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Writing History Sideways: Lessons for Indian Economic Historians from Meiji Japan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
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The history of economic growth and industrial development in Meiji Japan has long attracted the attention of economic historians of India, especially those who are concerned with the question of industrial development. There is as yet no consensus as to the message of any comparison between Japan and India, and the battlefield between different analyses of the Meiji economy has proved a useful source of pillage to dress up conflicting interpretations of the Indian economy in this and later periods.
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References
1See, for example, Lamb, H., ‘The “State” and Economic Development in India’, in Kuznets, S. S. et al. , (eds), Economic Growth: Brazil, India, Japan (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955), ch.16.Google Scholar
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3For a summary of this, see Charlesworth, British Rule and Indian Economy, ch. 1. The classic academic starting-point for this view is M.D. Morris's contributions to Morris, M. D. et al. , The Indian Economy in the Nineteenth Century: A Symposium (New Delhi, 1969)Google Scholar, and its best encapsulation remains, as Morris himself discovered, the opening paragraph of Winnie the Pooh.
4These ideas and their implications, are discussed in Cornwall, J., Modern Capitalism (Oxford, 1977), ch. 1.Google Scholar
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9Nakamura, James I., Agricultural Production and the Economic Development of Japan, 1873–1922 (Princeton, 1966).Google Scholar For a discussion of the debate that this book sparked off, see Broadridge, S., ‘The Economic Development of Japan, 1870–1920’, Journal of Develop ment Studies (1968).Google Scholar
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11Smith, T. C., ‘Pre-Modern Economic Growth: Japan and the West’, Past and Present (1973).Google ScholarSmith states that it was the skills and values of Japanese farm families that laid the basis for the growth of light industry, especially textiles, which was the leading sector of the industrial economy until the 1930s (pp. 157–9).Google Scholar Other work on the Edo period which supports this view includes Crawcour, E. S., ‘The Tokugawa Heritage’, in Lockwood, W. W. (ed.), The Stale and Economic Enterprise in Japan (Princeton, 1965), ch. 1Google Scholar; Hanley, S. B. and Yamamura, K., Economic and Demographic Change in Pre-Industrial Japan, 1600–1868 (Princeton, 1977)Google Scholar; Hauser, W. B., Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan (Cambridge, 1974).Google Scholar
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13There is an explicit statement of the view in Yamamura, K., ‘Towards a re-examination of the economic history of Tokugawa Japan’, Journal of Economic History (1973).Google Scholar
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15Sinha, R. P., ‘Unresolved issues in Japan's early economic development’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy (1969).Google Scholar
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17The argument here is that the break-down of the system of agriculture based on non-family labour, which T. C. Smith saw as fundamental to agricultural expansion and productivity growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford, 1959Google Scholar)), occurred without the welfare effects on which the revisionist case is based. Where this Japanese interpretation differs crucially from the ‘American’ one of the same data is over the latter's assumption that an increase in smallholding was a rational, maximizing response to the labour shortage. One key area of dispute is over the viability of small-holdings. Thus while contemporary officials in the 1830s thought that commercial pressures were leading to a disintegration of peasant society based on honbyakusho (peasant families with holdings thought to be the minimum needed for subsistence), the revisionists stress that even a three tan holding was now more productive if cultivated on a family basis than was one ten times as large that required hired labour (see Hanley, and Yamamura, , Economic and Demographic Change, pp. 186–90).Google Scholar There is also a debate, the main lines of which will be familiar to Indianists, about whether an increase in the incidence of famine and peasant revolt represents problems of growth or stagnation in agriculture.
