5 - Industry: traditional and modern

Summary

The combination of the so-called ‘second industrial revolution’ of the Song (960–1279) and the emergence of a commodity economy had served to extend China's early technological leadership and provide a means by which industrial output could keep pace with population growth without significant further adjustment. In the wake of this leadership the improved co-ordination of an increasing number of small-scale units through market mechanisms enabled output to continue to increase, though the corollary was a five-century technological stagnation [106: 167]. Even in the eighteenth century when population almost doubled and industrial output probably grew at an unprecedented rate, the technological base did not advance. Although there were largescale industrial undertakings representing substantial concentrations of capital in, for example, ceramics, iron-making, salt extraction and copper mining, although large silk and cotton weaving workshops figured more prominently and although isolated technological advances were still evident, the bulk of output continued to be generated in small specialist workshops or individual households employing technology very little different from that of the Song [142]. The early technological innovation had given way to persistent inertia.

In conditions of declining farm size, increasingly efficient market mechanisms and substantial seasonal agricultural labour underutilization, rural industry had expanded and, by the eighteenth century, may have become geographically more generalised than in Europe[1: 24–5; 15: 42]. Consumerism was embedded in the structure of society and was the product of a fluid and often ambiguous social structure in which the pursuit of wealth and status encouraged product differentiation.