Humanities Job Talk

Industrial Craft: A Global History of Chinese Cotton Industry, 1887-1937, examines the mechanization of cotton spinning in China with emphasis on the Sino-American exchange of spinning technologies, cotton varieties, and technical experts. Drawing upon a variety of technical writings such as machine manuals, engineering journals, agricultural reports, and contracts between American machine firms and Chinese cotton mills, it shows how the Chinese strove to solve technological problems specific to their factories through continued modification and repair of foreign machines that failed to process short-staple Chinese cotton. By reconstructing the specific jobs performed by engineers, machinists, and female machine operators, it argues that what enabled the mechanization was their multiple layers of knowledge, rather than the machines per se, obtained from hands-on experience of machines as well as formal engineering education. In doing so, it establishes Chinese workers as active participants in global technology transfer instead of passive recipients of Western machinery and knowledge.