The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw extraordinary transfer and diffusion of industry- and transportation-related technology, and business methods. While most scholarship on nineteenth-century technology transfer beyond Europe and North America has focused on the West-to-East movement of artifacts, skills, and knowledge, Strands of Modernization considers the transfer of technology and business methods within East Asia in the period between approximately 1850 and 1920.
Highlighting currents moving in multiple directions, contributors expand upon conventional notions of what qualifies as a "technology" or a "business practice," looking more broadly at skills, systems of technology, tacit knowledge, and the ideologies and other belief systems with which they interact. The core ambition driving Strands of Modernization is to illuminate processes of adaption, versus adoption, that occur when technology and business practices cross sociocultural boundaries.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Capacious Connections with and within East Asia
David G. Wittner and David B. Sicilia
1. Multinationals and Western Technology Transfer to East Asia, 1870-1914
David B. Sicilia
2. Print Capitalism and Material Culture: Technology Transfer in Early Twentieth-Century China
Tze-Ki Hon
3. The Essence of Being Modern: Indigenous Knowledge and Technology Transfer in Meiji Japan
David G. Wittner
4. The Evolution of the Exposition Form and its Transfer from the West to Japan
Jeffer Daykin
5. What the Eastern Wind Brings: Rickshaw, Mobility and Modernity in Asia
M. William Steele
6. Zhang Jian and the Transfer of Western Business Methods through Japan into China
Yu Chen
7. Shibusawa Eiichi and the Transfer of Western Banking to Japan
Kimura Masato
8. Korea’s Hansung Bank and the Daiichi Bank: The Path from the West through Japan
Kim Myungsoo
Bibliography
Contributors
About the Author :
David B. Sicilia is an associate professor in the Department of History and Henry Kaufman Chair of Financial History at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.
David G. Wittner is a distinguished professor in the Department of History at Utica College.
Review :
"Strands of Modernization offers essays by accomplished international scholars and a long-overdue, multidirectional perspective on technology transfer in East Asia. Emphasizing the importance of modernization as the actors themselves defined it in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the authors stress the preeminent role of small enterprise in selectively creating innovative hybrid technologies that fueled much of intra-East Asia technology transfer at the turn of the century."
--Philip C. Brown, Professor Emeritus of Japanese and East Asian History, Ohio State University
" Strands of Modernization is a valuable addition to this important series on Japan and global society. Through a rich collection of case studies, the authors paint a dynamic picture of a region learning to be modern, a place where skills, ideas, and know-how were circulated and knowledge was transferred and trafficked in multiple directions. Students and scholars alike will find this book to be a useful resource that helps us to understand how Japan was shaped by cross-national forces that would forever change the face of the nation."
--Morris Low, Associate Professor of Japanese History, University of Queensland
