This article examines the social background of engineers in Meiji Japan by analysing their employment-seeking activities and their role in fostering industrial development. In particular, it focuses on the graduates from the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE) in Tokyo. One of the most prestigious schools for technical education, the ICE was established by the Meiji government in 1871 and opened in 1873. In traditional Japanese society, the handicraft manufacturing sector was held in low regard. The difficulties that graduates faced while the industry was still developing serve as a stark reminder of the widespread contempt and disdain for manufacturing that existed in Japan before the new profession of engineer gained traction. By scrutinising the memoirs of these engineers, this study shows that new engineering graduates faced barriers to employment in industry due to the low social prestige of those working in manufacturing in the private sector and the conflict with traditional workers, as well as the fact that private companies could not afford to employ engineers in the early years of industrialisation.

The American Revolution, as recent studies have shown, was appropriated by Chinese revolutionaries to use in their anti-Manchu propaganda in the early twentieth century. Few scholars have fully recognised Japan's important role in mediating Chinese revolutionaries’ understanding of the American Revolution. This article aims to bridge the gaps in existing scholarship through a close reading of Chinese and Japanese writings on the American Revolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I will show that Chinese and Japanese elites’ understanding of the American Revolution was structured by the changing power relations between China, Japan, and the West. Before Chinese and Japanese elites internalised the ideology of Western cultural superiority, the former inspired the latter to see the American Revolution through a Confucian lens. After the ideology of Western cultural superiority became entrenched in Japan, Japanese elites reinterpreted the American Revolution through the lens of Western ideas of liberty, civil rights, and popular sovereignty. Their new interpretation, in turn, inspired Chinese revolutionaries in Meiji Japan to view the American Revolution as a model for their anti-Manchu revolution in the 1900s when the ideology of Western cultural superiority started to take root in China.

This article compares the ways in which two major textbook publishers in East Asia – namely Kinkōdō in Meiji Japan and the Commercial Press in early twentieth-century China – practised the Western model of corporations to build a new kind of publishing business in their respective societies, which were undergoing significant transformation. The study suggests that, although the use of the model could imply global business convergence, its transplantation process was largely shaped by entrepreneurs who negotiated the Western model as an alternative newly opened to them and brought to light variant forms of practice tailored to serve their own aspirations in corporate directions such as industrial integration and ownership structure. The two cases present two distinct patterns of developing a new textbook publishing business under the same corporation model.

Was nineteenth-century Japan an example of finance-led growth? Using a new panel data set of firms from the Meiji period (1868–1912), this article tests whether financial sector development influenced extensive firm activity across industries and locations. Results from a two-stage least squares first difference model suggest that financial intermediation is associated with additional net firm establishment, particularly in light manufacturing sectors like textiles. The overall effect is muted in the latter part of the period and among peripheral regions, which may underscore the respective roles of institutions and agglomeration economies in later stages of development.