“Technology, Gender, and History: The Case of Late Imperial China”

Technologies played a dramatic role in birthing the modern industrial world, so it is hardly surprising that classic and widely familiar histories of technology trace narratives of triumphant Western progress, contrasted to backwardness or stagnation in other societies around the world. But in recent years historians of Western technology have become less interested in technology as a catalyst of human progress, and more interested in how technical practices shape social identities, symbolic systems and power relations. In the case of China, historians of technology likewise spend less time now struggling to explain why China “failed to progress” after 1400, asking instead what they can learn by mapping the technological landscapes of imperial China, and by considering what social and symbolic as well as material work technologies performed in imperial society.
Dr. Francesca Bray is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and President-elect of The Society for the History of Technology. Her research includes the history of science, technology and medicine in China, and the anthropology of technology in the contemporary world, including the politics of everyday domestic technologies in California. Her most recent publication is The Warp and the Weft: Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China (Brill, 2007) and has 2 forthcoming works, Rice: New Networks and Global Histories (Cambridge) and .Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered (Routledge, expected May 2013).

updated hm 4/3/13