This deluxe catalogue featuring Islamic ceramics from the al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait is a welcome addition to the literature on the subject. Although a few catalogues of Islamic ceramics collections have been published in the twenty-first century (for example, Géza Fehérvári’s Ceramics of the Islamic World in the Tareq Rajab Museum, London: I.B.Tauris, 2000), the exceptional quality and range of the al-Sabah collection set it apart. In the introductory chapters of Ceramics from Islamic Lands, Oliver Watson broaches questions that other cataloguers of private collections might have avoided, namely fashions in collecting, the gulf between the types of Islamic ceramics acquired by museums and collectors and those excavated by archaeologists, and the pro-Persian, anti-Arab bias in scholarship and collecting in the twentieth century. While specialists would certainly be aware of the ratio of plain to fine wares at excavation sites, this information is rarely articulated; thus, people new to the subject often have a skewed understanding of the context and rarity of fine pottery from the Islamic world. On this matter as well as others, Watson’s book brings the reader up to date with recent trends in the study of Islamic ceramics and some, though not all, of the recent...