Mass production truly begins in Ancient China, not during the Industrial Revolution in the West.
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).
This book represents my dissertation from Princeton University, completed in 2001. At the time, I viewed it as part of a larger project studying workshops and artisans in Ancient China. In this book, I uncover the methods of mass production employed the Han imperial factory system, including fine division of labor, standardized parts and procedures, modular production, and quality control and accounting procedures. These allowed the factories to produce millions of object for the imperial state. The first part of the book details the macro organization of imperial workshops in the empire, looking at palace workshops, capital workshops and factories, and regional production units. The second half is a micro-study of the Western Workshop of Shu Comandery, a factory which produced luxury projects such as lacquers and bronzes for imperial use. I explore the history of the factory, its repertoire of products and their stylistic evolution, and investigate how they were made. The final two chapters explore the mass production system as well as the factory management structure.
I later published the second part of this study, a social history of artisans, as my book, Artisans in Early Imperial China.
Since it is unlikely that I will return to this subject and publish a revised version, I make it available now to purchase.