18I am grateful to Prof. Norikazu Shimizu of Yahata University for drawing my attention to this literature and for summarizing it for me. A classic treatment of these themes in English will be found in Norman, E. H., Japan's Emergence as a Modern State (New York, 1940), ch. 2.Google Scholar For a more recent questioning of the revisionist case, see Broadbridge, S., ‘Economic and Social Trends in Tokugawa Japan’, Modern Asian Studies (1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19Dore, R. P., Land Reform in Japan (Oxford, 1959), ch. 1Google Scholar; ‘Japan as a Model of Economic Development’, Archives europénes de sociologie (1964)Google Scholar; ‘Land Reform and Japan's Economic Development’, The Developing Economies (1965).Google Scholar
20Smith, T. C., The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan, pp. 152–6.Google Scholar Smith also estimates that in 1935 35% of the average peasant families’ income was received in kind and that as late as 1954 over one third of agricultural income on holdings up to 20 tan remained outside the money economy (pp. 209–10).Google Scholar Compare this to the standard estimate that in the 1950s 40% of all consumption in India did not enter into the monetary sector (see Morris, M. D., ‘Growth of Large-Scale Industry to 1947’, in Kumar, D. (with M. Desai) (ed.), Cambridge Economic History of India 2: c. 1757–1970 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 554).Google Scholar
21For the conflicting arguments see E. H. Norman, Japan's Emergence, ch. V; Ike, N., ‘Taxation and Landownership in the Westernization of Japan’, Journal of Economic History (1947)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Morris, M. D., ‘The Problem of the Peasant Agriculturalist in Meiji Japan, 1873–1885’, Far Eastern Quarterly Review (1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bowen, R. W., Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan (California, 1980), chs 2–3.Google Scholar
22Nakamura, Takafusa, Economic Growth in Pre-War Japan (Feldman, R. A., trans.) (New Haven, 1983), pp. 54–8.Google Scholar
23Koh, S. J., Stages of Industrial Development in Asia (Philadelphia, 1966), ch. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
24Myers, R., ‘Cotton Textile Handicrafts and the Development of the Cotton Textile Industry in Modern China’, Economic History Review (1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25Reubens, E. P., ‘Small-Scale Industry in Japan’, Quarterly Journal of Economics (1947).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26Nakamura, T., Economic Growth in Pre-War Japan, ch. 3.Google Scholar
27For the latest arguments on this, see Tipton, F. B., ‘Government Policy and Economic Development in Germany and Japan: A Skeptical Revaluation’, Journal of Economic History (1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The case is made in detail in Yamamura, Samurai Income, pp. 178ff.
28See Yamamura, K., ‘Success Ill-gotten? The Role of Meiji militarism in Japan's technological progress’, Journal of Economic History (1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Broadbridge, S., ‘Shipbuilding and the state in Japan’, Modern Asian Studies (1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Iida, K., ‘Origin and Development of Iron and Steel Technology in Japan’, in Yamamoto, H. (ed.), Industrialisation and Transportation in Japan (United Nations University, ‘Project on Technological Transfer, Transformation and Development: the Japanese Experience’, n.p., n.d.). Iida makes the point that until 1914 80–90% of Japan's steel output was produced by the state-run Yawata Steel Works. After that the private sector took a larger share, aided by access to Indian pig iron (chiefly from TISCO) which was the cheapest source of supply in the world (pp. 52–3).Google Scholar
29The military activities of the Meiji government were an important element in public capital formation, but this influence should not be exaggerated. While the share taken by defence industries of public sector investment peaked at around 50% in the late 1890s and early 1900s, this fell to 25–30% by 1910–15 (according to the figures in Long Term Economic Statistics vol. 4). If the activities of local governments are added in, total public investment for military purposes amounted to 14% of total government expenditure in 1887–96, 24% in 1897–1906 and 16% in 1907–16 (see Sinha, , ‘Unresolved Issues’ pp. 134–5).Google Scholar Purchasing policies and price subsidies were most important for the steel and ship-building industries, the products of which were significantly more expensive than imports before the 1920s (see Nakamura, T., Economic Growth in Pre-War Japan, pp. 75–6).Google Scholar Other policies of subsidization and support bolstered the shipping industry—thus between 1902 and 1926 government subsidies to the merchant marine (however corruptly obtained) amounted to more than the net earnings of Japanese steamship companies, excluding the boom years of 1915–20 (see Sinha, , ‘Unresolved Issues’, p. 143).Google Scholar Such activities, and those in the overseas banking sector as well, undoubtedly had beneficial effects even for light industries such as cotton textiles. For more details on this whole range of policies, see Sinha, , ‘Unresolved Issues’, pp. 137–40, 144–6Google Scholar
