Book Review

Asia

Since David S. Landes's Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (1983), historians have been well aware of the distinctiveness of this European invention and its apparent significance to European superiority. Focusing on the introduction of European mechanical clocks to China in the late sixteenth century, Catherine Pagani sets out the meanings for Chinese and Westerners of clock production for the Chinese market. She stresses that clocks were seen primarily as status symbols rather than timepieces in both China and Europe in the sixteenth century. Jesuit missionaries brought clocks to display their greater knowledge, which they deemed an indication of their religious faith's superiority. Emperors delighted in the mechanical clocks; these instruments and related automata were symbols of political power and, later, as they became available beyond the court, of social status and wealth. European clocks figured as one of the few items Europeans could find a market for in eighteenth-century China, although clock sales could not reverse the net flow of silver into the empire to pay for the porcelains, silks, and teas that streamed to Europe. Finally, Pagani examines the aesthetics of clock production and discerns the perceptions that Chinese and Westerners held of each other based on the particular characteristics of clocks produced in China and Europe; she argues that the differences in clocks produced for the Chinese market by Chinese and Europeans vividly illustrate the inability or unwillingness of Europeans to learn about Chinese preferences because they considered themselves superior culturally.

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