Woman sent threatening messages to herself, told police they were from ex-boyfriend

Technology to the rescue of an innocent man in Rotorua, New Zealand.

Jacinta Maree Hammond, 23, pleaded guilty to charges of making a false statement to police and wilfully attempting to pervert the course of justice. Hammond purchased a pre-pay phone and sent four text "threats" to herself. More than a week later, she went to police and claimed her (thankfully) unnamed estranged partner was threatening her. Her proof: the text messages she, herself, had authored.

Following her guilty plea, Hammond's lawyer requested the court seek a psychiatric report to help in sentencing, saying her client had not been "functioning well" for some time.  The lawyer said her client had little recollection of the incidents. "She recalls some things but the rest is a complete blank," she told the court.

Hammond will be sentenced on July 19.  "You should be making preparations in case you are sent to prison," the Judge told her.

Another example of modern technology leaving "traceable footprints" that help justice prevail.

http://www.rotoruadailypost.co.nz/local/news/rotorua-woman-sends-text-threats-to-herself/3951641/
 
Thanks to LDM

Woman sent threatening messages to herself, told police they were from ex-boyfriend

Technology to the rescue of an innocent man in Rotorua, New Zealand.

Jacinta Maree Hammond, 23, pleaded guilty to charges of making a false statement to police and wilfully attempting to pervert the course of justice. Hammond purchased a pre-pay phone and sent four text "threats" to herself. More than a week later, she went to police and claimed her (thankfully) unnamed estranged partner was threatening her. Her proof: the text messages she, herself, had authored.

Following her guilty plea, Hammond's lawyer requested the court seek a psychiatric report to help in sentencing, saying her client had not been "functioning well" for some time.  The lawyer said her client had little recollection of the incidents. "She recalls some things but the rest is a complete blank," she told the court.

Hammond will be sentenced on July 19.  "You should be making preparations in case you are sent to prison," the Judge told her.

Another example of modern technology leaving "traceable footprints" that help justice prevail.

http://www.rotoruadailypost.co.nz/local/news/rotorua-woman-sends-text-threats-to-herself/3951641/
 
Thanks to LDM

Thinking about disaster

Charles Perrow is a very talented sociologist who has put his finger on some of the central weaknesses of the American social-economic-political system.  He has written about corporations (Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism), technology failure (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies), and organizations (Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay).  (Here is an earlier post on his historical account of the corporation in America; link.) These sound like very different topics -- but they're not, really.  Organizations, power, the conflict between private interests and the public good, and the social and technical causes of great public harms have been the organizing themes of his research for a very long time.

His current book is truly scary.  In The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters he carefully surveys the conjunction of factors that make 21st-century America almost uniquely vulnerable to major disasters -- actual and possible.  Hurricane Katrina is one place to start -- a concentration of habitation, dangerous infrastructure, vulnerable toxic storage, and wholly inadequate policies of water and land use led to a horrific loss of life and a permanent crippling of a great American city.  The disaster was foreseeable and foreseen, and yet few effective steps were taken to protect the city and river system from catastrophic flooding.  And even more alarming -- government and the private sector have taken almost none of the prudent steps after the disaster that would mitigate future flooding.

Perrow's analysis includes natural disasters (floods, hurricanes, earthquakes), nuclear power plants, chemical plants, the electric power transmission infrastructure, and the Internet -- as well as the threat of deliberate attacks by terrorists against high-risk targets.   In each case he documents the extreme risks that our society faces from a combination of factors: concentration of industry and population, lax regulation, ineffective organizations of management and oversight, and an inability on the part of Congress to enact legislation that seriously interferes with the business interests of major corporations even for the purpose of protecting the public.

His point is a simple one: we can't change the weather, the physics of nuclear power, or the destructive energy contained in an LNG farm; but we can take precautions today that significantly reduce the possible effects of accidents caused by these factors in the future. His general conclusion is a very worrisome one: our society is essentially unprotected from major natural disasters and industrial accidents, and we have only very slightly increased our safety when it comes to preventing deliberate terrorist attacks.

This book has been about the inevitable inadequacy of our efforts to protect us from major disasters. It locates the inevitable inadequacy in the limitations of formal organizations. We cannot expect them to do an adequate job in protecting us from mounting natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters.  It locates the avoidable inadequacy of our efforts in our failure to reduce the size of the targets, and thus minimize the extent of harm these disasters can do. (chapter 9)

A specific failure in our current political system is the failure to construct an adequate and safety-enhancing system of regulation:

Stepping outside of the organization itself, we come to a third source of organizational failure, that of regulation. Every chapter on disasters in this book has ended with a call for better regulation and re-regulation, since we need both new regulations in the face of new technologies and threats and the restoration of past regulations that had disappeared or been weakened since the 1960s and 1970s. (chapter 9)

The central vulnerabilities that Perrow points to are systemic and virtually ubiquitous across the United States -- concentration and centralization.  He is very concerned about the concentration of people in high-risk areas (flood and earthquake zones, for example); he is concerned about the centralized power wielded by mega-organizations and corporations in our society; and he is concerned about the concentration of highly dangerous infrastructure in places where it puts large populations at risk.  He refers repeatedly to the risk posed by the transport by rail of huge quantities of chlorine gas through densely populated areas -- 90 tons at a time; the risk presented by LNG and propane storage farms in areas vulnerable to flooding and consequent release or explosion; the lethal consequences that would ensue from a winter-time massive failure of the electric power grid.

Perrow is an organizational expert; and he recognizes the deep implications that follow from the inherent obstacles that confront large organizations, both public or private.  Co-optation by powerful private interests, failure of coordination among agencies, lack of effective communication in the preparation of policies and emergency responses -- these organizational tendencies can reduce organizations like FEMA or the NRC to almost complete inability to perform their public functions.

Organizations, as I have often noted, are tools that can be used by those within and without them for purposes that have little to do with their announced goals. (Kindle loc, 1686)

Throughout the book Perrow offers careful, detailed reviews of the effectiveness and consistency of the government agencies and the regulatory legislation that have been deployed to contain these risks.  Why was FEMA such an organizational failure?  What's wrong with the Department of Homeland Security?  Why are chronic issues of system safety in nuclear power plants and chemical plants not adequately addressed by the corresponding regulatory agencies?  Perrow goes through these examples in great detail and demonstrates the very ordinary social mechanisms through which organizations lose effectiveness.  The book serves as a case-study review of organizational failures.

Perrow's central point is stark: the American political system lacks the strength to take the long-term steps it needs to in order to mitigate the worst effects of natural (or intentional) disasters that are inevitable in our future.  We need consistent investment for long-term benefits; we need effective regulation of powerful actors; and we need long-term policies that mitigate future disasters.  But so far we have failed in each of these areas.  Private interests are too strong, an ideology of free choice and virtually unrestrained use of property leads to dangerous residential and business development, and Federal and state agencies lack the political will to enact the effective regulations that would be necessary to raise the safety threshold in dangerous industries and developments. And, of course, the determined attack on "government regulations" that has been underway from the right since the Reagan years just further worsens the ability of agencies to regulate these powerful businesses -- the nuclear power industry, the chemical industry, the oil and gas industry, ...

One might think that the risks that Perrow describes are fairly universal across modern societies.  But Perrow notes that these problems seem more difficult and fundamental in the United States than in Europe.  The Netherlands has centuries of experience in investing in and regulating developments having to do with the control of water; European countries have managed to cooperate on the management of rivers and flood plains; and most have much stronger regulatory regimes for the high risk technologies and infrastructure sectors.

The book is scary, and we need to pay attention to the social and natural risks that Perrow documents so vividly.  And we need collectively to take steps to realistically address these risks.  We need to improve the organizations we create, both public and private, aimed at mitigating large risks.  And we need to substantially improve upon the reach and effectiveness of the regulatory systems that govern these activities.  But Perrow insists that improving organizations and leadership, and creating better regulations, can only take us so far.  So we also need to reduce the scope of damage that will occur when disaster strikes.  We need to design our social system for "soft landings" when disasters occur.  Fundamentally, his advice is to decentralize dangerous infrastructure and to be much more cautious about development in high-risk zones.