30Thus Sinha has concluded that ‘the new Japan was a product of the political will of the new leadership and not the result of natural self-development of a market-economy’ (‘Unresolved Issues’, p. 148).Google Scholar The latest revisionist answer to this case is not that government was unimportant by the 1900s but that its effect on the economy was malign. Thus Tipton has argued that the Meiji government pursued ‘suboptimal economic policies while limiting political modernization’, thus leading to imbalanced growth which prevented long-term social stability (which would have been possible without these policies because balanced growth would have taken place from below) and resulting in internal repression and external aggression once depression and the threatened loss of foreign markets impaired prospects for continued economic expansion in the 1930s (‘Government Policy and Economic Development’, esp. pp. 149–50). For an earlier questioning of the outcome, rather than the impact, of government policy, see Oshima, H. T., ‘Meiji Fiscal Policy and Economic Progress’, in Lockwood, , State and Economic Enterprise, ch. VII.Google Scholar
31On this see Ch'en, J., State Economic Policies of the Ch'ing Government, 1840–95 (New York, 1980), pp. 75ff.Google Scholar
32On the former relationship, see Yamamura, K., ‘The Founding of Mitsubishi’, Business History Review (1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the latter see Dewey, C. J., ‘The Government of India's “New Industrial Policy”, 1900–1925: Formation and Failure’, in Chaudhuri, K. N. and Dewey, C. J. (eds), Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History (Delhi, 1979), ch. 9.Google Scholar
33Nakamura, T., Economic Growth in Pre-War Japan, pp. 58–9.Google Scholar
34See Yamamura, , Samurai Income, pp. 139–43;Google ScholarHirschmeier, J., ‘Shibusawa Eiichi: Industrial Pioneer’, in Lockwood, , State and Economic Enterprise ch. V.Google Scholar
35Bowen, , Rebellion and Democracy, pp. 102–3.Google Scholar
36Koh, , Stages of Industrial Development, ch. 1;Google Scholar see also the analysis of the managerial and capitalist class in T. Nakamura, Economic Growth in Pre-War Japan, ch. 3, Appendix. It is tempting here to follow the syllogism noticed by K. Yamamura: ‘that modern banking was built by the initiative of heimin, industries depended on bank capital, and therefore heimin initiative and capital played a major role in spurring industrial development during the 1880s’ (Yamamura, K., ‘The Role of the Samurai in the Development of Modern Banking in Japan’, Journal of Economic History (1967), p. 219).Google Scholar Research on the second leg of this is still lacking, although there is some evidence to suggest that, once they were established, many industrial firms outside the zaibatsu groups financed expansion by reinvesting profits rather than by borrowing (see Yamamura, K., ‘Japan, 1868–1930: A Revised View’, in Cameron, R. (ed.), Banking and Economic Development (New York, 1972), ch. VI).Google Scholar For our purposes what is more important is to produce some breakdown of the heimin group to its constituent parts—chonin (merchants) and nomin (peasants)—and to assess the role of each separately in both banking and industry.
37On the theory behind this, see Kelley and Williamson, Lessons from Japanese Development, ch. 12.
38Bowen, , Rebellion and Democracy, pp. 102–3.Google Scholar
39Hemmi, K., ‘Primary Product Exports and Economic Development: the Case of Silk’, in Ohkawa, , Agriculture and Economic Growth, ch. 17.Google Scholar
40Gordon, A. D. D., Businessmen and Politics: Rising Nationalism and a Modernising Economy in Bombay, 1918–1933 (New Delhi, 1978), ch. 3.Google Scholar
41SeeOrchard, J. E., Japan's Economic Position (New York, 1930), pp. 107–8Google Scholar and Allen, G. C. and Donnithorne, A. G., Western Enterprise in Far Eastern Economic Development (London, 1954), pp. 200–1.Google Scholar Allen and Donnithorne's analysis of business structures in the export trades as a whole is interesting: ‘The success of the Japanese in wresting control over foreign trade from Westerners was in some degree associated with the highly integrated character of their country's economic organisation as it developed in the later years of the Maiji era … Thus M.B.K. [Mitsui Bussan Kaisha], in its activities as a silk exporter, drew much of its supplies from reeling mills under its own control, obtained its financial accommodation from the Mitsui Bank and had available Mitsui warehouses, stevedoring companies and shipping lines, as well as agencies overseas. In the cotton industry Mitsui owned one of the three largest firms engaged in exporting cotton piece-goods and importing raw cotton. It had unrivalled resources for breaking into new markets as well as for encroaching upon established trades.’ (pp. 204–5). One of the other Japanese cotton export firms began life as buying agents for Rallis Bros., but quickly elbowed its way into the export trade as well. Rallis remained dominant in the export of Indian cotton until after 1945.
