This article considers the Interaction between technological development in agriculture and social change. In the early Han, a period of comparatively strong and centralized rule, the government encouraged and subsidized a particular type of agricultural development designed to benefit independent small-holders, thus discouraging the formation of large estates and maximizing the state's Income from taxes. Later as the power of the landed gentry grew, large ‘manorial’ estates superseded Independent small-holdings as the dominant mode of production despite government efforts to reverse this trend. The change in tenurial pattern was accompanied by marked changes in agricultural technology and production which became far more ‘rational’ and market oriented than had been possible in a small-holder economy.

The early Chinese spindle-wheel was originally invented in conjunction with silk-technology and was linked to silk production, as pictured in some Han stone reliefs. It is concluded that the spindle-wheel is a Chinese Invention which may be dated to the early years of the Warring States period. In the course of time people realized the advantages of the spindle-wheel and it was adopted for plant fiber production.

The spindle-wheel may have been brought to Europe at the same time as silk-technology was introduced, most probably in the second half of the first millenium A.D. Only when the continuously working spinning-wheel with flyer was invented in fifteenth century Europe did a better and more efficient spinning device become available.

This paper was first prepared as a documentary appendix to “The Late Shang State: When, Where, and What?” (to be published in the conference volume, The Origins of Chinese Civilization), which, by analyzing a series of thirty-nine “state criteria” under the general headings of Sovereignty, Territoriality, Religion and Kinship, Alliance and Warfare, and Exchange, attempted to classify the state in developmental terms. The present paper presents the documentary evidence in more detail by translating and discussing characteristic Inscriptions (generally from period I, the reign of Wu Ting) within each of the thirty-nine criteria. In so far as possible, the discussion focuses on the case of the Chou as a Shang state member. The evidence is particularly valuable because of the insights it gives Into the daily activities of the Shang theocrat.