Japan and the Great Divergence

A Short Guide

Penelope Francks

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137576736
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

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.

© The Author(s) 2016

Penelope FrancksJapan and the Great DivergencePalgrave Studies in Economic History10.1057/978-1-137-57673-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Penelope Francks¹ 

(1)

East Asian Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

 

Abstract

The publication in 2000 of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence presented a seminal challenge to the prevailing, largely Eurocentric, view of the path taken by global economic development from the early-modern period onwards. Its argument that the conditions for economic growth in advanced regions of China and other parts of Asia were not significantly different from those of their counterparts in Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution stimulated a debate that has brought global history to life, while initiating a considerable reassessment of, in particular, Chinese economic history. However, it has yet to exert much influence over those who study the only country outside ‘the West’ that did achieve significant industrialisation before the Second World War, that is, Japan.

Keywords

The Great Divergence Economic history of ChinaEconomic history of Japan

End Abstract

It was in the year 2000 that Kenneth Pomeranz , then a professor at the University of California, unleashed upon the somewhat staid world of economic history his book The Great Divergence (Pomeranz 2000). As historians—not just economic ones, as it turned out—began to absorb the detailed arguments and evidence that the book contained, it became clear that a seminal challenge had been posed to a very longstanding consensus view of the path that global economic history had taken from early-modern times. This consensus maintained that the unprecedented leap into sustained economic growth brought about by the Industrial Revolution was rooted in a pattern of development that had prevailed in Europe since at least the sixteenth century. It was therefore this ‘superiority’ that explained the economic, political, and military dominance that Europe, and in due course the USA, came to be able to exercise in the world from the eighteenth century onwards, and hence the inequality in living standards between the ‘West and the rest’ that only began to narrow in the later twentieth century, as major Asian countries started to ‘catch up’.

Against this, Pomeranz essentially argued that this long-term European ‘superiority’ that was assumed to have brought about the Industrial Revolution could not be demonstrated on the ground, and that in fact significant parts of Asia could be shown to have been as developed, from the point of view of the factors that determine economic output and living standards, as much of Europe up to the eighteenth century. It was only thereafter, he maintained, as a result of the Industrial Revolution itself, that the divergence in fortunes across Eurasia set in. Consequently, the industrialisation that had made Europe and the USA the dominant forces in the world economy by the nineteenth century could not be explained as the outcome of particular long-term features of the economies, societies, or cultures of the West. If eighteenth-century China was as well placed as England to achieve sustained economic development, then the fact that the Industrial Revolution occurred when and where it did can only have been the result of particular contingent factors that came to operate on one place but not the other.

Pomeranz’s clear challenge to the Eurocentric picture of global economic change in the early-modern and modern eras has given rise to an explosion of debate that has brought the whole field of world history to life. As we shall see, by no means all of Pomeranz’s contentions have withstood the testing to which they have been subjected, but The Great Divergence has forced global comparison on to the agenda of historical analysis and shaken historians out of their Eurocentric assumptions, giving rise to what Eric Vanhaute deems the ‘single most important debate in recent global history’ (Vanhaute 2015: 7).

Although, where possible, The Great Divergence does include evidence from various parts of Asia, including India and Japan, given Pomeranz’s interests and expertise, the focus is predominantly on the comparison between (parts of) northern Europe and China. Moreover, it has principally been scholars of China who have risen to the challenge of testing and debating the book’s arguments. Scholars of India have more recently begun to take the Great Divergence debate on board, and Prasannan Parthasarathi ’s book Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Parthasarathi 2011) represents a thorough analysis of Indian economic history within a comparative economic framework. Meanwhile, work on the Ottoman Empire has begun to appear within the growing number of collected volumes inspired by the debate (e.g. Broadberry and Hindle 2011). However, as later chapters will show, although dutifully mentioned from time to time, it is largely only within the context of global quantitative comparisons that Japan appears in the discussion. While the efforts to estimate macro-level indicators of Japan’s development over long periods of time have produced interesting results, these have for the most part passed by non-quantitative historians, who continue to conduct their detailed research outside any comparative framework.

This is unfortunate because, as this book aims to show, global historians and scholars of Japan have much to offer each other in terms of both evidence and analytical insights. Japan’s early-modern and modern history has by now been extensively and intensively researched by both Japanese- and Western-language scholars, yet little of this work finds its way into the global and comparative literature emerging out of the Great Divergence debate. As a result, the light that the case of Japan—the only non-Western country to achieve significant industrialisation before the Second World War—might throw on the issues raised by the debate has scarcely been allowed to shine. In as far as work on Japan, subconsciously or not, accepts a global framework, it remains, with some notable exceptions, that of the Eurocentric ‘catch-up ’ model which the Great Divergence debate has so profoundly challenged.

This short book is therefore an attempt to promote dialogue between scholars of Japan and global/comparative historians, and to suggest some of the ways in which the Japanese case might fit into and throw light on the Great Divergence debate. Part I outlines the debate and the issues it has raised, so as to provide a framework within which to fit Japanese evidence. Part II assembles and summarises some of this evidence, concentrating for the most part on that published in English which might be available to non-Asian global historians. Throughout, the book makes substantial use of the important work of more-or-less quantitative economic historians of Japan, which is not always known by or accessible to a non-specialist readership. Equally, though, recent years have seen the publication of a growing number of remarkable qualitative studies of particular aspects of Japan’s early-modern and modernising history by a new generation of scholars. These may well not make it over the disciplinary border between Japanese studies and economic history but can, I believe, be shown to have important, if largely unexplored, implications for the comparative understanding of industrialisation and its preconditions.