42This is a fashionable concept in the analysis of modern firms, especially multinational corporations. It is defined as the creation of vertical or horizontal integration in production and sales by controlled, rather than market, channels. The major incentives to this type of activity by firms are to avoid the disadvantages, or capitalize on the advantages, of imperfections in external market mechanisms for resource allocation. For a succinct exposition, see Dunning, J., Internationl Production and Multinational Enterprise (London, 1981) ch. 2.Google Scholar
43On the organizations of Japanese commerce in India, see ‘Report on the Conditions and Prospects of British Trade at the Close of the War by His Majesty's Senior Trade Commissioner in India and Ceylon’ (Cmd. 422, 1919), PP. 32–5.Google Scholar
44Saxonhouse, G., ‘A Tale of Japanese Technological Diffusion in the Meiji Period’, Journal of Economic History (1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
45Patrick, H. T., ‘External Equilibrium and Internal Convertability: Financial Policy in Meiji Japan’, Journal of Economic History (1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tsuru, S., Essays on Japanese Economy (Tokyo, 1958), ch. 7Google Scholar, Statistical Appendix. For further discussion of the financial problem of the 1870s, see Rosovsky, H., ‘Japan's Transition to Modern Economic Growth, 1860–1885’, in Rosovsky, H. (ed.), Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of A. Gershenkron (New York, 1966), pp. 91–139.Google Scholar
46The Indian figures are calculated from Banerji, A. K., Aspects of Indo-British Economic Relations, 1858–1898 (Delhi, 1982), p. 241.Google Scholar
47Sinha, R. P., ‘Unresolved Issues’, pp. 129–45.Google Scholar This anslysis dissents from the usual assumptions about the unimportance of foreign capital in Japanese economic development, as set out in Reubens, E., ‘Foreign Capital and Domestic Development in Japan’, in Kuznets, (ed.), Economic Growth, ch. 6.Google Scholar
48Rosovsky, , ‘Japan's transition’, pp. 127ff.Google Scholar
49One famous contemporary estimate is that 15% of land changed hands in this way between 1884 and 1886, but this is probably an exaggeration (see Nakamura, T., Economic Growth in Pre-War Japan, pp. 56–7).Google Scholar
50See Bowen, , Rebellion and Democracy, chs 2–3.Google Scholar Even M. D. Morris's more optimistic account of the diffusion of the benefits of commercialization throughout the agrarian economy suggests that in income terms tenants were worse off in 1885 than they had been in 1873 and all rural groups were worse off in 1885 than they had been in 1881 (Morris, M. D., ‘The Problem of the Peasant Agriculturalist’, pp. 359–63).Google Scholar The adverse effects of the deflation in agriculture may have been intensified if the previous inflationary period had encouraged tenants and small-holders to over-extend themselves to increase market-orientated production. Morris also notes that the traditional explanation of a decrease in owner-occupancy as representing a hiatus in rural income distribution away from small-holders ‘would probably be more accurate during the deflationary period 1881–5’ although, even then, ‘the situation would be intricate’ (p. 367 fn. 40).
51Quoted in Tsuru, , Essays on Japanese Economy, pp. 131–2.Google Scholar
52Morris, M. D., ‘The Growth of Large-Scale Industry to 1947’, Cambridge Economic History of India 2, ch. VII, p. 601.Google Scholar It is also stated here that Japan's per capita GNP was ‘at least twice” that of India's in the 1870s. Other recent calculations suggest that the average annual growth rate of GNP (at constant prices) in Meiji Japan was 1.14%, and between 0.4% and 0.6% in India for the same period. India achieved an average annual increase in aggregate real product of around 1%, as against just under 2% in Japan (see Kelley, and Williamson, , Lessons from Japanese Development p. 97Google Scholar and Goldsmith, R. W., The Financial Development of India, 1860–1977 (New Haven, 1983), pp. 2–3).Google Scholar It should be noted that the recent recalculations of the overall growth of the Meiji economy in the LTES have revised earlier estimates substantially downwards and so mean that the remarkable disparity between rates of investment and rates of growth no longer exist or need to be explained away by special pleading.
53Morris, , ‘Growth’, pp. 598, 599.Google Scholar
54Ray, R. K., Industrialization in India (Delhi, 1979), pp. 229–30.Google Scholar
55For these views on agriculture, see Charlesworth, N., British Rule and the Indian Economy, ch. 2.Google Scholar Charlesworth himself goes further than most in arguing that ‘whatever the performance of agriculture, the rural social structure and its evolution over the nineteenth century in India was admirably attuned to the encouragement of capitalist development’ (p. 31).Google Scholar
56For a recent restatement of the problems of the Indian economy in these terms, see Sen, Sunanda, ‘Trade as a Handmaiden of Colonialism: India between Late Nineteenth Century to First World War’, Studies in History (1983).Google Scholar
57This view is expressed most coherently in Washbrook, D. A., ‘Law, State and Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies (1981), esp. pp. 672–84.Google Scholar
58For a typical case of wheat farming on the frontier of cultivation in Narmada valley, see Stokes, E. T., The Peasant and the Raj (Cambridge, 1978), ch. 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The more general conclusion is that of the Meerut Settlement Officer quoted by C. A. Bayly: ‘the Jat can make the earth give forth a Rupee where the bunniah with his Goojur or Chamar cultivator would with difficulty have raised 4 annas’ (Bayly, C. A., Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 433).Google Scholar
59Maddison, A., Class Structure and Economic Growth; India and Pakistan Since the Moghuls (London, 1971), p. 69.Google Scholar This analysis is based on the year 1938, but the proportion of national income enjoyed by the ‘middling classes’ was certainly no lower in the late nineteenth century.
