Ian Inkster

The technical problems confronting different societies and periods and the measures taken to solve them form the concern of this annual collection of essays. It deals with the history of technical discovery and change and explores the relationship of technology to other aspects of life - social, cultural and economic - showing how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

The technical problems confronting different societies and periods and the measures taken to solve them form the concern of this annual collection of essays. The series deals with the history of technical discovery and change and explores the relationship of technology to other aspects of life - social, cultural and economic - and shows how technological development has shaped, and been shaped by, the society in which it occurred.

This book reveals that the manipulation of culture was of more importance than the character of the original cultural stock in explaining Japan's modern industrialization. Thus the features of private enterprise culture that are so often isolated as keys to the nation's historical competitiveness may have been only temporary reflections of this wider process of cultural engineering: a necessary input into the program of technology transfer and late development. This book provides a highly reliable guide to the industrial economy and history and covers a wide ground; it will be of great interest to those involved in Asian studies, Japanese studies, plus economists and professionals in business and enterprise culture.

Japan's escape from colonialism and its subsequent industrialisation has taken it to the point where its economy is second only to that of the US. This comprehensive volume examines how this rapid change of fortunes occurred, and the impact it has had on East Asia and the world at large. Taking a wide range and focus, Inkster looks at the history of Japan's industrial development in a social and cultural context.

In 1850 the Industrial Revolution came to an end. In 1851 the Great Exhibition illustrated to the whole world the supremacy of industrial England. For the next twenty years Britain reigned supreme. From around 1870 Britain began to decline. Britain is now a second rate power with strong memories of its former supremacy. The above five sentences summarise a common view of the sequencing of Britain’s rise and relative fall, a stereotype that is challenged and modified in the essays of The Golden Age. By concentrating on central aspects of social and industrial change authors expose the underpinnings of supremacy, its unsung underside, its tarnished gold. Major themes cover industrial and technological change, social institutions and gender relations in a period during which industry and industrialism were equally celebrated and nurtured. Against this background it is difficult to argue for any sudden decline of energy, assets or institution, nor for any significant move from an industrial society to one in which a hearty manufacturing was replaced by commerce and land, sensibility and artifice.

These thirteen essays embrace case studies of Britain, Japan, Europe, China, India and Australasia and cover a period from circa 1700 to the present day. The author’s main intention is to illustrate a ’political economy' approach to industrial and technological history, to demonstrate the relations between technical and instutitional transformations, and to bring the history of technology into a wide historical perspective.

Ian Inkster’s intent in these studies is to move beyond the high culture and expertise of science towards the construction of the culture of urban communities. The work draws on a mass of detailed research and focuses on Britain's social and cultural advantages over other industrialising nations in the years prior to the Great Exhibition of 1851, an advantage which was not created by any single decision, nor by any explicit investment effect. Out of urban culture emerged a public sphere and an information system within which class divisions were abrogated; at the same time the relations between information and technique became complex and decidedly non-linear. So was created a social asset drawn upon by business interests, technicians, tinkerers and inventors throughout the period, and for some considerable time beyond it. Industrial Britain was made from diverse materials, amongst which were those fabricated in the course of cultural dissent and social ambition.