ABSTRACT
If, as Thomas Huxley once wrote, “the mind is so constituted that it does not willingly rest in facts and immediate causes, but seeks always after a knowledge of the remoter links in the chain of causation” (1874: 155), every attempt at explanation will bring criticism at its boundaries. This chapter invites such criticism. In it I seek to align footbinding, a massive and costly cultural curiosity, with parallels in the two other major preindustrial agrarian regions of AfroEurAsia. By the time the goals of northwestern Europeans became factors in their internal arrangements, the Chinese, the continental Islamic peoples, and the peoples of India had developed extensive handcraft industries with flourishing commercial ties to each other and to most of the populations on their Central and Southeast Asian, sub-Saharan African, and European margins. Their statecraft, too, was complex, sufficient to unite empires for centuries at a time, giving their commoners time to adjust local behavior to the strictures of their rulers. And they had each evolved exceptional means for constricting the activities of girls and women to housekeeping, childrearing, and handcraft production.