Given the limited success we can expect from organizational, executive, and regulatory reform, we should attend to reducing the damage that organizations can do by reducing their size.  Smaller organizations have a smaller potential for harm, just as smaller concentrations of populations in areas vulnerable to natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters present smaller targets. (chapter 9)

If owners assume more responsibility for decisions about design and location -- for example, by being required to purchase realistically priced flood or earthquake insurance -- then there would be less new construction in hurricane alleyways or high-risk earthquake areas.  Rather than integrated mega-organizations and corporations providing goods and services, Perrow argues for the effectiveness of networks of small firms.  And he argues that regulations and law can be designed that give the right incentives to developers and home buyers about where to locate their businesses and homes, reflecting the true costs associated with risky locations. Realistically priced mandatory flood insurance would significantly alter the population density in hurricane alleys.  And our policies and regulations should make a systematic effort to disperse dangerous concentrations of industrial and nuclear materials wherever possible.

Thinking about disaster

Charles Perrow is a very talented sociologist who has put his finger on some of the central weaknesses of the American social-economic-political system.  He has written about corporations (Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism), technology failure (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies), and organizations (Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay).  (Here is an earlier post on his historical account of the corporation in America; link.) These sound like very different topics -- but they're not, really.  Organizations, power, the conflict between private interests and the public good, and the social and technical causes of great public harms have been the organizing themes of his research for a very long time.

His current book is truly scary.  In The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters he carefully surveys the conjunction of factors that make 21st-century America almost uniquely vulnerable to major disasters -- actual and possible.  Hurricane Katrina is one place to start -- a concentration of habitation, dangerous infrastructure, vulnerable toxic storage, and wholly inadequate policies of water and land use led to a horrific loss of life and a permanent crippling of a great American city.  The disaster was foreseeable and foreseen, and yet few effective steps were taken to protect the city and river system from catastrophic flooding.  And even more alarming -- government and the private sector have taken almost none of the prudent steps after the disaster that would mitigate future flooding.

Perrow's analysis includes natural disasters (floods, hurricanes, earthquakes), nuclear power plants, chemical plants, the electric power transmission infrastructure, and the Internet -- as well as the threat of deliberate attacks by terrorists against high-risk targets.   In each case he documents the extreme risks that our society faces from a combination of factors: concentration of industry and population, lax regulation, ineffective organizations of management and oversight, and an inability on the part of Congress to enact legislation that seriously interferes with the business interests of major corporations even for the purpose of protecting the public.

His point is a simple one: we can't change the weather, the physics of nuclear power, or the destructive energy contained in an LNG farm; but we can take precautions today that significantly reduce the possible effects of accidents caused by these factors in the future. His general conclusion is a very worrisome one: our society is essentially unprotected from major natural disasters and industrial accidents, and we have only very slightly increased our safety when it comes to preventing deliberate terrorist attacks.

This book has been about the inevitable inadequacy of our efforts to protect us from major disasters. It locates the inevitable inadequacy in the limitations of formal organizations. We cannot expect them to do an adequate job in protecting us from mounting natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters.  It locates the avoidable inadequacy of our efforts in our failure to reduce the size of the targets, and thus minimize the extent of harm these disasters can do. (chapter 9)

A specific failure in our current political system is the failure to construct an adequate and safety-enhancing system of regulation:

Stepping outside of the organization itself, we come to a third source of organizational failure, that of regulation. Every chapter on disasters in this book has ended with a call for better regulation and re-regulation, since we need both new regulations in the face of new technologies and threats and the restoration of past regulations that had disappeared or been weakened since the 1960s and 1970s. (chapter 9)

The central vulnerabilities that Perrow points to are systemic and virtually ubiquitous across the United States -- concentration and centralization.  He is very concerned about the concentration of people in high-risk areas (flood and earthquake zones, for example); he is concerned about the centralized power wielded by mega-organizations and corporations in our society; and he is concerned about the concentration of highly dangerous infrastructure in places where it puts large populations at risk.  He refers repeatedly to the risk posed by the transport by rail of huge quantities of chlorine gas through densely populated areas -- 90 tons at a time; the risk presented by LNG and propane storage farms in areas vulnerable to flooding and consequent release or explosion; the lethal consequences that would ensue from a winter-time massive failure of the electric power grid.

Perrow is an organizational expert; and he recognizes the deep implications that follow from the inherent obstacles that confront large organizations, both public or private.  Co-optation by powerful private interests, failure of coordination among agencies, lack of effective communication in the preparation of policies and emergency responses -- these organizational tendencies can reduce organizations like FEMA or the NRC to almost complete inability to perform their public functions.

Organizations, as I have often noted, are tools that can be used by those within and without them for purposes that have little to do with their announced goals. (Kindle loc, 1686)

Throughout the book Perrow offers careful, detailed reviews of the effectiveness and consistency of the government agencies and the regulatory legislation that have been deployed to contain these risks.  Why was FEMA such an organizational failure?  What's wrong with the Department of Homeland Security?  Why are chronic issues of system safety in nuclear power plants and chemical plants not adequately addressed by the corresponding regulatory agencies?  Perrow goes through these examples in great detail and demonstrates the very ordinary social mechanisms through which organizations lose effectiveness.  The book serves as a case-study review of organizational failures.

Perrow's central point is stark: the American political system lacks the strength to take the long-term steps it needs to in order to mitigate the worst effects of natural (or intentional) disasters that are inevitable in our future.  We need consistent investment for long-term benefits; we need effective regulation of powerful actors; and we need long-term policies that mitigate future disasters.  But so far we have failed in each of these areas.  Private interests are too strong, an ideology of free choice and virtually unrestrained use of property leads to dangerous residential and business development, and Federal and state agencies lack the political will to enact the effective regulations that would be necessary to raise the safety threshold in dangerous industries and developments. And, of course, the determined attack on "government regulations" that has been underway from the right since the Reagan years just further worsens the ability of agencies to regulate these powerful businesses -- the nuclear power industry, the chemical industry, the oil and gas industry, ...

One might think that the risks that Perrow describes are fairly universal across modern societies.  But Perrow notes that these problems seem more difficult and fundamental in the United States than in Europe.  The Netherlands has centuries of experience in investing in and regulating developments having to do with the control of water; European countries have managed to cooperate on the management of rivers and flood plains; and most have much stronger regulatory regimes for the high risk technologies and infrastructure sectors.

The book is scary, and we need to pay attention to the social and natural risks that Perrow documents so vividly.  And we need collectively to take steps to realistically address these risks.  We need to improve the organizations we create, both public and private, aimed at mitigating large risks.  And we need to substantially improve upon the reach and effectiveness of the regulatory systems that govern these activities.  But Perrow insists that improving organizations and leadership, and creating better regulations, can only take us so far.  So we also need to reduce the scope of damage that will occur when disaster strikes.  We need to design our social system for "soft landings" when disasters occur.  Fundamentally, his advice is to decentralize dangerous infrastructure and to be much more cautious about development in high-risk zones.

Given the limited success we can expect from organizational, executive, and regulatory reform, we should attend to reducing the damage that organizations can do by reducing their size.  Smaller organizations have a smaller potential for harm, just as smaller concentrations of populations in areas vulnerable to natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters present smaller targets. (chapter 9)

If owners assume more responsibility for decisions about design and location -- for example, by being required to purchase realistically priced flood or earthquake insurance -- then there would be less new construction in hurricane alleyways or high-risk earthquake areas.  Rather than integrated mega-organizations and corporations providing goods and services, Perrow argues for the effectiveness of networks of small firms.  And he argues that regulations and law can be designed that give the right incentives to developers and home buyers about where to locate their businesses and homes, reflecting the true costs associated with risky locations. Realistically priced mandatory flood insurance would significantly alter the population density in hurricane alleys.  And our policies and regulations should make a systematic effort to disperse dangerous concentrations of industrial and nuclear materials wherever possible.

