Intermediary Functions and the Market for Innovation in Meiji and Taishō Japan

2013 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Nicholas ◽  
Hiroshi Shimizu

Japan experienced a transformational phase of technological development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that an important, but so far neglected, factor was a developing market for innovation and a patent-attorney system that was conducive to rapid technical change. We support our hypothesis using patent data and we also present a detailed case study on Tomogorō Ono, a key developer of salt-production technology who used attorneys in connection with his patenting work at a time when Japan was still in the process of formally institutionalizing its patent-attorney system. In accordance with Lamoreaux and Sokoloff's 1999 influential study of trade in invention in the United States, our quantitative and qualitative evidence highlights how inventors and intermediaries in Japan interacted to create a market for new ideas.

Author(s):  
Andrea M. Bertone

This chapter examines how the international community has defined and framed the issue of human trafficking over the last century, and how governments such as the United States have responded politically to the problem of human trafficking. Contemporary concerns about trafficking can be traced back to a late nineteenth-century movement in the United States and Western Europe against white slavery. White slavery, also known as the white slave trade, refers to the kidnapping and transport of Caucasian girls and women for the purposes of prostitution. The chapter first considers the definitions of human trafficking before discussing the anti-white slavery movement and the increase in international consciousness about the trafficking of women. It then traces the origins of the contemporary anti-human trafficking movement and analyses how trafficking emerged as a global issue in the 1990s. It also presents a case study on human trafficking in the United States.


2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-601
Author(s):  
Christopher Beauchamp

This dissertation summary introduces a new perspective on the legal and economic history of patents in the late nineteenth century. Through a case study of the early telephone industry in Britain and the United States, the dissertation explores interactions between business strategies and national legal regimes, and proposes a revised view of the multi-layered relationship between patents and industrial organization.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Scheibelhofer

This paper focuses on gendered mobilities of highly skilled researchers working abroad. It is based on an empirical qualitative study that explored the mobility aspirations of Austrian scientists who were working in the United States at the time they were interviewed. Supported by a case study, the paper demonstrates how a qualitative research strategy including graphic drawings sketched by the interviewed persons can help us gain a better understanding of the gendered importance of social relations for the future mobility aspirations of scientists working abroad.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


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