[mc32]

Do we normally say Europeans or Chinese were literate 400 years ago, even with woodblocks and printing presses? Some people knew how to read and write and do math, sure, but would we call them literate societies? Even at 10% proficiency we don't tend to call societies literate.

[kragen]

400 years ago China was a literate society with mass printing of pornographic novels written in the vernacular and literacy rates probably approaching 50%. Parts of Europe were similar.

As I understand it, no mainstream scholar is suggesting that Inka society was that literate. Rather, the debate is whether any khipu literacy was confined to a narrow, specialist scribe class associated with the imperial administrative order or whether nonspecialists could also read and write, and whether a khipu written by one person to be read by another was limited to calendrical and numerical data or whether it could express a wider range of concepts: bills of goods, ancestries, perhaps even love letters.

[mc32]

It's estimated that even during the Q'ing dynasty, literacy rates were at or below 10%. Over 90% of people were rural four centuries ago. No way you had country bumpkins being able to read and write. Same for Europe. You may have had 30% literacy in the few towns/cities, but those were by and large a small proportion of the populations --most people lived in rural areas doing farming and related activities.

[kragen]

Your incredulity is due to Whig history and imagining late medieval and early modern China as being the same as Europe, but in fact they were quite different.

The Qing dynasty (or Ch'ing in Wade-Giles, but never Qing) caused a disastrous collapse in literacy rates, as a matter of intentional policy, bringing the literacy rate well below 1% by the end of the dynasty. But we were talking about 400 years ago, which was the Ming dynasty, when literacy was indeed widespread even among "country bumpkins", though still far from universal. Many authors writing in vernacular Chinese at the time included prefaces explaining that their work was directed at all of the "four classes", one of which (though not the lowest) was those rural farmers.

There was a lot of variation even within Europe; literacy in medieval rural shtetls was nominally a prerequisite for adulthood for men, for example, and universal primary education dates back to the Talmudic period. See https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9hnt7/in_me... for more details.

About medieval Europe more generally, https://research.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20... and https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68148/how-litera... look plausibly informative.

Literacy among "country bumpkins" was nearly universal 300 years ago among the New England colonists, fueled by movable-type printing and the Protestant rejection of priestly intermediaries, despite lacking the Imperial civil service examination system or the rabbinate as an incentive to study.

[kragen]

> but never Qing

This should read "but never Q'ing". As written it is nonsense.

[jeltz]

Sweden became literate during the 1600s with most people being able to read at the end of the century and the elite were certainly literate before then.