Technical secrecy in China and England’s textile industries: cases from Early Qing Jiangnan and pre-Industrial Revolution England

This study addresses critical gaps in Sino-Western handicraft technology history scholarship, which has long focused on production scale and innovation while neglecting systematic comparative analysis of textile trade secrecy between Early Qing Jiangnan (China) and pre-Industrial Revolution England, as well as the interaction logic between state attitudes and private behaviors. Existing research overlooks how colonial production and global trade networks reshaped English textile secrecy practices, and lacks terminological precision for pre-modern technical protection. This study advances this precision by building on Palfrey’s intellectual property framework, which positions trade secrecy as a core, evolving protection mode alongside royal privileges, long before formal IP law’s global spread. Using case comparison and historical document analysis, this study answers three core questions: the commonalities and divergences in craftsmen’s secrecy practices across the two regions, whether state attitude differences offer a new analytical dimension for actor interactions, and how colonial production shaped English technical protection strategies against Qing Jiangnan’s domestically oriented system. The findings reveal that craftsmen in both regions adopted two core secrecy practices: intra-family inheritance and guild-enforced scope control. The critical divergence lies in state governance and market orientation: English policies were fundamentally shaped by colonial production and global competition, a dynamic entirely absent in Qing Jiangnan. This study challenges prevailing scholarly narratives, offers a new framework for interpreting the roles of craftsmen, guilds, and the state, fills interdisciplinary gaps, provides a new paradigm for integrating technological and social history, and delivers historical insights for contemporary craft inheritance and intellectual property protection.