Thinking about disaster

Charles Perrow is a very talented sociologist who has put his finger on some of the central weaknesses of the American social-economic-political system.  He has written about corporations (Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism), technology failure (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies), and organizations (Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay).  (Here is an earlier post on his historical account of the corporation in America; link.) These sound like very different topics -- but they're not, really.  Organizations, power, the conflict between private interests and the public good, and the social and technical causes of great public harms have been the organizing themes of his research for a very long time.

His current book is truly scary.  In The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters he carefully surveys the conjunction of factors that make 21st-century America almost uniquely vulnerable to major disasters -- actual and possible.  Hurricane Katrina is one place to start -- a concentration of habitation, dangerous infrastructure, vulnerable toxic storage, and wholly inadequate policies of water and land use led to a horrific loss of life and a permanent crippling of a great American city.  The disaster was foreseeable and foreseen, and yet few effective steps were taken to protect the city and river system from catastrophic flooding.  And even more alarming -- government and the private sector have taken almost none of the prudent steps after the disaster that would mitigate future flooding.

Perrow's analysis includes natural disasters (floods, hurricanes, earthquakes), nuclear power plants, chemical plants, the electric power transmission infrastructure, and the Internet -- as well as the threat of deliberate attacks by terrorists against high-risk targets.   In each case he documents the extreme risks that our society faces from a combination of factors: concentration of industry and population, lax regulation, ineffective organizations of management and oversight, and an inability on the part of Congress to enact legislation that seriously interferes with the business interests of major corporations even for the purpose of protecting the public.

His point is a simple one: we can't change the weather, the physics of nuclear power, or the destructive energy contained in an LNG farm; but we can take precautions today that significantly reduce the possible effects of accidents caused by these factors in the future. His general conclusion is a very worrisome one: our society is essentially unprotected from major natural disasters and industrial accidents, and we have only very slightly increased our safety when it comes to preventing deliberate terrorist attacks.

This book has been about the inevitable inadequacy of our efforts to protect us from major disasters. It locates the inevitable inadequacy in the limitations of formal organizations. We cannot expect them to do an adequate job in protecting us from mounting natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters.  It locates the avoidable inadequacy of our efforts in our failure to reduce the size of the targets, and thus minimize the extent of harm these disasters can do. (chapter 9)

A specific failure in our current political system is the failure to construct an adequate and safety-enhancing system of regulation:

Stepping outside of the organization itself, we come to a third source of organizational failure, that of regulation. Every chapter on disasters in this book has ended with a call for better regulation and re-regulation, since we need both new regulations in the face of new technologies and threats and the restoration of past regulations that had disappeared or been weakened since the 1960s and 1970s. (chapter 9)

The central vulnerabilities that Perrow points to are systemic and virtually ubiquitous across the United States -- concentration and centralization.  He is very concerned about the concentration of people in high-risk areas (flood and earthquake zones, for example); he is concerned about the centralized power wielded by mega-organizations and corporations in our society; and he is concerned about the concentration of highly dangerous infrastructure in places where it puts large populations at risk.  He refers repeatedly to the risk posed by the transport by rail of huge quantities of chlorine gas through densely populated areas -- 90 tons at a time; the risk presented by LNG and propane storage farms in areas vulnerable to flooding and consequent release or explosion; the lethal consequences that would ensue from a winter-time massive failure of the electric power grid.

Perrow is an organizational expert; and he recognizes the deep implications that follow from the inherent obstacles that confront large organizations, both public or private.  Co-optation by powerful private interests, failure of coordination among agencies, lack of effective communication in the preparation of policies and emergency responses -- these organizational tendencies can reduce organizations like FEMA or the NRC to almost complete inability to perform their public functions.

Organizations, as I have often noted, are tools that can be used by those within and without them for purposes that have little to do with their announced goals. (Kindle loc, 1686)

Throughout the book Perrow offers careful, detailed reviews of the effectiveness and consistency of the government agencies and the regulatory legislation that have been deployed to contain these risks.  Why was FEMA such an organizational failure?  What's wrong with the Department of Homeland Security?  Why are chronic issues of system safety in nuclear power plants and chemical plants not adequately addressed by the corresponding regulatory agencies?  Perrow goes through these examples in great detail and demonstrates the very ordinary social mechanisms through which organizations lose effectiveness.  The book serves as a case-study review of organizational failures.

Perrow's central point is stark: the American political system lacks the strength to take the long-term steps it needs to in order to mitigate the worst effects of natural (or intentional) disasters that are inevitable in our future.  We need consistent investment for long-term benefits; we need effective regulation of powerful actors; and we need long-term policies that mitigate future disasters.  But so far we have failed in each of these areas.  Private interests are too strong, an ideology of free choice and virtually unrestrained use of property leads to dangerous residential and business development, and Federal and state agencies lack the political will to enact the effective regulations that would be necessary to raise the safety threshold in dangerous industries and developments. And, of course, the determined attack on "government regulations" that has been underway from the right since the Reagan years just further worsens the ability of agencies to regulate these powerful businesses -- the nuclear power industry, the chemical industry, the oil and gas industry, ...

One might think that the risks that Perrow describes are fairly universal across modern societies.  But Perrow notes that these problems seem more difficult and fundamental in the United States than in Europe.  The Netherlands has centuries of experience in investing in and regulating developments having to do with the control of water; European countries have managed to cooperate on the management of rivers and flood plains; and most have much stronger regulatory regimes for the high risk technologies and infrastructure sectors.

The book is scary, and we need to pay attention to the social and natural risks that Perrow documents so vividly.  And we need collectively to take steps to realistically address these risks.  We need to improve the organizations we create, both public and private, aimed at mitigating large risks.  And we need to substantially improve upon the reach and effectiveness of the regulatory systems that govern these activities.  But Perrow insists that improving organizations and leadership, and creating better regulations, can only take us so far.  So we also need to reduce the scope of damage that will occur when disaster strikes.  We need to design our social system for "soft landings" when disasters occur.  Fundamentally, his advice is to decentralize dangerous infrastructure and to be much more cautious about development in high-risk zones.

Given the limited success we can expect from organizational, executive, and regulatory reform, we should attend to reducing the damage that organizations can do by reducing their size.  Smaller organizations have a smaller potential for harm, just as smaller concentrations of populations in areas vulnerable to natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters present smaller targets. (chapter 9)

If owners assume more responsibility for decisions about design and location -- for example, by being required to purchase realistically priced flood or earthquake insurance -- then there would be less new construction in hurricane alleyways or high-risk earthquake areas.  Rather than integrated mega-organizations and corporations providing goods and services, Perrow argues for the effectiveness of networks of small firms.  And he argues that regulations and law can be designed that give the right incentives to developers and home buyers about where to locate their businesses and homes, reflecting the true costs associated with risky locations. Realistically priced mandatory flood insurance would significantly alter the population density in hurricane alleys.  And our policies and regulations should make a systematic effort to disperse dangerous concentrations of industrial and nuclear materials wherever possible.

Transmitting technology

How do large technological advances cross cultural and civilizational boundaries? The puzzle is this: large technologies are not simply cool new devices, but rather complex systems of scientific knowledge, engineering traditions, production processes, and modes of technical communication. So transfer of technology is not simply a matter of conveying the approximate specifications of the device; it requires the creation of a research and development infrastructure that is largely analogous to the original process of invention and development. Inventors, scientists, universities, research centers, and skilled workers need to build a local understanding of the way the technology works and how to solve the difficult problems of material and technical implementation.

