British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Writing the History of the Global
British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1
21-22 May 2009
Cultures of Innovation
Dagmar Schäfer (MPIWG, Berlin)
The assumption that proprietary issues with regard to craftwork played only a marginal role in Chinese society relies on the perception by historians of a lack of a judicial or state protection system. Moreover, economic historians as well as historians of labor history and technology saw craftsmen and artisans as occupying a level too low in the social hierarchy to be able to protect their work or skills and thus also inventions and innovative products. Conversely the Chinese state is often considered able to access at free will all kinds of „useful“ knowledge, irrespective of any individual’s claim of ownership, only restricted by natural conditions and functional restrictions. The study of marks opens a view to how innovation worked in China, taking proprietary issues and claims to knowledge as a starting point to reassess Chinese approaches to knowledge making, holding and assessment: normative systems and methods for and systems of evaluation, from issues of efficacy to measurement, from trajectories of linearity or progress, to the reinstallation of old practices.
This expands our understanding of how technical knowledge was perceived, transmitted, evaluated and how it connected to other forms of knowledge, ethics, philosophy, and religion to form a distinct, yet changing, 'knowledge culture' in premodern China.