Francesca Bray - Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China

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TECHNOLOGY, GENDER AND HISTORY IN IMPERIAL CHINA

What can the history of technology contribute to our understanding of late imperial China? Most stories about technology in pre-modern China follow a well-worn plot: in about 1400 after an early ferment of creativity that made it the most technologically sophisticated civilization in the world, China entered an era of technical lethargy and decline. But how are we to reconcile this tale, which portrays China in the Ming and Qing dynasties as a dying giant that had outgrown its own strength, with the wealth of counterevidence affirming that the country remained rich, vigorous and powerful at least until the end of the eighteenth century? Does this seeming contradiction mean that the stagnation story is simply wrong, or perhaps that technology was irrelevant to how imperial society worked? Or does it imply that historians of technology should ask better questions about what technology was, what it did and what it meant in pre-modern societies such as late imperial China?

In this book, Francesca Bray explores subjects such as technology and ethics, technology and gendered subjectivities (both female and male), and technology and statecraft to illuminate how material settings and practices shaped topographies of everyday experience and ideologies of government, techniques of the self and technologies of the subject. Examining technologies ranging from ploughing and weaving to drawing pictures, building a house, prescribing medicine or composing a text, this book offers a rich insight into the interplay between the micro- and macro-politics of everyday life and the workings of governmentality in late imperial China, showing that gender principles were woven into the very fabric of empire, from cosmology and ideologies of rule to the material foundations of the state and the everyday practices of the domestic sphere.

This authoritative text will be welcomed by students and scholars of Chinese history, as well as those working on global history and the histories of gender, technology and agriculture. Furthermore, it will be of great use to those interested in social and cultural anthropology and material culture.

Francesca Bray is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Asias Transformations

Edited by Mark Selden, Cornell University, USA

The books in this series explore the political, social, economic and cultural consequences of Asias transformations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The series emphasizes the tumultuous interplay of local, national, regional and global forces as Asia bids to become the hub of the world economy. While focusing on the contemporary, it also looks back to analyze the antecedents of Asias contested rise.

This series comprises several strands:

Asias Transformations

Titles include:

1. Debating Human Rights

Critical essays from the United States and Asia

Edited by Peter Van Ness

2. Hong Kongs History

State and society under colonial rule

Edited by Tak-Wing Ngo

3. Japans Comfort Women

Sexual slavery and prostitution during World War II and the US occupation

Yuki Tanaka

4. Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy

Carl A. Trocki

5. Chinese Society

Change, conflict and resistance

Edited by Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden

6. Maos Children in the New China

Voices from the Red Guard generation

Yarong Jiang and David Ashley

7. Remaking the Chinese State

Strategies, society and security

Edited by Chien-min Chao and Bruce J. Dickson

8. Korean Society

Civil society, democracy and the state

Edited by Charles K. Armstrong

9. The Making of Modern Korea

Adrian Buzo

10. The Resurgence of East Asia

500, 150 and 50 year perspectives

Edited by Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Selden

11. Chinese Society, second edition

Change, conflict and resistance

Edited by Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden

12. Ethnicity in Asia

Edited by Colin Mackerras

13. The Battle for Asia

From decolonization to globalization

Mark T. Berger

14. State and Society in 21st Century China

Edited by Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen

15. Japans Quiet Transformation

Social change and civil society in the 21st century

Jeff Kingston

16. Confronting the Bush Doctrine

Critical views from the Asia-Pacific

Edited by Mel Gurtov and Peter Van Ness

17. China in War and Revolution, 18951949

Peter Zarrow

18. The Future of USKorean Relations

The imbalance of power

Edited by John Feffer

19. Working in China

Ethnographies of labor and workplace transformations

Edited by Ching Kwan Lee

20. Korean Society, second edition

Civil society, democracy and the state

Edited by Charles K. Armstrong

21. Singapore

The state and the culture of excess

Souchou Yao

22. Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History

Colonialism, regionalism and borders

Edited by Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann

23. The Making of Modern Korea, 2nd Edition

Adrian Buzo

24. Re-writing Culture in Taiwan

Edited by Fang-long Shih, Stuart Thompson and Paul-Franois Tremlett

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