Take inertial guidance systems for missiles, described in fascinating detail by Donald MacKenzie in Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. The process MacKenzie describes of discovery and development of inertial guidance was a highly complex and secretive one, with multiple areas of scientific and engineering research solving a series of difficult technical problems.

Now do a bit of counterfactual history and imagine that some country -- say, Burma -- had developed powerful rocket engines in the 1950s but did not have a workable guidance technology; and suppose the US and USSR had succeeded in keeping the development of inertial navigation systems and the underlying science secret. Finally, suppose that Burmese agents had managed to gain a superficial description of inertial navigation: "It is a self-contained device that tracks acceleration and therefore permits constant updating of current location; and it uses ultra-high precision gyroscopes." Would this be enough of a leak to permit rapid adoption of inertial navigation in the Burmese missile program? Probably not; the technical obstacles faced in the original development process would have to be solved again, and this means a long process of knowledge building and institution building.  For example, MacKenzie describes the knotty problem posed to this technology by the fact of slight variations in the earth's gravitational field over the surface of the globe; if uncorrected, these variations would be coded as acceleration by the instrument and would lead to significant navigational errors.  The solution to this problem involved creating a detailed mapping of the earth's gravitational field.

This is a hypothetical case. But Hsien-Chun Wang describes an equally fascinating but real case in a recent article in Technology & Culture, "Discovering Steam Power in China, 1840s-1860s" (link). There was essentially no knowledge of steam power in Chinese science in the mid-Qing (early nineteenth century). The First Opium War (1839-1842) provided a rude announcement of the technology, in the form of powerful steam-driven warships on the coast and rivers of eastern China. Chinese officials and military officers recognized the threat represented by Western military-industrial technology, but it was another 25 years before Chinese industry was in a position to build a steam-powered ship. So what were the obstacles standing in front of China's steam revolution?

Wang focuses on two key obstacles in mid-Qing industry and technology: the role of technical drawings as a medium for transmitting specifications for complex machines from designer to skilled workers; and the absence in nineteenth-century China of a machine tool technology.  Technical drawings were an essential medium of communication in the European industrial system, conveying precise specifications of parts and machines to the workers and tools who would fabricate them.  And machine tools (lathes, planes, stamping machines, cutting machines, etc.) provided the tools necessary to fabricate high-precision metal parts and components.  (Merritt Roe Smith describes aspects of both these stories in his account of the U.S. arms industry in the early nineteenth century; Harpers Ferry Armory and New Technology.)  According to Wang, the Chinese technical culture had developed models rather than drawings to convey how a machine works; and the intricate small machines that certainly were a part of Chinese technical culture depended on artisanal skill rather than precision tooling of interchangeable parts.

So communicating the technical details of a complex machine and creating the fabrication infrastructure needed to produce the machine were two important obstacles for rapid transfer of steam technology from Western Europe to Qing China.  But perhaps a more fundamental obstacle emerges as well: the fact that Chinese technical and scientific culture was as yet simply unready to "see" the way that steam power worked in the first place.  When steam warships arrived, acute Chinese observers saw smoke and fire, and they saw motion.  But they did not see "steam-driven traction", or the translation of kinetic energy into rotational work.  (This is evident also in the drawing of the treadmill water pump above; the maker of the drawing clearly did not perceive from the Italian drawing how the motion of the treadmill was translated into the vertical pumping action.)  Wang quotes a description from an observer in Guangzhou in 1828:

Early in the third month ... there suddenly came from Bengal a huo lunchuan [fire-wheel ship] .... The huo lunchuan has an empty copper cylinder inside to burn coal, with a machine on the top.  When the flame is up, the machine moves automatically. The wheels on both sides of the ship move automatically too. (37)

And another observer wrote in Zhejiang in 1840:

The ship's cabin stores a square furnace under the beam from which the wheels are hung. When the fire is burning in the furnace, the two wheels turn like a fast mill and the ship cruises as fast as if it is flying, regardless of the wind's direction. (37-38)

The give-away here is the word "automatically"; plainly these observers had not assimilated a causal process linking the production of heat (fire) to mechanical motion (the rotation of the paddle wheels).  Instead, the two circumstances are described as parallel rather than causal.

So the fundamental motive force of steam was not cognitively accessible at this point, even through direct observation.  By contrast, the marine utility of paddlewheel-driven warships was quickly assimilated. Chinese commanders adapted what they observed in the European naval forces (powerful paddlewheels that made sails unnecessary) to an existing technology (human- or ox-driven paddlewheels), and large "wheel-boats" saw action as early as 1842 on Suzhou Creek (40).

Wang notes that several Chinese inventors did in fact succeed in discerning the mechanism associated with steam power by the 1840s. Ding Gongchen succeeded in fabricating a model steam rail engine 61 centimeters long and a 134-centimeter model paddlewheel steamboat; so he clearly understood the basic mechanism at this point.  And Zheng Fuguang appears to have mastered the basic concept as well.  But here is Wang's summary:

Ding's efforts show that despite the circulating writings of a few experimenters, the steam engine remained a novelty, which was difficult to understand and probably impossible to reproduce. Interested parties were discussing it, however, but attempted to grasp it in terms of their indigenous expertise alone rather than more broadly understanding the new Western technology. (45)

In 1861, during the Taiping Rebellion, a senior military commander Zeng Guofan created an arsenal in Anqing for ammunition, and also set about to create the capacity to build steam-powered ships.  With the assistance of experts Xu Shou and Hua Hengfang, the arsenal produced a partially successful full-scale steamship by 1863, and in 1864 Hua and Xu succeeded in completing a 25-ton steamship, the Huanghu, that was capable of generating 11.5 kilometers per hour.  The Chinese-build steamship had arrived.

Here is how Wang summarizes this history of technology adaptation over a 25-year period of time:

The path from the treadmill paddlewheel boat to the Jiangnan arsenal's steamers was a long journey of discovery. Qing officials experimented with the knowledge and skills available to them, and it took time--and trial and error--for them to realize that steamboats were driven by steam, that machine tools were necessary to turn the principle of steam into a workable engine, and that drawings had to be made and read for the technology to be diffused. (53)

So perhaps the short answer to the question posed above about cross-civilizational technology transfer is this: "transfer" looks a lot more like "reinvention" than it does "imitation."  It was necessary for Chinese experimenters, officials, and military officers to create a new set of institutions and technical capacities before this apparently simple new technological idea could find its way into Chinese implementations on a large scale.

(The image at the top is one of the most interesting parts of Wang's very interesting paper; it establishes vividly the difficulty of transmitting technologies across different technical cultures.  The Italian drawing dates from 1607, and the Chinese copy dates from 1627.  As Wang points out, the Chinese version of the drawing is visually highly similar to the Italian original; it is a good copy.  And yet it fails to designate any of the technical features of how this treadmill-operated water pump works.  The pair of drawings are fascinating to examine in detail.)

Transmitting technology

How do large technological advances cross cultural and civilizational boundaries? The puzzle is this: large technologies are not simply cool new devices, but rather complex systems of scientific knowledge, engineering traditions, production processes, and modes of technical communication. So transfer of technology is not simply a matter of conveying the approximate specifications of the device; it requires the creation of a research and development infrastructure that is largely analogous to the original process of invention and development. Inventors, scientists, universities, research centers, and skilled workers need to build a local understanding of the way the technology works and how to solve the difficult problems of material and technical implementation.

Take inertial guidance systems for missiles, described in fascinating detail by Donald MacKenzie in Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. The process MacKenzie describes of discovery and development of inertial guidance was a highly complex and secretive one, with multiple areas of scientific and engineering research solving a series of difficult technical problems.

