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The Organization of Imperial Workshops during the Han Dynasty
It is widely believed that assembly-line mass production, quality-control procedures, inventory accounting, and multi-tiered factory management structures are inventions of the modern world, offspring of the mechanization and industrialization whichswept through Western Europe and America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But two thousand years ago in China, during the Han period (206 BC-AD 220), advanced production and management techniques were already implemented in well developed forms in the extensive factory system operated by the Han imperial government. This study was written as Part One of a larger project on workshops and artisans in Ancient China. Part Two was published as the book, Artisans in Early Imperial China (UW Press, 2007).
508 pages, Paperback
Published March 9, 2019
About the author
Anthony Barbieri-Low
6 books2 followersProfessor Anthony Barbieri-Low has a wide-ranging interests in many aspects of Early China, including technology, organization of production, labor history, gender and social relations, legal process, material culture, and state formation. He teaches undergraduate courses in East Asian civilization, world civilization, and early Chinese history, and graduate courses in specialized topics related to ancient China at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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November 8, 2021
This is a dissertation in art and archaeology at Princeton that focuses on the characteristics of Imperial Workships during the Han Dynasty (roughly equivalent to the peak period of the Roman Empire in the west.). Dissertations are generally a chore to work through, since they are not produced with more popular consumption in mind. This is a thorough and detailed study with lots of notes and supporting diagrams and figures.
So what is the punchline? Professor Barbieri-Low documents the existence of organizations that look and act very much like what we have come to call factories. These are establishments that produced millions of items for the needs of the Chinese Imperial Court. They made use of standardized product design and manufacture. They also made use of volume production technology such as multiplying the work of individual craftsmen and teams, utilizing mass molding and firing techniques, supervised by professional managers, and possessed advanced management and records keeping techniques to record production and likely administer accountability routines within the production environment.
So what? Well, Barbieri-Low documents this occurring more than thousand years prior to what we have come to know as the “Industrial Revolution”. That is quite a result. He also documents that these sorts of mass production facilities were also present in ancient civilizations in the west, including Greece, Rome, and Egypt. So the history of the factory just got more complex
There are constraints to all of this, of course. The Han Imperial workshops were not the products of capitalism and they were not prompted by increased consumer demands for their products. The workshop factories operated under a command rather than a market economy. The laborers in these factories worked under a brutal coerced regime and not for wages. They seem more akin to plantation organization than to earlier textile factories. So while mass production techniques showed themselves much earlier than most would expect, this is not an early indicator of capitalism but a highly controlled imperial state activity. Capitalism had to wait a while.
It is a tough read but worth the effort if you are interested in it like I am.
So what is the punchline? Professor Barbieri-Low documents the existence of organizations that look and act very much like what we have come to call factories. These are establishments that produced millions of items for the needs of the Chinese Imperial Court. They made use of standardized product design and manufacture. They also made use of volume production technology such as multiplying the work of individual craftsmen and teams, utilizing mass molding and firing techniques, supervised by professional managers, and possessed advanced management and records keeping techniques to record production and likely administer accountability routines within the production environment.
So what? Well, Barbieri-Low documents this occurring more than thousand years prior to what we have come to know as the “Industrial Revolution”. That is quite a result. He also documents that these sorts of mass production facilities were also present in ancient civilizations in the west, including Greece, Rome, and Egypt. So the history of the factory just got more complex
There are constraints to all of this, of course. The Han Imperial workshops were not the products of capitalism and they were not prompted by increased consumer demands for their products. The workshop factories operated under a command rather than a market economy. The laborers in these factories worked under a brutal coerced regime and not for wages. They seem more akin to plantation organization than to earlier textile factories. So while mass production techniques showed themselves much earlier than most would expect, this is not an early indicator of capitalism but a highly controlled imperial state activity. Capitalism had to wait a while.
It is a tough read but worth the effort if you are interested in it like I am.
Displaying 1 of 1 review