Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered by Francesca Bray (review)

As the title of its introduction implies, the ambition of Francesca Bray’s new book is to demonstrate the “power of technology” in explaining and understanding a society’s culture and history. This book has brilliantly achieved its goal and convinced its readers of the importance of technology as an indispensable key for understanding Chinese society in the late imperial period.

Many readers are familiar with Bray’s influential book on technology and gender published sixteen years ago, which has shaped the way historians and anthropologists think about technology and society in Chinese history (Bray 1997). It eloquently shows technology not simply as material practices for managing nature but as forms and expressions of subjectivity and social relations in everyday life: simply put, as part of culture itself. The new book is not only a condensed version of this earlier work; it reaches a new level of synthesis by engaging more closely with recent works on Chinese history and STS theories. By highlighting nong (agriculture) as China’s fundamental cosmopolitical realm where proper sociopolitical and gender relations were defined and understood, Bray shows ever more clearly the centrality of gendered agricultural work (gynotechnics as well as androtechnics) in the making of late imperial China’s political economy and governmentality. Compared to the 1997 work, this book presents a more holistic picture of gender and technology as part of Chinese history and culture. It is a must-read for students and scholars of all levels researching Chinese history, gender studies, and anthropology of technology.

Although most of the book’s eight chapters are edited versions of earlier publications between 1997 and 2008, they are revised and organized in such a way that together they present a well-structured and coherent account, revealing Bray’s steady pursuit of the topic since 1997. Three sections follow the introduction. Section 1, “Material Foundations of the Moral Order,” consists of two chapters depicting and analyzing the domestic space and farming landscapes. The three chapters in section 2, “Gynotechnics: Crafting Womanly Virtues,” rework and enhance the 1997 book’s three main themes on women’s work: in the domestic space, in textile production, and as mothers. And the three chapters in section 3, “Androtechnics: The Writing-Brush, the Plough and the Nature of Technical Knowledge,” coherently address the production of nong knowledge as a science and discuss the way it defined Chinese masculine identity. This last section, besides adding androtechnics (not discussed in Bray’s 1997 work) to complement gynotechnics (which were already intensively discussed), also substantiates the notion of nong agriculture: the idealistic cosmopolitical sphere where late imperial Chinese men and women conceived their daily work and life. Chapter 7, “A Gentlemanly Occupation: The Domestication of Farming Knowledge,” from a hitherto unpublished paper, compares official and private treatises on agronomy, highlighting the different levels of knowledge construction and demonstrating how even local practices and skills formed “an ethical-technical knowledge cluster focused on ritual and social propriety, family well-being and the perpetuation of the lineage and its patrimonial property” (218). The historical framework of this book remains the same as in Bray’s 1997 study: the Neo-Confucian period, from the Song dynasty of the twelfth century to the late Qing of the early nineteenth. However, this book’s structure articulates more forcefully the author’s idea of culture as embedded in gendered material practices, as ways of living, working, and interacting within a shared cosmopolitical order.

As expected, one of the new book’s most valuable chapters is the introduction, where Bray provides a lucid and critical overview of anthropological and STS theories on technology to demonstrate how important they are in offering new insights on late imperial Chinese culture. She notably highlights the STS notion of a “sociotechnical system,” a “seamless web” in which the social and the technical, the material and the symbolic merge. Under this light, some of the practices that had been treated in her...