The potted passion that fired Owd Woodenleg

After finishing experiment number 411, Josiah Wedgwood broke into jubilant capital letters. "A GOOD Wt. GLAZE! The best of all these trials," he wrote triumphantly in his laboratory notebook. Following years of carefully recorded research, Wedgwood had at last made the breakthrough he needed for selling his cream-coloured ware to Queen Charlotte, the most prestigious housewife in Britain. His confidence boosted by royal custom, Wedgwood honoured his prospective partner, Thomas Bentley, with an imperial title - "Vase maker General to the Universe". In Josiah Wedgwood: Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment , Brian Dolan examines how Wedgwood emerged from a poverty-stricken family in Burslem - which he derided as a "rugged pot-making spot of earth" - to become one of the country's wealthiest self-made men.

Wedgwood's commercial success owed much to his fellow Dissenters. He learnt from the minister who later married his sister that "invention without experiment signifys very little", and he admired John Wesley's advertising strategy of distributing free reading matter. Wedgwood was brought up to value puritan probity - Jeven as an apprentice he had sneered at his colleagues as "drunken, idle, worthless workmen". He believed in self-control, insisting on watching while his leg was amputated, fortified with only a few drops of laudanum; afterwards he treated the wound as though it were another experiment, measuring it and recording its changing dimensions. He was feared in his factory as "Owd Woodenleg" and dispensed stern discipline to his employees, summoning them to work with a bell and smashing sub-standard pieces to the floor with his stick.

Conveniently, Wedgwood fell in love with his rich cousin Sally. (His granddaughter continued the practice, keeping her inherited fortune in the family by marrying her cousin Charles Darwin.) Sally proved an excellent choice, since as well as rescuing Wedgwood's finances, she became his chief experimental collaborator and management administrator. Before long, she was learning how to decipher the secret chemical codes Wedgwood designed to protect his methods from industrial espionage. With her fine eye for taste, Sally ensured that he continually enticed his clientele by marketing fashionable products as essential acquisitions. According to Wedgwood, the best proof of the "enlightn'd age" he lived in was that Sally had "slipt upstairs just before supper", delivered her eighth baby, then eaten her meal and gone to sleep.

Renowned by wealthy Enlightenment customers for his pottery innovations, in the 20th century Wedgwood acquired a new status among revisionist historians as the inventor of consumerism. In The Birth of the Consumer Revolution (1983), a seminal set of essays, Neil McKendrick argues that Wedgwood introduced the urge to keep up with the Joneses by buying products that were desirable rather than necessary.

More recently, purchasers have made their preference clear, voting to buy books that make the Enlightenment the origin of conspicuous consumption. Roy Porter's Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000) and Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men (2002) celebrate the ferment of British intellectual and technological creativity. Dolan's portrait of Wedgwood continues these initiatives, providing a detailed case study of the man who made business so Anglo-American that President George W. Bush apparently wondered why the French have no word for entrepreneur.

Like his subject (referred to throughout as Josiah, a modern marketing mateyness for which Wedgwood unknowingly paved the way), Dolan believes in meticulous, carefully documented research. As well as thoroughly exploring archives of original correspondence, he has done his homework on many topics associated with Wedgwood, including 16th-century Burslem, the fates of several related children, his agent's adventures in South Carolina and Aristotle's influence on contemporary erotic literature. This book is rich in detailed information, although - resembling real life - it lacks a clear analytical direction.

Within Dolan's cradle-to-grave biography, the strongest implicit theme is progress, currently a conventional leitmotiv of the Enlightenment. Wedgwood himself limps steadily through the book, growing ever richer and more successful but finding he no longer has time to enjoy his adored "Wedgwoodikins". Wedgwood and Bentley shared with their mutual friend Benjamin Franklin an optimistic enthusiasm that science, medicine and political reform would guarantee a better future. Conscious of the Dissenters' social inferiority, Wedgwood jokingly called them "his majesty's improveable subjects", but both partners genuinely cared for their workers and tried to improve their bodies as well as their souls.

Bentley judged the most thrilling experience of his belated honeymoon in Paris to be a conversation with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but Wedgwood transformed family holidays into business trips. He reconciled his progressive paternalism with self-interest by maintaining that higher wages would encourage workers to drink away their profits. As enlightened incentives, he offered free housing and education, but quelled an incipient strike by firing a truculent troublemaker rather than giving in to demands for more money.

When he invented a high-temperature thermometer, Wedgwood was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, where its president, Joseph Banks, became a powerful ally. In London, patronage counted: as Wedgwood's friend, the radical chemist Joseph Priestley, put it: "Natural philosophy is a science which more especially requires the aid of wealth." But in the Midlands territory of Wedgwood, Priestley and their Lunar Society colleagues, ambition, collaboration and ideas were more important. Rather than formulating abstruse theories, these men concentrated on the technological inventions that were essential for scientific as well as industrial progress.

As possessor of the world's first brand name, Wedgwood is still a teaching exemplar at Harvard Business School. Wedgwood consolidated customer loyalty by charging for quality, and after one of his rivals foolishly let slip that "our pottery does very well tho' we make damned bad ware", he scooped up a lucrative Russian contract with Catherine the Great. Gerald Ratner should have studied Wedgwood's tactics.

Patricia Fara is a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.