This rare diminutive teapot, from the country’s earliest porcelain-making enterprise, personifies the country’s role in the global world. At the same time it exemplifies the entrepreneurial and intrepid spirit of 18th-century North America. John Bartlam, a master potter from Staffordshire, England, sought to compete with English luxury porcelains imported to the colonies. Porcelain required specialized clays, deposits of which had only recently been discovered on Cherokee lands of the Appalachian Mountains in the Carolinas, and were being mined and shipped to England from Charleston. Josiah Wedgwood feared that the success of the Cain Hoy pottery, located just outside of Charleston, would become serious competition to his stronghold in the American market writing in a letter to Thomas Bentley in 1767, of a “Pottwork in Chares Town” that used “Cherokee clay” from the Carolinas to make porcelains. It had to have been an enormous challenge for Bartlam to set up a porcelain factory, obtain the raw materials, build a high-fired kiln, and hire an accomplished decorator. Bartlam himself was clearly a skilled potter as this globular thin-walled vessel attests. To assist in the work of the pottery, Bartlam sought African-American laborers, presumably enslaved persons, as demonstrated by a newspaper advertisement of his. The teapot is both global and local in one exquisite tiny object. One side features a fantasy Chinoiserie river scene, while the opposite displays the palmetto tree and sandhill cranes that place it solidly in South Carolina. Thus, there is an amalgam of a British potter replicating a British form, the teapot, to be filled with tea from China, utilizing raw materials from Native American lands, and finally manufactured in North America, with its site specific decoration.