Technology and Progress in Islamicate Political Thought

Abstract This study compares how technology is theorised in an early sixteenth-century description of China, ʿAlī Akbar Khaṭāyī’s Khaṭāy-nāmeh (‘Book of China’), and two major works of late medieval Islamic political theory, Ibn Khaldūn’s (d. 1406) Muqaddimah and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s (d. 1502) Akhlāq-i Jalālī (‘Jalālian Ethics’). Concepts of artifice and distinctions between the natural and artificial, as well as the social division of labour, are critical to all three authors’ views of political authority and statecraft. Khaṭāyī and Ibn Khaldūn express diametrically opposed views within a common theoretical framework concerning the effects of artificial law and technical training on social relations, a difference in attitude likely due in part to the great importance Khaṭāyī attributed to Chinese firearms.