Japan and the Great Divergence
A Short Guide

Authors: Penelope Francks



Introduces a new comparative framework to the debate over the origins of the industrial revolution

This text offers an accessible guide to the ways in which our growing knowledge of development in early-modern and modernising Japan can throw light on the paths that industrialisation was eventually to take across the globe. It has long been taken as read that the industrial revolution was the product of some form of ‘European superiority’ dating back to at least early-modern times. In The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz challenged this assumption on the basis of his evidence that parts of eighteenth-century China were as well placed as northern Europe to achieve sustained economic growth, thus igniting what has been called ‘the single most important debate in recent global history’. Japan, as the only non-Western country to experience significant industrialisation before the Second World War, ought to provide crucial – and intriguing – evidence in the debate, but analysis of the Japanese case in such a context has remained limited. This work suggests ways of re-interpreting Japanese economic history in the light of the debate, so arguing that global historians and scholars of Japan have in fact much to say to each other within the comparative framework that the Great Divergence provides.

Table of contents

Front Matter

Introduction

The Great Divergence and Japan So Far
• Front Matter
• The Great Divergence Debate
• Explaining the Great Divergence
• Japan in the Great Divergence Debate: The Quantitative Story

The Japanese Case
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Interpreting the Tokugawa Economy
• Resources, Trade, and Globalisation
• Institutions and the Market
• The Role of the State
• Knowledge, Technology, and Culture
• Consumption and the Industrious Revolution
• Conclusion

Back Matter

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