Reframing the Needham Question: A Book Project

China was once the most technologically advanced civilization in the world. Ancient Chinese achievements in technology are simply staggering. China led Europe in metallurgy, ship construction, navigation techniques, and many other fields, often by several centuries. Chinese also invented gunpowder, paper, water clock, moveable printing press, and other consequential technologies way ahead of the West. For example, Chinese invented seismograph 1,700 years before the French.

But China’s technological development stalled, stagnated, and eventually collapsed and its early technological leadership did not set the country on a modernization path. This historical development led Joseph Needham (1969) to put forward what is known as the “Needham question:” Why China led the world in technology but failed to industrialize?

Using a newly-constructed database on Chinese inventions going back to 4^th century BCE, our book, coauthored with four other scholars, revisits and reframes the “Needham question” and examines the question empirically. Our findings, if valid, may significantly revise some of the settled views on this question.