Technology and Society in Ming China (1368-1644)

Historians of Chinese technology have tended to pay little attention to the Ming dynasty, characterizing it as a stagnantperiod unmarked by significant inventions of the kind that in Europe gave rise to the industrial revolution and the modern world. Yet the Ming was a period of extraordinary social, cultural, and economic vitality and change, and it would be curious if technology had played no part in these changes. This pamphlet approaches the material world of the Ming from a more anthropological perspective than has been conventional among historians of China, emphasizing the role of technologies in social order and identity.

Francesca Bray is a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of The Rice Economies: Techonology and Development in Asian Studies (University of California Press, 1994) and Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 1997)