Handmade Factory: How the Machine Complicated the Politics of Knowledge in the Transpacific Cotton Industry

 

A revisit to a classic case study in labor and economic history from a technological perspective, this talk illuminates how the machine complicated, rather than eliminated, the politics of skill and knowledge in an era of industrialization. Reconstructing the material and technical processes of machine spinning, it traces the various efforts of industrialists, engineers, mechanics, female machine operators, and cotton growers from China and the United States who tackled American machines that failed to process short-staple Chinese cotton, through modification and maintenance of the foreign machines on the shop floor while replacing native cotton with American varieties in cotton fields. New knowledge emerged from their hands-on experience with the machines and cotton, and it began to circulate in China and beyond. The nature of that knowledge was textual and tacit, Western and Chinese, mechanical and agricultural, and masculine and feminine, yet its hierarchy was all informed by complex social relations and reconfigured global orders in the era of imperialism. While the machine-based production system galvanized China to reinvigorate its technological prowess in the face of encroaching Western powers, it reinforced an existing intellectual culture that prioritized text as a form of knowledge, or intellectual work over manual labor, creating new divides among college-educated male engineers, female factory workers, and rural cotton farmers. The talk thus presents an early history of the biggest irony of China’s economic development—the deepening of social inequalities and the rural-urban divide.

 

 

Yuan Yi is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Concordia University, Montreal. Her current book project, “Handmade Factory,” examines the mechanization of cotton spinning in China with emphasis on the transpacific circulation of spinning machines, cotton varieties, and technical experts. She earned her PhD from Columbia University in 2020, where she held a postdoctoral fellowship before joining the faculty of Concordia in 2022.