Donald B. Wagner – författare

Donald B. Wagner provides a comprehensive historical account of the production and use of iron and steel in China in their political and economic context. An initial chapter on the traditional Chinese iron industry introduces the important technical concepts and the ways in which technology, geography, and economics interact and influence political phenomena. Recent archaeological work indicates that the earliest production of iron in China was in the Northwest, and that the technology was introduced from the West via Central Asia. It was, however, the invention in South China of large-scale technologies which put China on a very different developmental path from that of the West. Further chapters deal with developments from the Han to the Tang, the technical evolution and economic revolution of the Song period, and economic expansion under the Ming. A final chapter investigates the debt of the modern steel industry to Chinese developments.

This book explores the economic history of the traditional Chinese iron industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the interactions among technological, economic and geographic factors. The traditional technology of iron production is described together with the ways in which it changed and developed in response to upheavals wrought by foreign competition, war and revolution and by the growth in China of a modern iron industry.Many of the book's findings are counter-intuitive, and will provide food for thought in the study of Third World industrial development. The author has written widely on the history of science and technology in China, and is currently engaged in writing the volume on ferrous metallurgy for Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China.

Designed as an advanced/intermediate level textbook for students, this book will meet the needs of those making the transition between 'textbook texts' to 'real texts'. Dr Wagner's many years' experience of teaching classical Chinese are brought to bear on one of the most difficult aspects of learning the language - making the progression from introductory textbooks on classical Chinese, which do not present serious philological problems, to real historical texts, in which such problems abound. The text used is the biography of Huo Guang in the Han Shu together with the commentaries compiled by Yan Shigu.