Craft, Technology, and Material Culture in Early Modern Asia

*NOTE SPECIAL DATE*
Amanda Lanzillo, Pious Labour: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (Berkeley: UC Press.), introduction & chapter 5.

Nanny Kim, Mountain Rivers, Mountain Roads: Transport in Southwest China, 1700‐1850 (BRILL, 2020), Ch. 11. 
Jianxiong Ma, “The Mule Caravans as Cross-Border Networks: Local Bands and Their Stretch on the Frontier between Yunnan and Burma,” in Myanmar’s Mountain and Maritime Borderscapes, 237–60. 
 

Sucheta Mazumdar,  Sugar and society in China : peasants, technology, and the world market (Harvard University Asia Center, 1998), Introduction and Chs. 5-6.

C. A. Bayly, “The origins of swadeshi (home industry): cloth and Indian society, 1700–1930,” In Arjun Appadurai (Ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (pp. 285-321). Cambridge University Press.
Antonia Finnane, How to Make a Mao Suit: Clothing the People of Communist China, 1949–1976 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Introduction and chapter 1.
Some notes about the readings (from discussion leader Dr. Rachel Silberstein):
Chris Bayly's The Origins of Swadeshi looks at how the meanings of homespun cloth developed through the pre-colonial and colonial periods, partly in response to the import of European machine-made cloth. Chapter 1 from Antonia Finnane's newly published How to Make a Mao Suit charts the role of the Red Group tailors, the first Chinese tailors to master Western tailoring, in creating the Zhongshan suit. Introduction also included for further context (pp.20-24 provide a useful book outline).
 
 

Morgan Pitelka, Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Introduction & chapter 2.

Hu, Di. The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru. The University of Alabama Press, 2022, Chs. 3-4. 

Kai Jun Chen, Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technology in Qing China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022), Chapters 2 and 3.

We are going to discuss the changing concept of resources in the early modern and modern period.
“Focus: Resources in the Early Modern World,” Isis 114, no. 3 (September 1, 2023): 599–645, https://doi.org/10.1086/726186.
Peter B. Lavelle, The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), Chapter 2.

The discussion will be moderated by Anna Grasskamp.
- Robin Kelsey, "Ecology, Sustainability, and Historical Interpretation," American Art 28, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 8-13.
- Peter J. Golas, “Late Ming and The Exploitation of the Works of Nature,” in Picturing Technology in China : From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century (Hong Kong: HKU Press, 2015), pp. 97-124.
 
 

Sarah Teasley, "Sticky Solutions: The Persistence of Animal Glues in Laboratories and Workshops in Twentieth-Century Japan," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 53, no. 3 (June 2023): 278-307.
Tom H. Fisher, "What We Touch, Touches Us: Materials, Affects, and Affordances," Design Issues (2004) 20 (4): 20–31.