In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879-1940) was a maverick entrepreneur-at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation. Through the lens of Chen's career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen's activities exemplify "vernacular industrialism," the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China's economic ascent in the twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.

The historical relationship between science and capitalism has long stood as a central question in science studies, at least since its foundations in the 1930s. Taking inspiration from the recent surge of scholarly interest in the "history of capitalism," as well as from renewed attention to political economy by historians of science and technology, this Osiris volume revisits this classic quandary, foregrounding the entanglements between these two powerful and unruly historical forces and tracing the diverse ways they mutually shaped each other. Key attention is paid to the practices of knowledge work that enable both scientific and capitalistic action and to the diversity of global sites and circuits in which science/capitalism have been performed. The assembled papers excavate an array of tangled nodes at the science/capitalism nexus, spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, from Nevada to Central Asia to Japan, from microbiology to industrial psychology to public health.

"This book is at the forefront of the next generation of scholarship on early 20th century China. Lean makes a number of important claims about sentiment and modernity, puts forward broader claims that go beyond China Studies, and poses stark questions about the place of 'rationality' in modernity that will compel others to defer to her study for many years to come."--John Fitzgerald, author of "Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution"
"This ingeniously crafted book provides intriguing ways of linking the past to the present, weaving debates that stretch as far back as the Qin with questions of contemporary Chinese culture and politics. Through exhaustive examinations of media, political, and judicial records, the author vividly shows how the debate on emotions that Shi's case engendered was a manifestation of a 'modern public' in China."--Ruth Rogaski, author of "Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China"