60‘Growth of Large-Scale Industry’, pp. 553–8Google Scholar; ‘South Asian Entrepreneurship and the Rashomon Effect, 1880–1947’, Explorations in Economic History (1979).Google Scholar
61See the evidence given by both commercial and financial interests to the Indian Currency Committees of 1893 and 1898 (C.3692 of 1893–94 and C.3698–701 of 1899).
62Datta, K. L., Report on the Enquiry into the Rise of Prices in India (Calcutta, 1914), vol. 1Google Scholar argues that the effect of increased returns to agriculture resulting from improved transportation and rising external demand in the 1900s was to strengthen the position of cultivators and agriculturalist moneylenders against the traditional bania and merchant groups (p. 162–3). Datta also suggest that the boom of the 1900s had led to the expansion of the direct up-country buying operations of large import–export firms, and had thus driven out of the market ‘a very large number of dealers in grain and other agricultural products, who used to carry on business as the connecting link between the sellers of surplus production in the villages and the large dealers in trading centres … Competition and facility of communication have also reduced profits in trade’ (pp. 169–70).Google Scholar However, the outbreak of renewed currency instability and price uncertainty from 1916 to 1923 caused the import–export firms to retreat from up-country operations again.
63On this trade, see Atkinson, F. J., ‘Rupee Prices in India, 1870 to 1908’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (1909), pp. 553–8.Google Scholar
64This conclusion is largely based on my own research; see Tomlinson, B. R., The Political Economy of the Raj (London, 1979), ch.2Google Scholar, and ‘Colonial Firms and the Decline of Colonialism in Eastern India, 1914–1947’, Modem Asian Studies (1981).Google Scholar It is supported also by the work of such scholars as Aditya Mukherjee, Omkar Goswami and Claude Markovits. Sugata Mukherji, ‘The Jute Industry in Eastern India During the Depression’, Centre for Study in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Occasional Paper n. 44 (1981)Google Scholar, gives a rather different view of the jute industry, but Mukherji does agree that the depression of 1928–33 caused a fundamental change in the rural organization of jute production.
65As Rosovsky has pointed out, ‘given that the issue of that day—as now—was growth rather than economic democracy, there developed in Japan [before 1945, thanks to the ‘combined investment’ of the zaibatsu,] a certain kind of “bigness' that was unacceptable elsewhere but quite suitable in this setting.’ (Rosovsky, H., ‘What are the “lessons” of Japanese Economic History?’, in Youngson, A. J. (ed.), Economic Development in the Long Run (London, 1972), p. 241).Google Scholar
66See, for example, Byres, T. J., ‘India: Capitalist Industrialisation of Structuralist Stasis’, Bienefeld, and Godfrey, (eds), The Struggle for Development, ch. 5Google Scholar and Shetty, S. L., ‘Structural Regression in the Indian Economy since the mid-Sixties’, Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number (1978).Google Scholar
67A great deal of material for an analysis along these lines can be quarried from Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars.
68Ibid., pp. 424–6.
69See, for example, the papers on Japan and England in Laslett, Peter (ed.), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
70Macfarlane, Alan, The Origins of English Individualism: Family, Property and Social Transition (Oxford, 1978).Google Scholar This study makes no specific mention ofjapan, but does argue that, in terms of the wealth and organization of rural society, ‘to think of India or China in the early twentieth century as directly comparable to England just before the industrial revolution appeared to be a serious mistake’ (p. 4). Kozo Yamamura has specifically argued that, on the other hand, ‘the agricultural and commercial revolutions of the 1550–1650 period [in Japan] resembled many of the changes seen in England in the same period’—notably the growth of ‘independent cultivators’, rural specialization and inter-regional trade (Yamamura, K., ‘Economic Revolution in Japan, 1550–1650’, in Uselding, P. (ed.), Research in Economic History Volume 5, 1980 (Greenwich, Conn., 1980), p. 104).Google Scholar Much of the latest work on Japan by scholars such as Yamamura, Hanley, T. C. Smith and James Nakamura has been on demographic structure and ‘human capital formation’ in the Tokugawa period, and concludes that by the early nineteenth century Japan was already such a unique and growth-orientated economy and society that no comparative perspective is of any use in explaining her subsequent history.
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