This dissertation investigates the muscle-powered transport technologies that pervaded the Japanese empire. It examines the production, adoption, evolution, and decline of draft animals, rickshaws, human-powered railways, and push-car railways in Japan and colonial Taiwan, 1850-1930. Invented in Tokyo in 1870, rickshaws proliferated across Asia and became a symbol of modern metropolises such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Beijing. The less-known human-powered railways prevailed in localities across Japan and colonial Taiwan in 1895. This dissertation treats these transportation technologies as globalized commodities. It demonstrates how small businesses – family workshops, local/regional enterprises – made these organically driven technologies global, but in specific local contexts. The Muscle-powered Empire provides a transnational history of East Asia that contributes to debates in global/technology history, modern Japanese history, colonial modernity, business history, and spatio-environmental history. It focuses on the modernizing role of metabolic labors and “lively capital.” It thus challenges a conventional narrative in global history that marked energy transition as the divider between early modern and modern periods. Secondly, it focuses on small-time entrepreneurs’ efforts in Japan and colonial Taiwan and their contested relationships with the colonial government. In this way, it reorients the history of how the Japanese Empire projected economic power in global markets and interrogates the comparative framework of “colonial modernity.” Finally, it contributes to a burgeoning literature on spatio-environmental history by arguing that the evolution of the human-powered transport industry created unique spatiality and new perceptions of time, and, eventually, modern, regional identities. This project draws on published and unpublished corporate and business archives, local gazetteers, autobiographies, criminal records, newspapers, and geographical data analysis. It explores how small-time entrepreneurs and businesses shaped global transformations across national and natural borders. Doing so also unveils the social, environmental, and human costs in an age marked by “progress.” Overall, this dissertation argues that modernization, infrastructure upgrades, and empire-building are not always about expanding the scale of advanced technology, either by state-led or capital-intensive initiatives. Sometimes organic forms of technology, subtle refinement, and smaller businesses’ efforts are equally crucial in defining the nature of modernity and colonialism.

Creator

• Li, Youjia

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-n0fs-2478

Subject

• History
• Asian history
• Asian studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15712
• etdadmin_upload_843304

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright