Made in China: Material culture and its histories

The label “Made in China” is well-known across the world today. Most households have goods “made in China”—textiles, plastic objects, porcelain, furniture, electronics, toys, chemical products, and many other things. If the label is a fairly recent invention, dating back to the mid-twentieth century, the global circulation of resources and objects produced in China has a much longer history. For centuries, the material culture and material lives of people in China have been linked to those in other countries. This paper explores these histories and connections from the late 18th through to the early 21st century, paying attention both to the domestic history of resources, production, and consumption in China and to the circulation and consumption of goods abroad. It asks how things – luxury goods and everyday objects – were made and by whom, how they were traded, travelled, were used, reused, repaired, and recycled over time. Readings will take us from local mines to timber and bamboo forests, from the porcelain kilns of Jingdezhen to the imperial workshops in Beijing’s Forbidden City, from handicraft workshops to light industry factories designed for mass production, from workspaces at home to socialist communes, and from the local state bureaucrats’ offices to international trade fairs. To study and write the history of material culture and material lives – from local, regional, national, and global perspectives – means working with a variety of methods developed in social, cultural, gender, and economic history, the history of technology and design, but also material culture studies, archaeology, and other disciplines. This paper, while focused on China in global history, will therefore also be an opportunity to think about how we work as historians, what sources we use, and what stories we tell.