Penelope Francks – författare

In the historical literature on Japan, rural people have tended to be regarded as the exploited victims of the industrialisation process. This book provides an alternative view of the role and significance of the rural economy in Japan’s emergence as an economic power prior to World War II.

Using theories and approaches derived from development studies and economic history the book describes the nineteenth-century development of a diversified, proto-industrial rural economy, focusing on the strategies employed by households as they sought to secure and improve their livelihoods. The book argues that rural people, through their ‘industrious revolution’, played an active part in determining the course of Japan’s agrarian transition and, eventually, the distinctive features of industrial Japan’s political economy, with the result that rural life still figures largely in the reality and imagination of contemporary Japan.

In the historical literature on Japan, rural people have tended to be regarded as the exploited victims of the industrialisation process. This book provides an alternative view of the role and significance of the rural economy in Japan’s emergence as an economic power prior to World War II.

Using theories and approaches derived from development studies and economic history the book describes the nineteenth-century development of a diversified, proto-industrial rural economy, focusing on the strategies employed by households as they sought to secure and improve their livelihoods. The book argues that rural people, through their ‘industrious revolution’, played an active part in determining the course of Japan’s agrarian transition and, eventually, the distinctive features of industrial Japan’s political economy, with the result that rural life still figures largely in the reality and imagination of contemporary Japan.

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.

This book illuminates the largely neglected contribution of unpaid, primarily female household labour to economic production and living standards in Japan from the early modern period to the eve of World War Two.

The difficulties involved in measuring time devoted to housework and other forms of household labour in the past have meant that most attempts to assess the process of industrialisation have failed to recognise the ways in which such labour is essential to the sustainability and welfare of the population. In this context, Japan presents a significant example of a historical case of industrialisation occurring within an economy that continued to be dominated by the institution of the household.  This short study argues that this must have led to a particularly significant underestimation of Japanese living standards in the past, with implications for comparative and global analysis, and to neglect of the key role of women in the historical economy. Providing a nuanced yet concise analysis, this book will be valuable reading for scholars of economic history and feminist economics, as well as introducing important comparative angles for researchers in Japanese studies and gender studies more widely.