Francesca Bray is an anthropologist and historian of technology and gender, of agricultural systems, and of technical skills. She holds the Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Most of her research has been on imperial China, but she uses comparative insights from China to illuminate the politics of technology in the contemporary world, especially in Southern California, where she lived and taught for 20 years. Her publications include: Agriculture (Volume VI.2 of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, 1984); The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (1986); Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (1997); Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China: the Warp and the Weft (2007); Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered (2013) and Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (2015).