At its founding in 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) selected its Governing Body from eight ‘states of Chief Industrial Importance’. The ILO’s attempt to define industrial importance was predicated on its seemingly expert-driven and statistical impartiality. As a technical organization, this standard was created to depoliticize the selection of its Governing Body. Yet, with its utilization of relative economic indicators, the standard ended up recreating a highly Eurocentric Governing Body. Resistance to these metrics by aggregately large but relatively underdeveloped economies, such as colonial India, reveals the inherently political nature of attempting to define industrial ‘importance’. This article examines the little-known history of how the Indian delegation to the ILO challenged the ILO’s Eurocentric metrics, constituting what it meant to be industrially important. In doing so, this article questions to what extent ‘technical’ international organizations can remain apolitical spaces and how our contemporary international institutions are responding to the increasing politicization of their function.

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The turn of the nineteenth century saw an increasing encroachment of Russian explorations into and around isolationist Japan, culminating with the capture and imprisonment of Russian naval captain Vasily Golovnin in 1811. These Russian attempts to "open" Japan were a threat to the established contact between Japan and Europe through the Dutch base in Dejima at Nagasaki, which gave the Dutch a monopoly on relations and the transfer of knowledge between Japan and Europe. However, Russia's imperial designs in the North Pacific and the Napoleonic wars, which reduced Dutch power, threatened this monopoly, offering new perspectives on Japan and throwing political relations with the Japanese Shogunate (Bakufu) into turmoil. This paper compares Dutch and Russian approaches to contact with Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century and examines how actions such as Golovnin's imprisonment foreshadowed an end for Japanese isolationism and the Dutch monopoly on contact with the Shogunate.

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