The Relation between the Market and the Making: Song to Mid-Qing Coal Culture

My research on the history of science in China attempts to frame technology and natural knowledge as an integral part of broader socio-cultural processes. At the heart of this work is the idea of innovation. While many studies of innovation focus on the generation and transmission of new ideas or methods, I am more interested in what actually makes the new or different “innovative” and how this develops in specific contexts projects pursue the development of an expertise culture, the growth of normative frameworks, standards and standardization and how innovation is expressed and it can be traced historically. This project will span the pre-modern to the contemporary, and can be organized into four main sections.

The first compares Song to Qing coal use and coal technology to that of the pre-Han; the second will examine what I call Song to mid-Qing “coal culture”; the third will use Song to mid-Qing coal culture to contextualize late Qing to early PRC innovations; and the final section will analyze the politico-economic and socio-cultural implications of contemporary practices surrounding coal and coal mining.