Very good. So this paper is going to be delivered as a double act.
And first of all, we are absolutely delighted to be such a wonderful conference and indeed share the floor with some of the scholars who have most
contributed to the divergence debate and also to the study of the economic and scientific change in the pre-industrial world.
Our paper comes from a project Dark Matter and I have been developing over the past two years,
leading hopefully up to the production, the publication of a book and asked from the title.
It has four key words that are Silk China, Europe and pre-modern,
three of which are well known in the divergence debate and indeed also in the history of capitalism.
China Europe pre-modern yet the fourth that is quite central to what we do.
Silk is less so was silk is at the heart of the economy and culture of China.
It has been a barely mentioned, I would say, in debate, in debates over divergence.
And similarly, an expression that I would like to coin that is silk capitalism is not yet into the scholarly jargon.
By contrast, cotton, very dear to me, has been given great importance in narrative, not just divergence but and industrialisation.
But thanks to the new history of capitalism, to slavery, its contribution to capitalist transformation in the Americas and elsewhere in the world.
Silk never had slave plantations. Slave traders, slave traders might have liked to dress in silk.
It was not the fibre of the industrial revolution and apparently was never much implicated in narratives of divergence.
Yet it was also the same time the most important manufacturing sector in Tang Ming and Qing China.
It was by far the most technologically sophisticated branch of textile manufacturing.
Its products were widely traded along the Silk Roads and later on maritime routes and even in Europe.
It emerged in the Renaissance as one of the most important sectors in the production of complex,
high value added products produced through processes that were aided by some of the most sophisticated late mediaeval and renaissance technologies.
So we are all too aware that silk of silk, marginal position in industrialisation,
divergence and the rise of Western capitalism, and partially this is a result of the trajectory of silk.
It did not become. The modern fibre par excellence in the way in which Cotton did.
And yet if we go beyond the purely economic.
It became actually an incredibly important epistemic object informing scientific change, acoustics, construction.
More recently, chemical engineering, polymer research and so on.
Yet not withstanding all of these, as I said, silk and the fact that silk supported local economies in renaissance cities in China and so on.
This never became, in the case of Europe, at least a kind of central feature of of their economies.
But opens for us to issues, the first one is the ways in which,
as we have discussed in the previous panel, divergence have been debated on hard evidence,
GDP, economic growth, etc. rather than on processes of change mentalities, principles of social cultural differences.
Silk might have not embodied all the characteristics that made cult and a good process of divergence.
But both in China and in Europe, as well as in many parts of Asia, the manufacturing,
trade and use of silk was a matter of considerable importance for artisan rich consumers and indeed states, and we come back towards the end.
On the issue of state, the action of states and in relation to knowledge and wealth generation, what we call living well.
The second element is silk brings forth the limited use of bean and cans reciprocal comparisons.
All the limitations of silk that I just outlined are clearly not applicable to China.
From China's perspective, silk, not cotton, would have been the terrain of global competition,
as indeed it was in markets as different as Western Europe.
The Ottoman Empire and Latin America before 18:00.
It is only from an exposed European perspective that cotton is the fibre of choice,
as silk reigned supreme over the entire early modern period pre-modern period.
In the rest of the paper, we would like to do two things.
The first one is to say a little bit, and that will be dogma about the overarching shape of our projects and then towards the end,
give you a mini hint to one of the topics that is really that the action of the state in particular and city culture,
and we want in particular to give centrality to the to the concept of innovation or perhaps to try to change that
concept for our young use and to reflect a little bit again on comparative methods in the divergence debate.
Magnus, thank you very much, Jojo.
I would like to continue on before I continue to say one note because I should be really grateful to Patrick O'Brien,
to Maxine Burke, who is actually sitting there and John McCain,
because they are actually the reason why a historian of science who does actually China and the
pre-modern era and an economic historian who does pre-modern to the modern cotton industry,
really sit together and try to think about, like how they can actually do such a project in a way that is rewarding for both parties.
And the reason actually why the book is not ready is because we are a historian of science and an economic historian,
so there is much to debate about. So I would like to give you a little run through through the three major aims of the
book and then also give you an idea about how the book actually tries to approach them.
We cannot go into each chapter, so we give you only short snippets of that.
So one of the aim is that we want to connect history of technology and economic history, debates on innovation.
As you know, as you all know, there is a huge debate on that,
and the history of technology has really moved away very much from talking innovation and economic history is moving again into innovation,
even though it discuss it entirely differently. So, for instance,
economic history very much looks at innovation history as a question of machine and the history of technology and the history of science,
probably more as a question of knowledge as assets.
Then there is this question of technological and innovation and thus knowledge as material practise.