In the end, of course, the book offers no definitive answers to the questions posed by the inclusion of Japan in the Great Divergence debate—in some ways, paradoxically, it reinforces the conclusion that research presented in a comparative context merely serves to emphasise the variety of distinctive paths that economic development has taken over the centuries. Nonetheless, if it stimulates others to view Japan’s history within the broader lens that Pomeranz’s seminal work makes possible, it will have done its job.

References

Broadberry, S., & Hindle, S. (Eds.). (2011). Asia in the great divergence. Economic History Review, 64 (special issue), s1.

Parthasarathi, P. (2011). Why Europe grew rich and Asia did not: Global economic divergence, 1600–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pomeranz, K. (2000). The great divergence: China, Europe and the making of the modern world economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Vanhaute, E. (2015). Escaping the great divergence? A discussion about and in response to Peer Vries’s Escaping poverty: The origins of modern economic growth. An introduction. Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Gescheidnis 12(2), 3–16.

Part I
The Great Divergence and Japan So Far

© The Author(s) 2016

Penelope FrancksJapan and the Great DivergencePalgrave Studies in Economic History10.1057/978-1-137-57673-6_2

Begin Abstract

2. The Great Divergence Debate

Penelope Francks¹

(1)

East Asian Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Abstract

The Great Divergence presents a range of evidence for its contention that, by the eighteenth century, the Yangzi Delta was in no worse a position, in terms of living standards, economic institutions, and the spread of the market, to achieve sustained growth in output and incomes than was England. It followed from this that the ‘Great Divergence’ in economic fortunes across Eurasia since the eighteenth century cannot be explained by conditions that preceded the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of which in northern Europe rather than China must therefore depend on contingent factors that relieved resource limitations in one place but not the other. This argument challenged prevailing interpretations of the causes of industrialisation in terms of a longstanding European ‘superiority’ and led to a substantial reassessment of the path of global economic change from the sixteenth century onwards. However, the work on China of the ‘California School’, following Pomeranz, has been replicated for Japan only to a limited, mainly quantitative, extent and the significance of the Japanese case for the issues that The Great Divergence raised has hardly been considered.

Keywords

Kenneth PomeranzEurocentrismIndustrial RevolutionCalifornia School

End Abstract

The Great Divergence is a long and dense book designed to provide the evidence to support Pomeranz’s clear and straightforward—though, as it turned out, highly provocative—claim for ‘a world of surprising resemblances’ across Eurasia in the eighteenth century. ¹ Its central focus is on a comparison between the two regions that represent, according to Pomeranz , the most developed parts of Europe and Asia, respectively, in the early-modern period, England and the Yangzi Delta in China. Other regions—for example, Holland on the European side and Moghul India and Tokugawa Japan, as well as other areas of China, on the Asian side—are brought in from time to time, but one of Pomeranz’s innovations has been to search out and work with comparable parts of two vast continents, rather than making a simple East–West divide. It is on this basis that he presents his argument for the possibility of similar levels of income, welfare, and economic development in general across pre-industrial Eurasia, with its implication that the Great Divergence in prosperity only emerged once Europe had discovered the secret of the sustained and rapid economic growth that industrialisation made possible.

Pomeranz’s attempt to bring together comparable quantitative and qualitative data to support such an argument was largely unprecedented. Nonetheless, he was able to assemble a wide range of evidence on incomes, living standards, and the institutions and infrastructure underlying the economies of both his regions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This enabled him to argue that levels of consumption of food, textiles, and other basic goods were broadly equivalent (even if quite different in their composition) and that comparable standards of welfare led to comparable life expectancies. At the same time, he showed that the degree of commercialisation did not differ significantly across the two economies and that sophisticated market systems operated in China as in England. Local, national, and international trade were highly developed in both regions, and the institutional bases for market activity, such as property rights, were equally well established, even if their forms were different. The Yangzi Delta thus appeared to have been as capable as England of generating the form of economic expansion, based on the spread of the market and the consequent division of labour, that has come to be known as ‘Smithian ’ growth. ² Hence, in terms of the factors that determined the level of economic development in the pre-industrial world, the Yangzi Delta and England appeared to resemble each other more than they differed.

If this were so, the implications for understanding of the pattern of world development over the centuries were nothing short of revolutionary. Since the nineteenth century at least, those looking for answers to the question of why the Industrial Revolution began in England/Europe, or to the closely related ‘Needham question’ as to why the Scientific Revolution did not take place in China, had turned to any number of particular features of European economic, social, cultural, or political history that could be contrasted with their Chinese, or more broadly Asian, counterparts. As later chapters will illustrate, explanations ranged from the impact of the European voyages of discovery and the acquisition of empires, through the invention of the institutions of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 1. The Great Divergence and Japan So Far
• 2. The Japanese Case
• Backmatter