Prologue
Patterns of Cultural Appropriation in World History
Like ancient Chinese
historians who identified dynastic cycles and alternating periods of order and
chaos, historians throughout the world have sought to distinguish patterns in history, to
decipher the rise and fall of civilizations, and to explain revolutionary periods which
preface structural changes in methods of production and related world-views. Although such
patterns have always been matters of vast complexity and have to be discerned through the
lens of the present, patterns before the First Industrial Revolution have at least
appeared more coherent. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of years separated major
technological breakthroughs, migrations, and their cross cultural transformations
of
related political-economies and religions. Terms like Romanization,
Christianization, and 'Southernization, '[2]
have at least been functional in describing shifts in intellectual and social organization
as one region of the world emanated knowledge, technology, and other subjective images to
surrounding regions. Problems arise, however, since the First Industrial Revolution and
the beginning of the European-initiated world economy. Technological change and inter-cultural exchange has proceeded at such a dizzying pace, many of our explanations of
cross-cultural change have quickly become blurred or irrelevant.
During the nineteenth century, technological breakthroughs in Britain, their
corresponding production methods, political-economic and religious workings seemed to be
universal developments. Terms like 'Britannization,' and 'proletarianization' were used
to distinguish these apparently inevitable transformations. Certainly industrialization and
urbanization proved to be pervasive, but continued innovation in other countries based on
different combinations of technology and social organization, produced an increasing
number of variations on the original British experience.
America and Germany led a Second Industrial Revolution based on new
social-technological relationships; moreover, as the twentieth century proceeded and the
world economy grew to include more cultures of the globe, further 'post-industrial'
revolutions occurred, bringing even more variation to production and organization. These
ongoing transformations seem to have cast doubt on the function of terms like
'Britannization, ' 'Americanization, ' 'Europeanization,' 'Westernization,' and
'Modernization'; and some 'postmodern' historians have questioned their relevance
altogether.[3] This thesis contends that, far from 'melting
into nothingness' these designations, including a new one, 'Japanization,' serve as
temporary lights in the sea of global change since the First Industrial Revolution. In
their periods of popular usage, these designations acted as signs, or vehicles for
meaning, through which affected cultures (including the purveying culture) legitimized
cultural introspection and institutional reform in the direction of the image they
perceived.
This thesis seeks to distinguish more clearly the significance of these temporary
lights since the First Industrial Revolution, when British 'modes' of production and
social organization appeared to be universal. Like succeeding countries caught up in
the currents of their respective industrial revolutions, Britain wrought modern
institutions in a specific social-technological context.
Mass education and public universities in particular, reinforced the functions and/or
dysfunctions of respective periods of industrialization.
Being the first to industrialize, the British were also the first to
de-industrialize, or see their model industrial towns turn into iron and
steel ghost towns. Suffering from lost prestige and economic power, Britain was the
first 'developed' nation to have to come to terms with the
historicity of its modern institutions and their responsibility for economic decline
relative to countries which became more productive and innovative. The 'British
disease, ' a term originally coined by the Germans in the late 19th century, is a
designation the British have used since the Second World War to refer to the apparent
dysfunction of their 'outmoded' cultural and
technological combinations. The self-diagnosis and related search for foreign models to
overcome the disease provides a tool to analyze the subsequent industrial revolutions and
the role of countries at their centers.
Countries at the center (or 'cutting-edge') of technological innovation and
production efficiency, even before the First Industrial Revolution, projected cultural and
technological images to vulnerable societies which appropriated models that they perceived
would bring them up
to-date. Moreover, the outside identification of models would often reinforce institutions
in the culture at the center. This is the irony of success that diagnosticians of the
British disease attempted to explicate.
Before the First Industrial Revolution, South Asia (India) , East Asia (china) ,
and West Asia (Mesopotamia and the Greek and Roman empires) each had turns at projecting images to peripheral regions interacting in their ecumene, or world economy. China referred to itself
literally as the 'country at the center, ' and established patterns of education during
the orderly (and influential) periods of the dynastic cycle.[4] Within this
cycle, as dogmatic ideas
and institutions led to dysfunction over time, and after resulting periods of
socio-economic crisis, foreign and local traditions again influenced intellectual
and institutional responsiveness. This creative responsiveness, in turn, heralded a new
Mandate of Heaven for another dynastic cycle. A proponent of the British disease compared
his country's plight with China's during one of its dogmatic and dysfunctional phases in
the dynastic cycle.
