Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China

This book 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. In doing so, it shows that gender principles were woven into the very fabric of empire and prompts a reexamination of imperial China's technological development.

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

Introduction: the power of technology Part I: Material foundations of the moral order 1. Machines for living: domestic architecture and the engineering of the social order in late imperial China 2. Instructive and nourishing landscapes: natural resources, people and the state in late imperial China Part II: Gynotechnics: crafting womanly virtues 3. Women's work and women's place: textiles and gender 4. Structures of feeling: decorum, desire and a place of one's own 5. Tales of fertility: reproductive narratives in late imperial medical cases Part III: Androtechnics: the writing-brush, the plough and the nature of technical knowledge 6. Science, technique, technology: passages between matter and knowledge in imperial Chinese agriculture 7. A gentlemanly occupation: the domestication of farming knowledge 8. Agricultural illustrations: blueprint or icon?