This introduction focuses on the long three decades, from the early 1870s to the turn of the century, paying particular attention to major developments in media, journalism, the educational system, literacy, and practices of writing and reading in the larger sociopolitical context. Toward the end of 1873, a group of leading scholars and intellectuals, who played important roles in Meiji nation building as government officials, and who shared similar concerns with Fukuzawa Yukichi. The oligarchic government aggressively promoted a policy of "developing national prosperity and military strength" after leading members of the early Meiji government came back from an eighteen-month embassy to the United States and Europe, where they witnessed first-hand the modern system of industrial capitalism and its infrastructure. From the early 1900s, after Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the phonocentric ideology of the national language emerged as the core of systematic national language policy, in which the differences between the spoken and written languages were ideologically suppressed.

This chapter explores the interaction between technological innovation and the global spread of capitalism from 1848 to 2005. It then examines the interaction of technological innovation, the global spread of capitalism, and the varied ability of nations to "catch up" with the technological and economic leaders in the world economy during this period of more than 150 years. Technology is the integration of knowledge, organization, and technique, directed towards material transformations. The importance of incremental innovation underscores the complex relationship between the appearance of a new technology and its adoption. Innovation in transportation and communications technologies was essential to the growth of domestic and international commerce during the period between 1870 and 1914. The rise of industrial capitalism also changed the process of innovation itself. Government policies exerted a direct and indirect influence on innovation in the post-1850 world. Innovation was spurred by the growth of capitalism, but technology had powerful effects on the global spread of capitalism.

The circulation of resources for welfare is a central theme in the urban history of Britain, and the terms on which welfare was provided had an immediate effect on another process of circulation: migration within the urban network, as discussed by David Feldman. Regional urban networks revolved around a major city, which coordinated the activities of towns within a specialised economy. One of the major concerns of economists and political scientists is to understand the circumstances in which individual rationality gives way to collective action. The scale of investment in the infrastructure of urban services, such as roads, railways, sewers, water, gas, electricity, was huge, and created major problems both of collective action and of regulation of private enterprise. A common view of British history in the nineteenth century assumes a division between industrial capitalism in the North, and a commercial and service economy in the South.