Now do a bit of counterfactual history and imagine that some country -- say, Burma -- had developed powerful rocket engines in the 1950s but did not have a workable guidance technology; and suppose the US and USSR had succeeded in keeping the development of inertial navigation systems and the underlying science secret. Finally, suppose that Burmese agents had managed to gain a superficial description of inertial navigation: "It is a self-contained device that tracks acceleration and therefore permits constant updating of current location; and it uses ultra-high precision gyroscopes." Would this be enough of a leak to permit rapid adoption of inertial navigation in the Burmese missile program? Probably not; the technical obstacles faced in the original development process would have to be solved again, and this means a long process of knowledge building and institution building.  For example, MacKenzie describes the knotty problem posed to this technology by the fact of slight variations in the earth's gravitational field over the surface of the globe; if uncorrected, these variations would be coded as acceleration by the instrument and would lead to significant navigational errors.  The solution to this problem involved creating a detailed mapping of the earth's gravitational field.

This is a hypothetical case. But Hsien-Chun Wang describes an equally fascinating but real case in a recent article in Technology & Culture, "Discovering Steam Power in China, 1840s-1860s" (link). There was essentially no knowledge of steam power in Chinese science in the mid-Qing (early nineteenth century). The First Opium War (1839-1842) provided a rude announcement of the technology, in the form of powerful steam-driven warships on the coast and rivers of eastern China. Chinese officials and military officers recognized the threat represented by Western military-industrial technology, but it was another 25 years before Chinese industry was in a position to build a steam-powered ship. So what were the obstacles standing in front of China's steam revolution?

Wang focuses on two key obstacles in mid-Qing industry and technology: the role of technical drawings as a medium for transmitting specifications for complex machines from designer to skilled workers; and the absence in nineteenth-century China of a machine tool technology.  Technical drawings were an essential medium of communication in the European industrial system, conveying precise specifications of parts and machines to the workers and tools who would fabricate them.  And machine tools (lathes, planes, stamping machines, cutting machines, etc.) provided the tools necessary to fabricate high-precision metal parts and components.  (Merritt Roe Smith describes aspects of both these stories in his account of the U.S. arms industry in the early nineteenth century; Harpers Ferry Armory and New Technology.)  According to Wang, the Chinese technical culture had developed models rather than drawings to convey how a machine works; and the intricate small machines that certainly were a part of Chinese technical culture depended on artisanal skill rather than precision tooling of interchangeable parts.

So communicating the technical details of a complex machine and creating the fabrication infrastructure needed to produce the machine were two important obstacles for rapid transfer of steam technology from Western Europe to Qing China.  But perhaps a more fundamental obstacle emerges as well: the fact that Chinese technical and scientific culture was as yet simply unready to "see" the way that steam power worked in the first place.  When steam warships arrived, acute Chinese observers saw smoke and fire, and they saw motion.  But they did not see "steam-driven traction", or the translation of kinetic energy into rotational work.  (This is evident also in the drawing of the treadmill water pump above; the maker of the drawing clearly did not perceive from the Italian drawing how the motion of the treadmill was translated into the vertical pumping action.)  Wang quotes a description from an observer in Guangzhou in 1828:

Early in the third month ... there suddenly came from Bengal a huo lunchuan [fire-wheel ship] .... The huo lunchuan has an empty copper cylinder inside to burn coal, with a machine on the top.  When the flame is up, the machine moves automatically. The wheels on both sides of the ship move automatically too. (37)

And another observer wrote in Zhejiang in 1840:

The ship's cabin stores a square furnace under the beam from which the wheels are hung. When the fire is burning in the furnace, the two wheels turn like a fast mill and the ship cruises as fast as if it is flying, regardless of the wind's direction. (37-38)

The give-away here is the word "automatically"; plainly these observers had not assimilated a causal process linking the production of heat (fire) to mechanical motion (the rotation of the paddle wheels).  Instead, the two circumstances are described as parallel rather than causal.

So the fundamental motive force of steam was not cognitively accessible at this point, even through direct observation.  By contrast, the marine utility of paddlewheel-driven warships was quickly assimilated. Chinese commanders adapted what they observed in the European naval forces (powerful paddlewheels that made sails unnecessary) to an existing technology (human- or ox-driven paddlewheels), and large "wheel-boats" saw action as early as 1842 on Suzhou Creek (40).

Wang notes that several Chinese inventors did in fact succeed in discerning the mechanism associated with steam power by the 1840s. Ding Gongchen succeeded in fabricating a model steam rail engine 61 centimeters long and a 134-centimeter model paddlewheel steamboat; so he clearly understood the basic mechanism at this point.  And Zheng Fuguang appears to have mastered the basic concept as well.  But here is Wang's summary:

Ding's efforts show that despite the circulating writings of a few experimenters, the steam engine remained a novelty, which was difficult to understand and probably impossible to reproduce. Interested parties were discussing it, however, but attempted to grasp it in terms of their indigenous expertise alone rather than more broadly understanding the new Western technology. (45)

In 1861, during the Taiping Rebellion, a senior military commander Zeng Guofan created an arsenal in Anqing for ammunition, and also set about to create the capacity to build steam-powered ships.  With the assistance of experts Xu Shou and Hua Hengfang, the arsenal produced a partially successful full-scale steamship by 1863, and in 1864 Hua and Xu succeeded in completing a 25-ton steamship, the Huanghu, that was capable of generating 11.5 kilometers per hour.  The Chinese-build steamship had arrived.

Here is how Wang summarizes this history of technology adaptation over a 25-year period of time:

The path from the treadmill paddlewheel boat to the Jiangnan arsenal's steamers was a long journey of discovery. Qing officials experimented with the knowledge and skills available to them, and it took time--and trial and error--for them to realize that steamboats were driven by steam, that machine tools were necessary to turn the principle of steam into a workable engine, and that drawings had to be made and read for the technology to be diffused. (53)

So perhaps the short answer to the question posed above about cross-civilizational technology transfer is this: "transfer" looks a lot more like "reinvention" than it does "imitation."  It was necessary for Chinese experimenters, officials, and military officers to create a new set of institutions and technical capacities before this apparently simple new technological idea could find its way into Chinese implementations on a large scale.

(The image at the top is one of the most interesting parts of Wang's very interesting paper; it establishes vividly the difficulty of transmitting technologies across different technical cultures.  The Italian drawing dates from 1607, and the Chinese copy dates from 1627.  As Wang points out, the Chinese version of the drawing is visually highly similar to the Italian original; it is a good copy.  And yet it fails to designate any of the technical features of how this treadmill-operated water pump works.  The pair of drawings are fascinating to examine in detail.)

Transmitting technology

How do large technological advances cross cultural and civilizational boundaries? The puzzle is this: large technologies are not simply cool new devices, but rather complex systems of scientific knowledge, engineering traditions, production processes, and modes of technical communication. So transfer of technology is not simply a matter of conveying the approximate specifications of the device; it requires the creation of a research and development infrastructure that is largely analogous to the original process of invention and development. Inventors, scientists, universities, research centers, and skilled workers need to build a local understanding of the way the technology works and how to solve the difficult problems of material and technical implementation.

Take inertial guidance systems for missiles, described in fascinating detail by Donald MacKenzie in Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. The process MacKenzie describes of discovery and development of inertial guidance was a highly complex and secretive one, with multiple areas of scientific and engineering research solving a series of difficult technical problems.

Now do a bit of counterfactual history and imagine that some country -- say, Burma -- had developed powerful rocket engines in the 1950s but did not have a workable guidance technology; and suppose the US and USSR had succeeded in keeping the development of inertial navigation systems and the underlying science secret. Finally, suppose that Burmese agents had managed to gain a superficial description of inertial navigation: "It is a self-contained device that tracks acceleration and therefore permits constant updating of current location; and it uses ultra-high precision gyroscopes." Would this be enough of a leak to permit rapid adoption of inertial navigation in the Burmese missile program? Probably not; the technical obstacles faced in the original development process would have to be solved again, and this means a long process of knowledge building and institution building.  For example, MacKenzie describes the knotty problem posed to this technology by the fact of slight variations in the earth's gravitational field over the surface of the globe; if uncorrected, these variations would be coded as acceleration by the instrument and would lead to significant navigational errors.  The solution to this problem involved creating a detailed mapping of the earth's gravitational field.

