The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw extraordinary transfer and diffusion of industry- and transportation-related technology, and business methods. While most scholarship on nineteenth-century technology transfer beyond Europe and North America has focused on the West-to-East movement of artifacts, skills, and knowledge, Strands of Modernization considers the transfer of technology and business methods within East Asia in the period between approximately 1850 and 1920.

Highlighting currents moving in multiple directions, contributors expand upon conventional notions of what qualifies as a "technology" or a "business practice," looking more broadly at skills, systems of technology, tacit knowledge, and the ideologies and other belief systems with which they interact. The core ambition driving Strands of Modernization is to illuminate processes of adaption, versus adoption, that occur when technology and business practices cross sociocultural boundaries.