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Abstract:
Early China’s fields and those who worked them have left a deep imprint on historical and contemporary perceptions of Chinese civilisation. Yet, unlike the toiling peasant, most who wrote about the soil in early China escaped its back-breaking demands. In texts of the period one stock phrase held that “for every man who fails to plough, another will go hungry; for every woman who does not weave, one will go unclothed”. Yet, most authors of texts dealing with agronomy and the fate of the peasant wrote without putting their hands to the plough. In this lecture, Professor Sterckx will introduce the sources available for the study of early Chinese agronomy and the challenges they pose to the historian. He will show that, in their analysis of Chinese agronomy, historians of science and technology have largely overlooked the “unscripted” world of the Chinese peasant in pre-imperial and early imperial China. This should encourage us to question the narrative that early Chinese agronomy developed in a linear manner of progressive technological advances. Despite the prospect of higher economic returns, technological innovation was not always politically desirable to those who ruled.
Biography:
Professor Roel Sterckx FBA is Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science and Civilisation at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Clare College, and trustee of the Needham Research Institute. His writings include The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (SUNY Press, 2002), Food, Sacrifice and Sagehood in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Chinese Thought. From Confucius to Cook Ding (Penguin, 2020). Among his edited work is Of Tripod and Palate. Food, Politics and Religion in Traditional China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Animals through Chinese History (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