This is a hypothetical case. But Hsien-Chun Wang describes an equally fascinating but real case in a recent article in Technology & Culture, "Discovering Steam Power in China, 1840s-1860s" (link). There was essentially no knowledge of steam power in Chinese science in the mid-Qing (early nineteenth century). The First Opium War (1839-1842) provided a rude announcement of the technology, in the form of powerful steam-driven warships on the coast and rivers of eastern China. Chinese officials and military officers recognized the threat represented by Western military-industrial technology, but it was another 25 years before Chinese industry was in a position to build a steam-powered ship. So what were the obstacles standing in front of China's steam revolution?

Wang focuses on two key obstacles in mid-Qing industry and technology: the role of technical drawings as a medium for transmitting specifications for complex machines from designer to skilled workers; and the absence in nineteenth-century China of a machine tool technology.  Technical drawings were an essential medium of communication in the European industrial system, conveying precise specifications of parts and machines to the workers and tools who would fabricate them.  And machine tools (lathes, planes, stamping machines, cutting machines, etc.) provided the tools necessary to fabricate high-precision metal parts and components.  (Merritt Roe Smith describes aspects of both these stories in his account of the U.S. arms industry in the early nineteenth century; Harpers Ferry Armory and New Technology.)  According to Wang, the Chinese technical culture had developed models rather than drawings to convey how a machine works; and the intricate small machines that certainly were a part of Chinese technical culture depended on artisanal skill rather than precision tooling of interchangeable parts.

So communicating the technical details of a complex machine and creating the fabrication infrastructure needed to produce the machine were two important obstacles for rapid transfer of steam technology from Western Europe to Qing China.  But perhaps a more fundamental obstacle emerges as well: the fact that Chinese technical and scientific culture was as yet simply unready to "see" the way that steam power worked in the first place.  When steam warships arrived, acute Chinese observers saw smoke and fire, and they saw motion.  But they did not see "steam-driven traction", or the translation of kinetic energy into rotational work.  (This is evident also in the drawing of the treadmill water pump above; the maker of the drawing clearly did not perceive from the Italian drawing how the motion of the treadmill was translated into the vertical pumping action.)  Wang quotes a description from an observer in Guangzhou in 1828:

Early in the third month ... there suddenly came from Bengal a huo lunchuan [fire-wheel ship] .... The huo lunchuan has an empty copper cylinder inside to burn coal, with a machine on the top.  When the flame is up, the machine moves automatically. The wheels on both sides of the ship move automatically too. (37)

And another observer wrote in Zhejiang in 1840:

The ship's cabin stores a square furnace under the beam from which the wheels are hung. When the fire is burning in the furnace, the two wheels turn like a fast mill and the ship cruises as fast as if it is flying, regardless of the wind's direction. (37-38)

The give-away here is the word "automatically"; plainly these observers had not assimilated a causal process linking the production of heat (fire) to mechanical motion (the rotation of the paddle wheels).  Instead, the two circumstances are described as parallel rather than causal.

So the fundamental motive force of steam was not cognitively accessible at this point, even through direct observation.  By contrast, the marine utility of paddlewheel-driven warships was quickly assimilated. Chinese commanders adapted what they observed in the European naval forces (powerful paddlewheels that made sails unnecessary) to an existing technology (human- or ox-driven paddlewheels), and large "wheel-boats" saw action as early as 1842 on Suzhou Creek (40).

Wang notes that several Chinese inventors did in fact succeed in discerning the mechanism associated with steam power by the 1840s. Ding Gongchen succeeded in fabricating a model steam rail engine 61 centimeters long and a 134-centimeter model paddlewheel steamboat; so he clearly understood the basic mechanism at this point.  And Zheng Fuguang appears to have mastered the basic concept as well.  But here is Wang's summary:

Ding's efforts show that despite the circulating writings of a few experimenters, the steam engine remained a novelty, which was difficult to understand and probably impossible to reproduce. Interested parties were discussing it, however, but attempted to grasp it in terms of their indigenous expertise alone rather than more broadly understanding the new Western technology. (45)

In 1861, during the Taiping Rebellion, a senior military commander Zeng Guofan created an arsenal in Anqing for ammunition, and also set about to create the capacity to build steam-powered ships.  With the assistance of experts Xu Shou and Hua Hengfang, the arsenal produced a partially successful full-scale steamship by 1863, and in 1864 Hua and Xu succeeded in completing a 25-ton steamship, the Huanghu, that was capable of generating 11.5 kilometers per hour.  The Chinese-build steamship had arrived.

Here is how Wang summarizes this history of technology adaptation over a 25-year period of time:

The path from the treadmill paddlewheel boat to the Jiangnan arsenal's steamers was a long journey of discovery. Qing officials experimented with the knowledge and skills available to them, and it took time--and trial and error--for them to realize that steamboats were driven by steam, that machine tools were necessary to turn the principle of steam into a workable engine, and that drawings had to be made and read for the technology to be diffused. (53)

So perhaps the short answer to the question posed above about cross-civilizational technology transfer is this: "transfer" looks a lot more like "reinvention" than it does "imitation."  It was necessary for Chinese experimenters, officials, and military officers to create a new set of institutions and technical capacities before this apparently simple new technological idea could find its way into Chinese implementations on a large scale.

(The image at the top is one of the most interesting parts of Wang's very interesting paper; it establishes vividly the difficulty of transmitting technologies across different technical cultures.  The Italian drawing dates from 1607, and the Chinese copy dates from 1627.  As Wang points out, the Chinese version of the drawing is visually highly similar to the Italian original; it is a good copy.  And yet it fails to designate any of the technical features of how this treadmill-operated water pump works.  The pair of drawings are fascinating to examine in detail.)

Technology innovation in Chinese agriculture

It is a commonplace in world history to observe that China had achieved a high level of sophistication in science, medicine, and astronomy by the Middle Ages, but that some unknown feature of social organization or culture blocked the further development of this science into the expansion of technology in the early modern period. Chinese culture was "blocked" from making significant technological advances during the late Ming and early Qing periods -- in spite of its scientific advantage over the West in medieval times; or so it is believed in a standard version of Chinese economic history.

A variety of hypotheses have been offered to account for this supposed fact. For example, Mark Elvin argues that China's social and demographic system created conditions for a "high-level equilibrium trap" in the early modern period in The Pattern of the Chinese Past. According to Elvin, Chinese social arrangements favored population growth; innovative and resourceful farmers discovered all feasible refinements of traditional agricultural techniques to refine a highly labor-intensive system of agriculture; and population expanded to the point where the whole population was at roughly the subsistence level while consuming virtually the whole of the agricultural product. There was consequently no social surplus that might have been used to invest in discovery of major innovations in agricultural technology; so the civilization was trapped. (Here is a more developed discussion of Elvin's argument.)

Other historians have speculated about potential features of Confucian culture that might have blocked the transition from scientific knowledge to technology applications. The leading Western expert on Chinese science is Joseph Needham (1900-1995), whose multi-volume studies on Chinese science set the standard in this area (Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 1: Introductory Orientations; Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West). And Needham attributes China's failure to continue to make scientific progress to features of its traditional culture.

But here is a more fundamental question: is the received wisdom in fact true? Was Chinese technology unusually stagnant during the early-modern period (late Ming, early Qing)? Agriculture is a particularly important aspect of traditional economic life; so we might reformulate our question a bit more specifically: what was the status of agricultural technology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (late Ming, early Qing)? (See an earlier posting on Chinese agricultural history for more on this subject.)


