had no reason whatsoever to pursue glass. Not only were the consuming public content with the wealth of porcelain and pottery containers, but the producing workers, the vast empire of workshops and potters, were hardly likely to argue that their skills be made less central in order to introduce a technology which requires a lot more fuel (because of the cost of keeping glass molten for long periods) and produces a less robust and arguably less beautiful object. Glass-making is a different technique and there is no great reason why another group should start to do it. What glass there was in most civilisations was mainly used for coloured beads. Clear glass, which would later become the essential kind for use as a tool to see the world in a different way, was for a very long period of little obvious use. So it is, in some senses, a non-question as to why the east Asians did not have glass.

Yet if one says that there were perfectly good containers in the Far East, this still implies that containers in western Eurasia were such that a new substance could be developed alongside it. In the ruthless competition for a niche, there was something about western pottery which meant that it was possible to develop glass-making. The answer might lie in the relative quality of the ceramics, it might be related to the uses to which containers were put (for example, hot and cold drinks), it might be in the organisation and status of the workers in pottery. For example, if the potters had a fairly low status and were then faced with outside glass-workers from the Middle East who had a high status and were well paid, some of them might be pushed aside or change their occupation. On the other hand, the high status of Japanese and Chinese ceramics workers is well known.

To make the story more complex, we have to remember that the factors suggested above are interconnected.

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