Art in World History, a Berkshire Essential, put readers in touch with art from the Paleolithic period and the millennium-long heyday of porcelain, to performance art of the postmodernist world. They explore fundamental questions about the origins of art making and the case for including visual studies in world history. The volume balances and interweaves regional coverage with cross-cultural perspectives - when trade brought Chinese silk to the Romans in the first century CE, or how celebrated 19th-century Japanese printmakers used one-point perspective, a Western technique. Overviews on vernacular architecture and textiles examine how the study of these art forms can provide insight on a people's aesthetic sense and development, as well as on the cultural, political, and socioeconomic aspects of their lives.