The diagnosis of the British disease and subsequent reforms correspond to other
patterns in world history as well. After the First Industrial Revolution, western Europe
took a central position and affected vulnerable societies around the globe (China
included) in an amazingly short span of time. The rate of change was especially fast in
many societies which had been isolated from the Eurasian continent for thousands of years.
As they battled European-
carried diseases and superior military technology, these peoples often diagnosed their
institutions with the disease as well, thereby speeding the adaption of the seemingly healthier European models in a short time-span of a few decades.[5]
Although no epidemics had prompted Britain's self-diagnosis, the cultural critique carried
similar ramifications for accelerating Britain's adaption of foreign models.
Under the stresses and crisis of the Western challenge, many non-Western societies
legitimized reforms in the name of the culture that appeared to be more advanced. For
example, after Western powers threatened Japan in the mid-nineteenth century. the Meiji
leadership used the slogan 'Civilization and Enlightenment' (Bunmei Kaika)
and 'Strong Military and Rich Nation' (Fukoku Kyouhei) to
help speed along reforms.[6]
Similarly, British government officials and leaders of industry harkened the popular
Japanese model and 'Japanization' to legitimize reforms in the wake of the British disease
during the 1980s and early 1990s.
The pattern of cultural appropriation in Britain via reformers and Japanese
managers can also be likened to a historical pattern whereby foreign merchants and local
elite served as 'cultural brokers, ' facilitating the adaption of distant political, economic and religious institutions.[7] Through Japanese direct investment in Britain during the 1980s and
early 1990s, Japanese managers working in the new firms helped to 'broker, ' or
facilitate, the adaption of post-industrial models that were fundamentally different from
traditional British practices. As British and American firms in Britain emulated these and
other Japanese images projected by the media throughout the 1980s, many observers
concluded that the traditional practices were transformed into a 'new industrial
relations' in the likeness of the Japanese model. Others argued that traditional
structures predominated in a smoke-screen of Japanization rhetoric. To what extent a
transformation, or Japanization, occurred and what dynamics were involved in the process
is a subject of debate that this thesis seeks to explore.
To establish some parameters for the original pattern of British industrialization
and to understand the stimulus of reform in the 1980s and 1990s, chapter one reviews the
diagnosis of the British disease. In light of the disease, chapter two traces the
evolution and identification of the cures, or models, which developed in America and
Japan, the two centers of industrial revolutions succeeding Britain's. Chapter three then analyzes the debate over Japanization
and the new industrial relations
said to have resulted.
Because many factors were involved in the appropriation of the Japanese model and
the resulting Japanization of industry, chapter four considers Britain's education reforms
and actual operations in the public schools, comparing them to their equivalent in Japan.
Diagnosticians of the British disease maintained that public education was a key
determinant of Britain's industrial under-performance since the nineteenth century. If there
is a strong correlation between the British disease and reforms in the direction of the
Japanese model, then the education reforms and operational trends in the schools would at
least reflect an awareness and creative response to the Japanese conception of management
education, which has, since Japan's industrialization, evolved in a fundamentally
different manner from the British equivalent. Finally, the epilogue attempts to draw the
evidence together into a world historical framework to further distinguish patterns of
cultural appropriation since the First Industrial Revolution.
ENDNOTES
[2] 'Southernization' (as corollary to Westernization), refers to the spread of methods of medicine, mathematics, textile production methods, and religions from India to China, Africa, and Europe between the 200 and 1300 CE. Lynda Shaffer "Southernization, "Journal of World History," 5 (1) 1994 : 1-21. [back to text]
[3] see Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1982) ; Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (FortWorth, 1976); and Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984). [back to text]
[4] The ideographs for China translate literally, "country at the center.'' [back to text]
[5] For an engaging narrative account of the spread of European-carried diseases, plants, and animals and their dual effect on host societies, see Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1986). [back to text]
[6] The former slogan, 'Civilization and Enlightenment' appealed to the intelligentsia led by Fukuzawa Yukichi, whereas the latter slogan, 'Strong Military and Rich Country' appealed to the masses in the nation's drive to build a military and industrialize. [back to text]
[7] The concept of 'cultural broker' is developed in Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1984). Curtin looks at cross-cultural trade in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1000 BCE to 1600 CE. [back to text]