This chapter surveys Japan’s era of civilization and enlightenment (bunmei kaika), roughly the first decade of the Meiji era (1868–1912). It interprets bunmei kaika as a revolutionary attempt at Westernization intended to overcome the disruption wrought by the globalizing effects of Western imperialism. The chapter covers four categories: first, politics and war, including the Iwakura Mission, the political crisis of 1873, the movement for freedom and peoples’ rights, the invasion of Taiwan, the Saga Rebellion, the incident at Kanghwa Island, the Shinpūren Rebellion, and the civil war of 1877; second, thought, including intellectual societies, the ideas of civilization and the nation, religion, language, and the public sphere; third, society, including household registration, taxes and allowances, the military, education, gender, and law enforcement; and fourth, culture, including the emperor, clothes, food, transportation, and time. It stresses disorder as integral to these transformations of the 1870s.

The acquisition of “Western knowledge” in late Tokugawa Japan, particularly in fields of science, technology, and medicine, has functioned as a central resource not only in modernization narratives but in the legitimization of imperial geographies that situate Japan as Asia’s rightful hegemon. This chapter brings together emerging research that decenters and pluralizes existing understandings of “Western knowledge,” placing “Western knowledge” instead within broader flows of global modernity. Specifically, by examining how a “transimperial educational commons” rendered diverse new texts and resources available to late Tokugawa scholars, this chapter argues that “Western knowledge” was in fact the product of networks of mediation across South, Southeast, and East Asia. Particular sites considered include circulation and brokerage through Dutch Indonesia and Qing China. The sum of these studies indicates that the problem of late Tokugawa engagements with Western knowledge can only be solved by examining sites both beyond the West and beyond Japan.

This chapter examines the ideas of neomercantilist thinkers from outside Europe and the United States whose thought became well known in various places during the pre-1945 period. Some of them adapted the ideas of neomercantilist thinkers from Europe and the United States in creative ways, including thinkers from Argentina (Alejandro Bunge), Australia (David Syme), China (Liang Qichao), Ethiopia (Gabrahiwot Baykadagn), India (Mahadev Govind Ranade, Benoy Sarkar), and Turkey (Ziya Gökalp). Others developed distinctive neomercantilist ideas without much, or any, reference to neomercantilist thought from Europe and the United States, including figures from Canada (John Rae), China (Sun Yat-sen, Zheng Guanying), Egypt (Muhammad Ali), Japan (Fukuzawa Yukichi, Ōkubo Toshimichi), and Korea (Yu Kil-chun). This latter group of thinkers reveal how the ideas of Hamilton and List did not play the same kind of central role in the emergence of neomercantilist thought that Smith’s played in the growth of economic liberalism. Taken together, all the thinkers described in this chapter reinforce the point that neomercantilist thought was characterized by considerable diversity.