Technological Innovation and Cotton Textiles in Traditional China

-43TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND COTTON TEXTILES G? TRADITIONAL CHINA* Evelyn S. Rawski Department of History University of Pittsburgh In an article written several years ago, Mark Elvin raises the extremely important question of the causes, of technological stagnation in the traditional textile industries as a means of attacking the broader historical problem of patterns of economic evolution in China during the last five or six centuries. Beginning with the existence of a mechanized hemp-spinning machine in the fourteenth century, and comparing its technological level to machines used in Europe in the early eighteenth century, Elvin wonders "why it was eighteenth-century England that was the scene ofan industrial revolution in textile manufacture and not fourteenth -century China. " In the remainder of the article, Elvin considers possible explanations and finally emerges with a composite explanation which he calls the "high-level equilibrium trap. " In this short note, a potential technical hindrance to mechanized cotton weaving, the short length of the Chinese cotton staple, will be considered , and its relevance to the question of technological stagna - * In writing this note, I have profited from discussions with Thomas G. Rawski, Bruce L. Reynolds, Gregory D. Sukharchuk, and Gavin Wright. -44tion discussed. Several things bear repeating from Elvin's article: first, that it was not lack of mechanical skill that inhibited Chinese technology. As Elvin shows, the problem is not on this level but on the wider one of why the Chinese did not use their knowledge to improve existing machinery. Second, although the fourteenth century invention was a machine for spinning hemp, discussions of subsequent technological change must turn from hemp to cotton, the textile which wrought a "botanical revolution" in China from the thirteenth century on. Cotton was a superior textile and would have been the leading candidate for mechanization had the Industrial Revolution taken place in China. Why did the Chinese fail to mechanize cotton textiles? In attempting to answer this question, Elvin assumes that "gluts" in raw materials act as spurs to invention. In China, these surpluses of cotton appeared for only a relatively short time. Furthermore, incentives to adopt labor-saving machinery were weakened by the probable decline of labor costs as a share of textile production costs. Finally, the structure of the industry prevented market forces from exerting strong influences on the cotton technology. An additional important factor in the development of modern textile industries which Elvin fails to consider concerns the quality of Chinese cotton and its ability to fuel mechanization on -452 the British model. If classified by staple length, cotton can be divided into three major categories: the cotton found in pre modern East Asia, especially China, Korea, and Japan, which is characterized by a short staple; the cotton grown in the United States, known colloquially as "upland cotton, " characterized by 3 a medium length staple; and other types which have a long staple. The native varieties of Chinese cotton have a staple length of about 5/8 of an inch, as compared to from 7/8 to over 1 inch for American cotton, and 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 inches for the long staple vari4 eties. Although many qualities are important in evaluating raw cotton, staple length is an important variable in both spinning and weaving. It is generally correlated with the fineness, or 6 "count" of the yarn. Short staple cotton is suitable for coarse low-count yarn, and there seems to have been no technical obstacle to using Chinese raw cotton for this purpose in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the other hand, there was some difficulty in using this yarn on power looms because of the brittleness of the yarn. When the Shanghai Cotton Cloth Mill, the first Chinese project in mechanized production, contemplated using power looms, it engaged án American engineer, who tested O cotton samples for the necessary adjustment of the machines. Even when foreign machinery was adjusted for Chinese low- -46count yarn, it is possible that there was a higher incidence of breaks, adversely affecting both labor and machine productivity, 9 and lowering the cost advantage of mechanization. In China, development of a modern textile industry has been accompanied by a switch from native...