Bone china in the context of "Meissen porcelain"

Tableware items are the dishware and utensils used for setting a table, serving food, and dining. The term includes cutlery, glassware, serving dishes, serving utensils, and other items used for practical as well as decorative purposes. The quality, nature, variety and number of objects varies according to culture, religion, number of diners, cuisine and occasion. For example, Middle Eastern, Indian or Polynesian food culture and cuisine sometimes limits tableware to serving dishes, using bread or leaves as individual plates, and not infrequently without use of cutlery. Special occasions are usually reflected in higher quality tableware.

Cutlery is more usually known as silverware or flatware in the United States, where cutlery usually means knives and related cutting instruments; elsewhere cutlery includes all the forks, spoons and other silverware items. Outside the US, flatware is a term for "open-shaped" dishware items such as plates, dishes and bowls (as opposed to "closed" shapes like jugs and vases). Dinnerware is another term used to refer to tableware, and crockery refers to ceramic tableware, today often porcelain or bone china. Sets of dishes are referred to as a table service, dinner service or service set. Table settings or place settings are the dishes, cutlery and glassware used for formal and informal dining. In Ireland, tableware is often referred to as delph, the word being an English language phonetic spelling of the word Delft, the town from which so much delftware came. Silver service or butler service are methods for a butler or waiter to serve a meal.

Earthenware is glazed or unglazed nonvitreous pottery that has normally been fired below 1,200 °C (2,190 °F). Basic earthenware, often called terracotta, absorbs liquids such as water. However, earthenware can be made impervious to liquids by coating it with a ceramic glaze, and such a process is used for the great majority of modern domestic earthenware. The main other important types of pottery are porcelain, bone china, and stoneware, all fired at high enough temperatures to vitrify. End applications include tableware and decorative ware such as figurines.

Earthenware comprises "most building bricks, nearly all European pottery up to the seventeenth century, most of the wares of Egypt, Persia and the near East; Greek, Roman and Mediterranean, and some of the Chinese; and the fine earthenware which forms the greater part of our tableware today" ("today" being 1962). Pit fired earthenware dates back to as early as 29,000–25,000 BC, and for millennia, only earthenware pottery was made, with stoneware gradually developing some 5,000 years ago, but then apparently disappearing for a few thousand years. Outside East Asia, porcelain was manufactured at any scale only from the 18th century AD, and then initially as an expensive luxury.

Royal Crown Derby is the oldest or second oldest remaining English porcelain manufacturer (disputed by Royal Worcester, which claims 1751 as its year of establishment). Based in Derby, England, the company is particularly noted for its high-quality bone china, having produced tableware and ornamental items since approximately 1750. It was known as 'Derby Porcelain' until 1773, when it became 'Crown Derby', with the 'Royal' appellation being added in 1890.

The Derby Porcelain article covers the earliest history of this and other porcelain producers in 18th-century Derby.

Josiah Spode (23 March 1733 – 18 August 1797) was an English potter and the founder of the English Spode pottery works which became famous for the high quality of its wares. He is often credited with the establishment of blue underglaze transfer printing in Staffordshire in 1781–84, and with the definition and introduction in c. 1789–91 of the improved formula for bone china (a form of soft-paste porcelain) which thereafter remained the standard for all English wares of this kind.

The Herculaneum Pottery was based in Toxteth, Liverpool, England. between 1793/94 and 1841. They made creamware and pearlware pottery as well as bone china porcelain.

About 1793-4 Richard Abbey, who had been apprenticed to John Sadler, an engraver, started a pottery at Toxteth Park, on the north side of the River Mersey, along with a Scotsman named John Graham. In 1796 they sold the business to Worthington, Humble & Holland, who engaged as manager Ralph Mansfield, of Burslem. He left them after some years' service, and commenced a small pottery on his own account. In addition to Mansfield, the new company engaged about forty men from the Staffordshire potteries, and they were transported there by boat. The buildings acquired from Abbey were considerably enlarged and improved, and as Wedgwood had called his new colony "Etruria", the company christened theirs "Herculaneum".