Economic historian Bozhong Li considers this question with respect to the agriculture of the lower Yangzi Delta in Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620-1850. And since this was the most important agricultural region in China for centuries, his findings are important. (It was also the major cultural center of China; see the concentration of literati in the map above.) Li makes an important point about technological innovation by distinguishing between invention and dissemination. An important innovation may be discovered in one time period but only adopted and disseminated over a wide territory much later. And the economic effects of the innovation only take hold when there is broad dissemination. This was true for Chinese agriculture during the Ming period, according to Li:

The revolutionary advance in Jiangnan rice agriculture technology appeared in the late Tang and led to the emergence and development of intensive agriculture composed of double-cropping rice and wheat. But this kind of intensive agriculture in pre-Ming times was largely limited to the high-fields of western Jiangnan. In the Ming this pattern developed into what Kitada has called the 'new double-cropping system' and spread throughout Jiangnan, but only in the late Ming did it become a leading crop regime. Similar were the development and spread of mulberry and cotton farming technologies, though they were limited to particular areas and cotton technology's advances came later because cotton was introduced later. Each had its major advances in the Ming. Therefore, technology advances in Ming Jiangnan agriculture were certainly not inferior to those of Song times which are looked at as a period of 'farming revolution'. (40)

Li also finds that there was a significant increase in the number of crop varieties in the early Qing -- another indication of technological development. He observes, "The later the date, the greater the number of varieties. For example, in the two prefectures of Suzhou and Changzhou, 46 varieties were found in the Song, but the number rose to 118 in the Ming and 259 in the Qing" (40). And this proliferation of varieties permitted farmers to adjust their crop to local soil, water, and climate conditions -- thus increasing the output of the crop per unit of land. Moreover, formal knowledge of the properties of the main varieties increased from Ming to Qing periods; "By the mid-Qing, the concept of 'early' rice had become clear and exact, and knowledge of 'intermediate' and 'late' strains had also deepened" (42). This knowledge is important, because it indicates an ability to codify the match between the variety to the local farming environment.

Another important process of technology change in agriculture had to do with fertilizer use. Here again Li finds that there was significant enhancement, discovery, and dissemination of new uses of fertilizer in the Ming-Qing period.

A great advance in fertilizer use took place in Jiangnan during the early and mid-Qing, an advance so significant that it can be called a 'fertilizer revolution'. The advance included three aspects: (a) an improvement in fertilizer application techniques, centring on the use of top dressing; (b) progress in the processing of traditional fertilizer; and (c) an introduction of a new kind of fertilizer, oilcake. Although all three advances began to appear in the Ming, they were not widespread until the Qing. (46)

And the discovery of oilcake was very important to the increases in land productivity that Qing agriculture witnessed -- thus permitting a constant or slightly rising standard of living during a period of some population increase.

There were also advances in the use of water resources. Raising fish in ponds, for example, became an important farming activity in the late Ming period, and pond fish became a widely commercialized product in the Qing. Li describes large-scale fishing operations in Lake Tai in Jiangnan using large fishing boats with six masts to catch and transport the fish (62).

So Li's estimate of agricultural technology during the Ming period is that it was not stagnant; rather, there was significant diffusion of new crops, rotation systems, and fertilizers that led to significant increases in agricultural product during the period. "In sum, in the Jiangnan plain, land and water resources were used more rationally and fully in the early and mid-Qing than they had been in the late Ming" (64).

Two points emerge from this discussion. First, Li's account does in fact succeed in documenting a variety of knowledge-based changes in agricultural practices and techniques that led to rising productivity during the Ming-Qing period in Jiangnan. So the stereotype of "stagnant Chinese technology" does not serve us well. Second, though, what Li does not find is what we might call "science-based" technology change: for example, the discovery of chemical fertilizer, controlled experiments in rice breeding, or the use of machinery in irrigation. The innovations that he describes appear to be a combination of local adaptation and diffusion of discoveries across a broad territory.

So perhaps the question posed at the start still remains: what stood in the way of development of empirical sciences like chemistry or mechanics that would have supported science-based technological innovations in the early modern period in China?

Technology innovation in Chinese agriculture

It is a commonplace in world history to observe that China had achieved a high level of sophistication in science, medicine, and astronomy by the Middle Ages, but that some unknown feature of social organization or culture blocked the further development of this science into the expansion of technology in the early modern period. Chinese culture was "blocked" from making significant technological advances during the late Ming and early Qing periods -- in spite of its scientific advantage over the West in medieval times; or so it is believed in a standard version of Chinese economic history.

A variety of hypotheses have been offered to account for this supposed fact. For example, Mark Elvin argues that China's social and demographic system created conditions for a "high-level equilibrium trap" in the early modern period in The Pattern of the Chinese Past. According to Elvin, Chinese social arrangements favored population growth; innovative and resourceful farmers discovered all feasible refinements of traditional agricultural techniques to refine a highly labor-intensive system of agriculture; and population expanded to the point where the whole population was at roughly the subsistence level while consuming virtually the whole of the agricultural product. There was consequently no social surplus that might have been used to invest in discovery of major innovations in agricultural technology; so the civilization was trapped. (Here is a more developed discussion of Elvin's argument.)

Other historians have speculated about potential features of Confucian culture that might have blocked the transition from scientific knowledge to technology applications. The leading Western expert on Chinese science is Joseph Needham (1900-1995), whose multi-volume studies on Chinese science set the standard in this area (Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 1: Introductory Orientations; Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West). And Needham attributes China's failure to continue to make scientific progress to features of its traditional culture.

But here is a more fundamental question: is the received wisdom in fact true? Was Chinese technology unusually stagnant during the early-modern period (late Ming, early Qing)? Agriculture is a particularly important aspect of traditional economic life; so we might reformulate our question a bit more specifically: what was the status of agricultural technology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (late Ming, early Qing)? (See an earlier posting on Chinese agricultural history for more on this subject.)


Economic historian Bozhong Li considers this question with respect to the agriculture of the lower Yangzi Delta in Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620-1850. And since this was the most important agricultural region in China for centuries, his findings are important. (It was also the major cultural center of China; see the concentration of literati in the map above.) Li makes an important point about technological innovation by distinguishing between invention and dissemination. An important innovation may be discovered in one time period but only adopted and disseminated over a wide territory much later. And the economic effects of the innovation only take hold when there is broad dissemination. This was true for Chinese agriculture during the Ming period, according to Li:

The revolutionary advance in Jiangnan rice agriculture technology appeared in the late Tang and led to the emergence and development of intensive agriculture composed of double-cropping rice and wheat. But this kind of intensive agriculture in pre-Ming times was largely limited to the high-fields of western Jiangnan. In the Ming this pattern developed into what Kitada has called the 'new double-cropping system' and spread throughout Jiangnan, but only in the late Ming did it become a leading crop regime. Similar were the development and spread of mulberry and cotton farming technologies, though they were limited to particular areas and cotton technology's advances came later because cotton was introduced later. Each had its major advances in the Ming. Therefore, technology advances in Ming Jiangnan agriculture were certainly not inferior to those of Song times which are looked at as a period of 'farming revolution'. (40)

Li also finds that there was a significant increase in the number of crop varieties in the early Qing -- another indication of technological development. He observes, "The later the date, the greater the number of varieties. For example, in the two prefectures of Suzhou and Changzhou, 46 varieties were found in the Song, but the number rose to 118 in the Ming and 259 in the Qing" (40). And this proliferation of varieties permitted farmers to adjust their crop to local soil, water, and climate conditions -- thus increasing the output of the crop per unit of land. Moreover, formal knowledge of the properties of the main varieties increased from Ming to Qing periods; "By the mid-Qing, the concept of 'early' rice had become clear and exact, and knowledge of 'intermediate' and 'late' strains had also deepened" (42). This knowledge is important, because it indicates an ability to codify the match between the variety to the local farming environment.

