Amidst unprecedented exploitation of resources on a global scale, the high tide of colonialism in the 1800s was accompanied by equally unprecedented creation of wealth, mobility of people, and exchange of knowledge. What came along with this new order was an explosion in new technologies, new systems of production, and the new transnational management of natural resources and labour. As Jürgen Osterhammel addressed in his renowned work, The Transformation of the World, these new global phenomena reshaped human space and human experience.Footnote ¹

Industrialisation, with regional differences, characterised a distinctive process of modernising empire states, especially the Western powers, in their quest for power and wealth from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Modern science and technology as well as mechanisation created significant changes in occupational structures and a gradual transition in society has been observed in the European continent since 1800.Footnote ² In particular, the formation of elite professions (e.g. engineers and industrial managers), as well as skilled trades among working classes, intensified the accumulation of human capital and accelerated the specialisation of expert knowledge, skills, and labour not only in the economic sphere, but also in social, cultural, and political domains. Driven by Western imperialism and capitalism, new Western-style educational, industrial, and political systems, institutions, and infrastructures began to alter the social and cultural fabric of East Asian societies. However, Western industrialisation was never translated into Eastern modernisation in a straightforward sense.

Recent scholarship has increasingly demonstrated that the globalisation of, and transnational moving of, knowledge (as expertise, know-how, or information) was mediated through trade networks, scientific or technical experts, cultural brokers, and individual travellers.Footnote ³ Such ‘move’, ‘flow’, ‘transfer’, or ‘translation’ of knowledge from the West to the East and within East Asia facilitated the appropriation, adaptation, or localisation of global knowledge on sites and pushed regional integration forward.Footnote ⁴ Shifting the focus away from conventional scholarship that tends to analyse Eastern–Western comparative factors regarding industrial or industrious revolutions, mechanisation and technology transfer, or foreign capital investment in historical contexts, the contributors to this timely Special Issue address various issues of ‘expertise’ that characterise the transformation of human resources in East Asia's industrial transition, spanning from the late nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth centuries.

The seven research articles in this Special Issue have their origins in the XIX World Economic History Congress in July 2022, Paris, the theme of which was ‘resources’. They draw upon diverse approaches and perspectives of ‘human’ resources in historical contexts and provide insights into newly emerged human agents and institutions. The authors of this multidisciplinary issue bring together case studies on the history of science and technology, trading or business history, and (gendered) labour history. They aim neither to test an economic or social theory based upon European models nor to bring forward a distinctly ‘East Asian’ pattern to the debate on regional industrialisation, especially to make a contrast between Japan and China, or between the East and the West. Instead, they attempt to break through regional and disciplinary barriers in order to portray a multifaceted East Asia in industrial transition. These case studies depict different scenarios across regions and time in East Asia, and address the dynamics in mobilising global knowledge and the institutionalisation of expertise in relation to cross-regional/cultural commercial management, engineering, and skilled labour cultivation.

It should be pointed out that the term ‘expertise’, just like other terms such as ‘knowledge’, ‘skill’, or ‘intelligence’, is too broad and difficult to be precisely defined.Footnote ⁵ This Special Issue employs ‘expertise’ to emphasise the knowledge (in some cases, the information or the skill) to be gained or informed through practices in a domain, which, as the case studies of this issue examine, includes trade, engineering, and education as well as other informal training systems.Footnote ⁶

The authors investigate a wide array of archival sources kept in East Asia as well as the USA, including trading company records, railway company annual reports and statistics, government statistical reports, graduate students’ records, engineers’ biographies and autobiographies, engineering journals, and private archival collections (e.g. Sheng Xuanhuai). Through in-depth analysis with both qualitative and quantitative methods, the articles demonstrate how global knowledge was mobilised via trading, diplomatic, intellectual, or professional networks (between China, Japan, Europe, and the USA, and between Japan and its colonies in Taiwan and Korea) and how expertise was further institutionalised in formal or informal training systems and in governmental or private organisations (such as engineering universities, technical schools, engineers’ associations, internal training programmes in trading companies, and railway or communication sectors). In particular, they reveal the demand for, acquisition of, and obstacles to institutionalising expertise during East Asia's starting-up phases of industrialisation in the 1870s, and the intensification of mobilising expertise and training skilled (and gendered) labour in maintaining and consolidating phases of its political regimes until the 1940s. The selected topics cover modern industrial, professional, and informational infrastructures, including railway and mining industries, engineering association, as well as postal and communication systems.

