THE GENEALOGY OF THE SAUCER

Consider the saucer. For most of my life I have taken saucers for granted, as one of many objects encountered in the routine of everyday life. Without thinking too hard, I associate saucers with cups, drinking tea, and a vague sense of Englishness. Thinking a little harder, I realise these associations are historically contingent. Around four centuries ago, very few people in Europe had tasted tea, let alone drank it using a cup and saucer. How did this familiar association of saucers, cups, and tea come into being? A clue is provided in the records of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) of 1645, detailing the specifications and quantities of Chinese porcelain deemed likely to sell in the port of Mocha (now Yemen):

Volker, from whose book Porcelain and the Dutch East India Company I take this example, considered this to be the first reference for the now ubiquitous cup-and-saucer combination, which he believed to be a Turkish innovation of 1645, or shortly before. Since the English lagged behind the Dutch in the trade of tea and porcelain from China, it was probably not until several decades later in the early 18th century that the popular practice of drinking tea with a cup-and-saucer combination really took off in England. This brief example demonstrates how cultural practices often rely on combinations of standardised objects that are the products of highly specific historical circumstances and connections. The genealogy of what is now seen as a quintessentially English practice probably not only involved the appropriation of a Turkish custom, but was dependent on the global trade networks of the English East India Company to obtain tea and the porcelain vessels from China necessary for polite consumption – and all of this in some sense physically embodied by the mundane saucer.