Another important process of technology change in agriculture had to do with fertilizer use. Here again Li finds that there was significant enhancement, discovery, and dissemination of new uses of fertilizer in the Ming-Qing period.

A great advance in fertilizer use took place in Jiangnan during the early and mid-Qing, an advance so significant that it can be called a 'fertilizer revolution'. The advance included three aspects: (a) an improvement in fertilizer application techniques, centring on the use of top dressing; (b) progress in the processing of traditional fertilizer; and (c) an introduction of a new kind of fertilizer, oilcake. Although all three advances began to appear in the Ming, they were not widespread until the Qing. (46)

And the discovery of oilcake was very important to the increases in land productivity that Qing agriculture witnessed -- thus permitting a constant or slightly rising standard of living during a period of some population increase.

There were also advances in the use of water resources. Raising fish in ponds, for example, became an important farming activity in the late Ming period, and pond fish became a widely commercialized product in the Qing. Li describes large-scale fishing operations in Lake Tai in Jiangnan using large fishing boats with six masts to catch and transport the fish (62).

So Li's estimate of agricultural technology during the Ming period is that it was not stagnant; rather, there was significant diffusion of new crops, rotation systems, and fertilizers that led to significant increases in agricultural product during the period. "In sum, in the Jiangnan plain, land and water resources were used more rationally and fully in the early and mid-Qing than they had been in the late Ming" (64).

Two points emerge from this discussion. First, Li's account does in fact succeed in documenting a variety of knowledge-based changes in agricultural practices and techniques that led to rising productivity during the Ming-Qing period in Jiangnan. So the stereotype of "stagnant Chinese technology" does not serve us well. Second, though, what Li does not find is what we might call "science-based" technology change: for example, the discovery of chemical fertilizer, controlled experiments in rice breeding, or the use of machinery in irrigation. The innovations that he describes appear to be a combination of local adaptation and diffusion of discoveries across a broad territory.

So perhaps the question posed at the start still remains: what stood in the way of development of empirical sciences like chemistry or mechanics that would have supported science-based technological innovations in the early modern period in China?

Technology innovation in Chinese agriculture

It is a commonplace in world history to observe that China had achieved a high level of sophistication in science, medicine, and astronomy by the Middle Ages, but that some unknown feature of social organization or culture blocked the further development of this science into the expansion of technology in the early modern period. Chinese culture was "blocked" from making significant technological advances during the late Ming and early Qing periods -- in spite of its scientific advantage over the West in medieval times; or so it is believed in a standard version of Chinese economic history.

A variety of hypotheses have been offered to account for this supposed fact. For example, Mark Elvin argues that China's social and demographic system created conditions for a "high-level equilibrium trap" in the early modern period in The Pattern of the Chinese Past. According to Elvin, Chinese social arrangements favored population growth; innovative and resourceful farmers discovered all feasible refinements of traditional agricultural techniques to refine a highly labor-intensive system of agriculture; and population expanded to the point where the whole population was at roughly the subsistence level while consuming virtually the whole of the agricultural product. There was consequently no social surplus that might have been used to invest in discovery of major innovations in agricultural technology; so the civilization was trapped. (Here is a more developed discussion of Elvin's argument.)

Other historians have speculated about potential features of Confucian culture that might have blocked the transition from scientific knowledge to technology applications. The leading Western expert on Chinese science is Joseph Needham (1900-1995), whose multi-volume studies on Chinese science set the standard in this area (Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 1: Introductory Orientations; Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West). And Needham attributes China's failure to continue to make scientific progress to features of its traditional culture.

But here is a more fundamental question: is the received wisdom in fact true? Was Chinese technology unusually stagnant during the early-modern period (late Ming, early Qing)? Agriculture is a particularly important aspect of traditional economic life; so we might reformulate our question a bit more specifically: what was the status of agricultural technology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (late Ming, early Qing)? (See an earlier posting on Chinese agricultural history for more on this subject.)


Economic historian Bozhong Li considers this question with respect to the agriculture of the lower Yangzi Delta in Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620-1850. And since this was the most important agricultural region in China for centuries, his findings are important. (It was also the major cultural center of China; see the concentration of literati in the map above.) Li makes an important point about technological innovation by distinguishing between invention and dissemination. An important innovation may be discovered in one time period but only adopted and disseminated over a wide territory much later. And the economic effects of the innovation only take hold when there is broad dissemination. This was true for Chinese agriculture during the Ming period, according to Li:

The revolutionary advance in Jiangnan rice agriculture technology appeared in the late Tang and led to the emergence and development of intensive agriculture composed of double-cropping rice and wheat. But this kind of intensive agriculture in pre-Ming times was largely limited to the high-fields of western Jiangnan. In the Ming this pattern developed into what Kitada has called the 'new double-cropping system' and spread throughout Jiangnan, but only in the late Ming did it become a leading crop regime. Similar were the development and spread of mulberry and cotton farming technologies, though they were limited to particular areas and cotton technology's advances came later because cotton was introduced later. Each had its major advances in the Ming. Therefore, technology advances in Ming Jiangnan agriculture were certainly not inferior to those of Song times which are looked at as a period of 'farming revolution'. (40)

Li also finds that there was a significant increase in the number of crop varieties in the early Qing -- another indication of technological development. He observes, "The later the date, the greater the number of varieties. For example, in the two prefectures of Suzhou and Changzhou, 46 varieties were found in the Song, but the number rose to 118 in the Ming and 259 in the Qing" (40). And this proliferation of varieties permitted farmers to adjust their crop to local soil, water, and climate conditions -- thus increasing the output of the crop per unit of land. Moreover, formal knowledge of the properties of the main varieties increased from Ming to Qing periods; "By the mid-Qing, the concept of 'early' rice had become clear and exact, and knowledge of 'intermediate' and 'late' strains had also deepened" (42). This knowledge is important, because it indicates an ability to codify the match between the variety to the local farming environment.

Another important process of technology change in agriculture had to do with fertilizer use. Here again Li finds that there was significant enhancement, discovery, and dissemination of new uses of fertilizer in the Ming-Qing period.

A great advance in fertilizer use took place in Jiangnan during the early and mid-Qing, an advance so significant that it can be called a 'fertilizer revolution'. The advance included three aspects: (a) an improvement in fertilizer application techniques, centring on the use of top dressing; (b) progress in the processing of traditional fertilizer; and (c) an introduction of a new kind of fertilizer, oilcake. Although all three advances began to appear in the Ming, they were not widespread until the Qing. (46)

And the discovery of oilcake was very important to the increases in land productivity that Qing agriculture witnessed -- thus permitting a constant or slightly rising standard of living during a period of some population increase.

There were also advances in the use of water resources. Raising fish in ponds, for example, became an important farming activity in the late Ming period, and pond fish became a widely commercialized product in the Qing. Li describes large-scale fishing operations in Lake Tai in Jiangnan using large fishing boats with six masts to catch and transport the fish (62).

So Li's estimate of agricultural technology during the Ming period is that it was not stagnant; rather, there was significant diffusion of new crops, rotation systems, and fertilizers that led to significant increases in agricultural product during the period. "In sum, in the Jiangnan plain, land and water resources were used more rationally and fully in the early and mid-Qing than they had been in the late Ming" (64).

Two points emerge from this discussion. First, Li's account does in fact succeed in documenting a variety of knowledge-based changes in agricultural practices and techniques that led to rising productivity during the Ming-Qing period in Jiangnan. So the stereotype of "stagnant Chinese technology" does not serve us well. Second, though, what Li does not find is what we might call "science-based" technology change: for example, the discovery of chemical fertilizer, controlled experiments in rice breeding, or the use of machinery in irrigation. The innovations that he describes appear to be a combination of local adaptation and diffusion of discoveries across a broad territory.

So perhaps the question posed at the start still remains: what stood in the way of development of empirical sciences like chemistry or mechanics that would have supported science-based technological innovations in the early modern period in China?