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Abstract
As illustrated in the work of Elman and his school, the demystification of science has opened new vistas in the history of late imperial China. I argue that the similarly demystified concept of technology, as it is has recently been elaborated in technology studies, offers equally exciting new opportunities. They include an enrichment of our understanding of late imperial governance, subjectivities and material culture, and new possibilities for organizing, relating and comparing within the history of China, as well as for cross-cultural comparison. The article proposes three organizing concepts, technological landscape, culture and era/mode, as tools both for exploring late imperial China and for linking China into comparative or global history.
Notes
1 On divination and risk see the work of the Erlangen International Consortium on Fate, freedom and prognostication: strategies for coping with the future in East Asia and Europe; http://www.ikgf.uni-erlangen.de/ accessed 12 February 2017. On building a corpus, see Florence Bretelle-Establet (ed), Looking at it from Asia: The Processes that Shaped the Sources of History of Science, Springer, 2010. On mathematical proof see Karine Chemla (ed), The History of Mathematical Proof in Ancient Traditions, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
2 Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900, Harvard University Press, 2005.
3 Dagmar Schäfer (ed), Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History, Brill: 2012. At the workshop where these papers were first presented, it proved extremely difficult to convince most of the contributors that they were writing about technology.
4 Nathan Sivin, ‘Why the Scientific Revolution did not take place in China – or didn't it?’ Chinese Science 5 (1982): 45-66.
5 See Francesca Bray, Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered, Routledge, 2013: 23.
6 E.g. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 1969; Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Creativity and Economic Progress, Oxford University Press, 1990.
7 John S. Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric, MIT Press, 1985.
8 David Edgerton, ‘From innovation to use: ten eclectic theses on the historiography of technology’, History and Technology, 16, no. 2 (1999): 111-136.
9 Jennifer Karns Alexander, The mantra of efficiency: From waterwheel to social control, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008; David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and global history since 1900, Profile Books, 2011; David Arnold and Erich DeWald, ‘Cycles of empowerment? The bicycle and everyday technology in colonial India and Vietnam’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53.04 (2011): 971-996; Nina E. Lerman, ‘“Preparing for the Duties and Practical Business of Life": Technological Knowledge and Social Structure in Mid-19th-Century Philadelphia’, Technology and Culture 38.1 (1997): 31-59; Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, How users matter: the co-construction of users and technology, MIT Press, 2003.
10 Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender 1880-1914, Pickering and Chatto, 2008; Nurcin Ileri, A Nocturnal History of Fin du Siècle Istanbul, PhD thesis, SUNY Binghampton, 2015; Natalia Nikiforova, ‘Electricity at Court: Technology in Representation of Imperial Power’, in Alain Beltran, Léonard Laborie, Pierre Lanthier and Stéphanie Le Gallic (eds), Electric Worlds. Creations, Circulations, Tensions, Transitions (19th-21st C.), Peter Lang, 2016: 64-80.
11 Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi, Princeton University Press, 2009; Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815, University of Chicago Press, 1997; Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Indentity after WWII, MIT Press, 2009.
12 Whitney E. Laemmli, A case in pointe: romance and regimentation at the New York City Ballet’, Technology and Culture 56, 1: 1-27, p.1. On bound feet as discipline and bound feet and labor, see Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Foot-Binding, California University Press, 2005; Laurel Bossen, Wang Xurui, Melissa J. Brown, and Hill Gates, ‘Feet and Fabrication: Footbinding and Early Twentieth-Century Rural Women's Labor in Shaanxi’, Modern China 37, 4 (2011): 347-383.
13 Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell, ‘Hail the Maintainers’, Aeon (online magazine https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more) [accessed 10 February 2017].
14 Francesca Bray, ‘Technics and civilization in Late Imperial China: an essay in the cultural history of technology’, Osiris 13 (1999): 11-33.
15 George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge, 1988: 15.
16 Svante Lindqvist ‘Changes in the technological landscape: the temporal dimension in the growth and decline of large technological systems’, in Ore Granstrand (ed), Economics of Technology, Amsterdam, 1994: 271-288; Jon Sigurdson, ‘A New Technological Landscape in China’, China Perspectives 42 (2004): 37-53.
17 Wiebe Bijker, ‘American and Dutch coastal engineering: differences in risk conception and differences in technological culture’, Social Studies of Science 37 (2007):143–152; Bray, Technology, Gender and History: 5.
18 M. Flitsch, ‘Knowledge, embodiment, skill and risk: anthropological perspectives on women's everyday technologies in rural North China’, East Asian Science, Technology and Society 2, 2 (2008): 265-288.
19 Cho-ying Li, ‘Contending strategies, collaboration among local specialists and officials, and hydrological reform in the late fifteenth-century Lower Yangzi Delta’, East Asian Science, Technology and Society 4, 2 (2010): 229-253.
20 I make use of technological culture in Technology, Gender and History (passim) and in Francesca Bray, ‘Technological Transitions’, in The Cambridge History of the World, vol. 6 part 1, The Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800 C.E., edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Jerry H. Bentley and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Cambridge University Press, 2015: 76-106. I applied the paired concepts to analyze the role of technology in China's transition to modernity in Francesca Bray, ‘Technology’, in Howard Chiang (ed), The Making of the Human Sciences in China: Historical and Conceptual Foundations (Leiden, forthcoming 2017).
21 Flitsch, ‘Knowledge’: 268.
22 Christian Daniels, Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology, Part III, Agro-industries and Forestry. Agro-industries: Sugarcane Technology, in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
23 Peer Högselius, Arne Kaijser and Erik van der Vleuten, Europe's Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature, Springer, 2015: xiii.
24 Bray, Technology, Gender and History.
25 Thomas J. Misa, Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004: 1-32.
26 Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China, California University Press, 1997; Jacob Eyferth, ‘Women's Work and the Politics of Homespun in Socialist China, 1949–1980’, International Review of Social History 57, 3 (2012): 365-391.
27 Misa, Leonardo, passim.
28 Here beer and brewing play a starring role, evoking the similar prominence of saké production and fermentation more generally in the development of manufacturing in Tokugawa Japan; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The technological transformation of Japan: From the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
29 Eda Kranakis, ‘Surveying technology and history: Essential tensions and postmodern possibilities’, Technology and Culture 46.4 (2005): 805-812; p. 807.
30 ibid: 809, emphases added.
31 Misa, Leonardo: 57.
32 Francesca Bray, ‘Science, technique, technology: passages between matter and knowledge in imperial Chinese agriculture’, British Journal for the History of Science 41, 3 (2008): 319-344. There I briefly discuss key technologies of the Chinese state, and I compare the styles and strategies of agricultural treatises to show the tensions and contradictions between the technological cultures of state officials and land-owners.
33 Christine Moll-Murata, Song Jianze and Hans Ulrich Vogel (eds) Chinese Handicraft Regulations of the Qing Dynasty: Theory and Application, Iudicum, 2005; Gugong bowuguan (Palace Museum), Gongting yu difang: shiqi zhi shiba shiji de jishu jiaoliu (The court and the localities: technological knowledge circulation in the 17th and 18th century), Zijincheng Press, 2010.
34 Esha Shah, ‘Telling otherwise: a historical anthropology of tank irrigation technology in South India’, Technology and Culture 49, no. 3 (2008): 652-674; pp. 653, 655.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Francesca Bray
Francesca Bray is a historian of science, technology and medicine in imperial China. She has published extensively on the history of agriculture, on technology and gender, and on the politics of everyday technologies. She holds the Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, and is Past President of the Society for the History of Technology.