Moreover, by contextualising discussions in the frames of East Asia's industrialisation and modern transformation processes, often associated with various crises, either from traditional empires to modern nation states or from traditional to modern organisations, the seven articles address how the people and groups involved deal with the crises and challenges that arose in the industrial transformation. The authors of this issue reveal a strong feature of interregional connections within East Asia—between Meiji Japan and Qing China, between Japan and its colonies of Korea and Taiwan, beyond the global connectivity through mobilising experts, goods, and thoughts between East Asia, Europe, and America.

This Special Issue starts with two articles on expertise in cross-regional commercial management. They examine brokers of daily living resources and agents for transregional and transnational circulation of industrial goods and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge as well as ideas. In her case study of well-known sugar merchant Wang Xuenong (1870–1915), Yuju Lin examines the shifting pattern of ‘traditional’ commercial culture in Taiwan before and after 1900 in transitions towards industrialisation and modernisation. She explores why and how the merchant Wang introduced a trading company system through incorporating Japanese as well as East Asian and Western elements facing the challenges posed by the political regime transfer from the Qing China to Meiji Japan, and addresses how a sugar trading company expanded their business by involving mechanical rice milling and steamship transport.

Through examining the understudied trading company Okura & Co. in Meiji Japan and its locomotive trade in New York, Naofumi Nakamura analyses how Japanese trading companies acquired the knowledge and know-how of locomotive trading as well as other railway materials in international transactions at the beginning of the 1900s. He argues that Japan's overseas local business networks, international communication lines, transportation and financial systems, and hired foreign (oyatoi) consulting experts all facilitated the knowledge transfer in cross-regional commercial management. This insight clarifies how trading as well as engineering expertise enabled the global activities of Japanese trading companies at their early starting stage.

The second set of three articles addresses engineer expertise and the institutions for educating and promoting professional knowledge. Focusing on the employment-seeking activities of those early graduates from the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE) in Meiji Japan, Masanori Wada examines the early engineer students’ memoirs and reveals their social background and difficulties in finding employment. He draws particular attention to the conflicts between government-sponsored interests in educating Western-style engineers and traditional workers preferred by private companies in Japan's early industrialisation. Wada points out that the private sector could not afford to employ graduates and that traditional distain for manufacturing occupations or artisans likewise hindered the promotion of engineering professions at that time.

Similarly, Hailian Chen reveals the difficulties in initiating mining education in late Qing China during the 1870s in her article. The idea of institutionalising global mining knowledge via establishing mining schools, as her article showcases, originated not from late Qing educational reforms, but from real mining practices. Her article reveals the previously overlooked ‘failures’ of Sheng Xuanhuai's mining-related enterprises in Hubei and Shandong, and addresses how the demand for expertise within the framework of mining bureaucracy evolved under the impact of Western imperialism. She draws particular attention to the monetary crisis of that era and the global recruitment of engineers despite a pronounced distrust of foreign expertise. She argues that these seemingly discrete efforts or ‘failures’ in fact paved the way for initiating China's first engineering university in 1895 and eventually led to the rise of engineering education.

Focusing on the role of engineering associations in China after 1900, Lin-chun Wu in her article examines how Western standardisation practices were introduced, transmitted, and promoted in China during the first half of the twentieth century. She draws attention to the role of British, American and local Chinese engineers in the transmission process, and points out major shifting patterns of the standardisation projects chronologically: British engineers initiated ‘standardisation’ in Shanghai; after World War I, engineers of China and the USA implemented the standardisation of railroad infrastructure with the cooperation of the Beijing government; in the 1930s, the Nanjing government advocated an industrial standardisation for engineering a technocratic state; from World War I to the 1930s, the orientation and practices of American standardisation strategies dominated China.

The final two articles in this issue examine the acquisition, cultivation, and management of workforce expertise, namely the marginalised actors, in the industrial transition, which arose in parallel with the arrival of railway transportation and communications industries in Japan and Korea. In her article on Japan's government-run informational infrastructure, Janet Hunter examines labour-intensive workforce strategies adopted by the postal and communication systems (e.g. post, telegraph, and telephone). She argues that the scale of employment in the communications infrastructure confirmed the existence of labour-intensive growth outside the manufacturing sector; new communication technologies demanded specialised knowledge and skills; the formal or informal labour-absorbing institutions were designed to mobilise or incentivise large numbers of employees; and the gradual improvement in the quality of labour was normally associated with the labour-intensive industrialisation process.

In the last article, Chaisung Lim provides a quantitative analysis of the labour management practices in the colonial-era Korean Government Railways (KGR), which is discussed in association with Japanese techno-imperialism beyond ethnic discrimination. His article reveals a dual-pronged labour strategy that adopted a Japanese government employment system to manage middle- and upper-level personnel, and directly recruited on-site workers for the lower echelons, especially when the labour shortage during the wartime period became severe. The expansion of internal education aimed to alleviate labour shortages, but the economic and ethnic inequalities in employment persisted.