So we've moved away in the history of science is looking at as knowledge as something that is only idea driven
to something that is very much related to the practises in which the people live and from where they come.
And the third aim is to looking at how the human quest for living well relates to technological changes and in particular to cultural approaches,
to novel practises and ideas with which I confess here that even though the history of technology says innovation is not the topic to discuss,
it cannot be denied that certainly in history, in our development, constantly new things appear,
things new for us, things new for society, things new for that place, things new for our time.
Even though if we might find them differently out,
the project that we want to pursue are how we think we get out of this debate and can actually pursue
these three aims is by introducing a new concept that we call Making Things Work and the work.
Of producing value in it. And I now I've lost it.
So here you can see actually the run through through the seven chapters that all begin actually with a
vignette on things and that all try to discuss a different problem that this innovation discourse has done.
And the first is the question of NATO's nature and technologies.
Or do technologies evolve? Are they similar to a Darwinian concept?
Innovation as power writing and codification as a motor of innovation machines as a motor of innovation expert,
humans best practise ideas are the market a driver of innovation?
We think that we can relate all these things to this concept of making things work because we understand things very much from an approach.
But I would at least call informed by Chinese philosophy and Chinese approaches so that we want to look at the nature of things,
the institutionalisation of things. So the work they are doing or they what they should be doing, the working on things things put to work,
working on people and things and the making of things by working together and by making things.
And this is our thing. Silks work as commodity value, money memory, our knowledge, our comparative approach takes on purpose.
The long duration. So we also want to move away from this idea of the 18th and 19th century gives us an answer to the question
of how you actually think about innovation because making things work is actually so to say that we've
somehow forgotten to look at innovation so as the attempt to look to do things in a different way and then
to gain power and wealth as something that is an everyday spectacle so that it's nothing that is aggrandise.
And that also in the 19th century was a big effort, as David Edgerton has shown us, this is actually not the case.
So we look back at two periods the young dynasty, which roughly is only the framework,
which is a period when we have a very global Eurasian context in which silk expands considerably.
So it's a rough idea. But also, I would argue, in which the young dynasty actually really uses very,
very similar methods of looking at trade that you could compare to capitalism.
I wouldn't claim it is capitalism, but that you could compare it to capitalist methods and Italy.
Florence Piedmont And as you can see, these are different periods.
So this comparison is different to what Ken Pomeranz and are being warned if they look that same region, same period.
Yeah, if I may say so. Instead of being synchronic type of comparison we do is they are chronic because we are moving to a much more micro level.
And therefore, once you start moving to the level of one sector, I mean,
to compare Italy with the Yuan Dynasty would be impossible, the sense that you have no silk at all.
So what you are doing is to compare two trajectories that are actually not quite different, not very different,
but they happen in two temporal temporality that are different and see what is different and what is similar.
Of course, the result is not a divergence outcome in any sense.
You cannot get that out of that type of comparison as an output, as an intellectual output, epistemic output.
The other aspect to it is also geographic, because that's a point that came up earlier in terms of how are we doing really?
And that's been really in the debates. Can I move this? Yeah. And there is also the well, then these you might say something about this.
So if so, one thing about the linear idea is suddenly that there is a trajectory that somehow
ends in the contemporary novel and that we then know what we have to look back.
This is why the linearity approach, especially historians of technology,
have said a lot about how that actually doesn't work and how we have multiple temporality is
with different ideas about like how and what knowledge actually is and how you pursue it.
So that's why the linearity cannot be an issue in this comparison with the space.
The issue is if you look at a specific space in order to understand the technological change,
then these are always arbitrary boundaries and six shows that very clear.
So when we think of China, we talk about shifts. Most of you will have in mind that actually entire China was somehow producing silk.
This is entirely not the case in the US, in this state. But the only place that actually did this, but there is no point on that skip.
Yeah. All right.
Actually, the red shirts and the orange regions, so probably those regions that you nowadays you not even consider to have hats at all.
So at the very north of China, not the very south and from their expansive network in the Yuan Dynasty,
that is of a very different nature and they're not cutting up grass by any political boundaries.
So when you look at Italy, you would certainly think the city state is very cannot be the same, right?
It's a totally different dimension. How can you actually compare them?
But now I show you a different map. So similar in the film on this period or in this period happened, certainly not in the city.
It happens in a large region.
But I think as William, for instance, mentioned, there is a processing plant as a manufacturing part, there is a joining together part.
This all goes over very broad regions, very long geographical networks in which these manufacturers actually happen.
And I think these, for instance, also include the the broken lines of transmission that we cannot explain.
So for instance, when you look at Europe,
then there is a huge network of silk that moves from the Eurasian plain over Africa into Spain, where we know lots of silk produced.
But that has totally been erased from the picture of understanding how actually this network has developed.
But that is also very interesting to look at because when it starts to look at silk two hundred years later,
it totally ignores this, this whole tradition. So how do we explain such things?
Last night, I wanted to show you is related to that. Why do we actually want to talk about textile technologies?
Textile technologies are in the 18th and 19th century,
and here we come back to this very idea of what divergences and also useful, reliable knowledge put.
All those are about to take a world that they really petition in terms of materials, in terms of technologies,
in terms of economy, and to give them the very specific ideas about how these things work.
So here you see a map that was produced by James Yates,
who was a Manchester manufacturer and who kind of envisioned parts of the world as a kind of economy in
which you can see you can petition the world in different fibres and those different fibres of India custom.
And then then there is hemp and linen. And then there is this fur region up there with wool.
And here you're very young. That's ActionScript. So it's very much at the very end of it, these.
And when you look at the authenticity,
then you can see that you have similar ideas in mind about how actually technologies may work with regard to a specific fibre.
So the dynasty itself in very, let's say, Chinese approach to consider the US as the Mongols, who then were actually foreign to China itself.
They consider themselves felt fur and plant based region in the north.
So this area then that this is where the new silk was actually happening.
It's only roughly it's in Sichuan and the north of China.
Then down there you have a region in which you basically have snacks, bust and plant based fibres.
And then from the very least, from the very best, I'm sorry, wrong direction.
You have cotton flocks to it by the end of the young dynasty.
That idea of where fibres and rescue them ends and where these capital intensive
these very important industries of this era actually are is very different.
First, because the Yuan Dynasty like mutually invested in just so you see a map of their actually their
area of trade down there and then up there where they establish made major living centres.
I say weaving centres because in these places we know they have more than 300 500 new standards.
So this is quite considerable for trading this sort of in this region.
And I think then very briefly, because I don't know how much time we actually have in India by only 50 years later,
the whole idea of where silk is has totally changed.
So this is where we actually should be. That's the orange part of it.
And we have cotton that is has changed too. So you have a full region in which you have silk and cotton overlapping as torture.
Textile production regions. So this image has entirely changed.
You have no longer one region in which you have served, but you have a large region in which you want to have both.
So how can I have a interjection here?
In many ways, Europe is the similar because the development, the early development of the cultural industry in Europe,
in northern Italy and southern Germany is exactly more or less the same era in which silk.
Places like Bologna thrives in the 14, 15, 16 century, so there is an overlap.
In many ways you might say that going north. The the cotton story of the Lancashire is not followed necessarily is followed
by a good start with the long gone factories in Derby in the 17th Venice,
but is not really followed by and large scale silk industry in the UK.
So you can see that that is again an overlap but not totally realised is more what they wanted rather than what they get, at least in.
No definite, no connexion. So I think one of the things that we actually tried to do in this project is taking
the Chinese idea of what you actually do in order to gain wealth and live well and to
gain knowledge how that actually related to a very specific idea of what silk is and
what is about how that changes over 100 to 150 years when that is really in focus.
And then based on this very party, very successfully, but also a very difficult project,
look back at what actually happened in Europe and how they tried to make these things work in the long run.
Yeah, and certainly in the short run to. So we want to go also against some of the ideas that we think are in,
like very much informing these ideas about the great and the big or the small little divergences that you actually have.
And I think many of you really, especially in the last panel addressed this issue.
Is this question on how much innovation actually was this out of systematic and accidental?
I think you can actually see it. I would really flash that throughout most of the dynastic period.
So innovation was extremely systematic and nothing was lax.
Left to accident doesn't mean that it always worked,
but it does mean that there is a huge investment and a huge body of thought about, like how they actually wanted to make that happen.
We also debate the notion that there was little economic growth during the pre-industrial period, which by inclination, I would say like this.
I think as the previous session already set a really very different concept because it is not changing so dramatically in the 19th and 20th century,
the idea of industrialising textiles and the ideas of how you actually produce that have all been around for a long period,
and they have been employed very differently in these regions and they are coming back,
which is an important point to when you think about energy consumption, sustainability and the idea in the long run.
And I think there is also a very important point about like how the very important factor that
these whole debates do not take into account is that when you look as this grows as a power,
as a question that makes things work, what you really need to factor in is the time factor that things actually have.
So things have a time when they are produced and when they are consumed and when they are disappearing.
And when you bring this into the debate of how you make things work by thinking of and about time,
and I think you can answer these questions about what does energy consumption actually do to how is sustainable innovation coming about?
What does sustainable growth and living well well actually mean if we can at least try to answer
them in a way that satisfies historians of science and technology more than the current debate?
That's.