How does a late-developing country transition from an agrarian, semi-autarkic, and technologically backward economy to one that is an industrial leader exporting its manufactures to other parts of the world? For Japan in the late nineteenth century, the answer seems to be a highly interventionist government intent on developing domestic capacity, allowing the country to move away from foreign capital imports even as it was constrained by the forces of globalization.

In his new book, “Trading Locomotives,” Naofumi Nakamura makes a clear and articulate argument for this as shown through the development of the Japanese railroad industry at the turn of the twentieth century. Over eight chapters, including an introduction and conclusion, Nakamura analyzes the international context of railway technology starting from the period when Japan was forcibly opened to Western markets in the mid-1800s. The country’s leaders adeptly adapted to a world where foreign exporters took advantage of differences in technology to cement leadership in manufacturing and reinforced specialization among those with manufacturing nous at the expense of less advanced nations. At the same time, the high degree of competition among Western countries like the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany meant that as the technologies for railways changed, Japan could adopt best practices and increase its leverage to develop its own industry, which became relatively self-sufficient by the eve of the First World War.

Unlike other books on railroad history, for example, Steven Ericson’s excellent volume, The Sound of the Whistle (1996), Nakamura’s monograph emphasizes the role of individuals like the British engineer Francis Trevithick, the Japanese trade liaison Yamada Majiro, and the American salesman Samuel Vauclain, who were instrumental in the trajectory of the industry’s development in Japan. From the various (and surprisingly sympathetic) oyatoi, who were the foreign specialists employed at great expense by the Japanese government, to the tireless Japanese engineers, commercial intermediaries, and public servants eager to learn best practices, readers appreciate the difficulties inherent in building a strong nation-state while under the specter of colonization. That Japan itself became an empire was in no small part due to its ability to integrate its domestic market with railways and to marshal its meager resources to project power against much larger adversaries like China and Russia. Even more remarkably, Japan was able to do this while encumbered with unequal treaties with Western nations, which meant it was unable to protect its industries with tariffs against foreign imports.

Nakamura’s central thesis, that the “Japanese state was the most important player in the localization of railroad technology,” rests on how the government systematically developed the human resources and institutions to gradually replace the country’s reliance on costly imports (p. 201). While these efforts ultimately paid off, as shown by the ability of domestic manufacturers to successfully build locomotives in the early 1900s, a case can also be made that the process was highly contingent on exogenous factors. These include the unexpected victories against both China and Russia, which meant that Japan had the fiscal capacity to transition to the gold standard and to gain its first colonies, as well as changes in international leadership in railroad technology. That the British lost their edge to both the Americans and Germans was outside the remit of the Japanese government, but the latter was able to identify these developments as useful for its own industry.

For scholars of transport and trade, the book is useful in providing breakdowns of production and imports to Japan of locomotives by Western manufacturers over the five decades before the First World War. Somewhat surprising is the lack of information about government expenditures on the costs of the oyatoi system, procurement contracts, and facility construction, and a cost-benefit analysis of the nationalization of railways in 1906–1907. That said, the book is amply referenced with many Japanese language sources that may not be easily accessed by non-Japanese scholars. The final chapter is also tantalizing in its comparison of Japanese and Chinese development over the same period, suggesting but not fully explaining reasons for the two countries’ industrial divergence when faced with similar threats to sovereignty and limited financial capacity. Also omitted from the discussion are the human costs of Japanese imperialism, which would darken the book’s relatively optimistic tone. That said, this slim volume provides much needed contextualization of the macroeconomic contours of Japanese railway development, which hurtled over technological, financial, and political obstacles much like the country itself.