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Countries commencing industrialization with relatively low levels of agricultural productivity, hence low wages, enjoy advantages that can also prove host to daunting challenges. The chief advantage is a relatively elastic supply of labor for manufacturing; the chief challenge is how to free up farm labor for factory employment through the raising of labor productivity in farming. Key to raising agricultural labor productivity is providing incentives to increase effort levels including hours worked — access to markets being crucial — and improving the quality of labor as measured by health indicators and educational attainment. The willingness of elites to promote improvements in infrastructure — physical infrastructure in the form of roads and railroads and hydroelectric systems; human capital enhancing infrastructure augmenting the educational attainment and health of populations in rural areas; and financial infrastructure — and to invest directly in factories is crucial to the process by which labor is transferred from farming to manufacturing activities. During the period 1850 to 1935 elites in China tended to resist the requisite changes while elites in Japan did not. This legacy played a crucial role in shaping the nature of post-1950 economic development in the two countries.

Following the opening of Japan's ports in 1859, Nagasaki rapidly became one of Japan's leading industrial centres, which included shipbuilding. It has been largely overshadowed by interest in the Meiji settlements of Kobe and Yokohama. Fully illustrated, the value of the work is reinforced by additional key data to be found in the appendices.

In this unique anthology, Steckel and Floud coordinate ten essays that bring a new perspective to inquiry about standard of living in modern times. These papers are arranged for international comparison, and they individually examine evidence of health and welfare during and after industrialization in eight countries: the United States, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia. The essays incorporate several indicators of quality of life, especially real per capita income and health, but also real wages, education, and inequality. And while the authors use traditional measures of health such as life expectancy and mortality rates, this volume stands alone in its extensive use of new \"anthropometric\" data—information about height, weight and body mass index that indicates changes in nations' well-being. Consequently, Health and Welfare during Industrialization signals a new direction in economic history, a broader and more thorough understanding of what constitutes standard of living.

After World War II, Japan reinvented itself as a shipbuilding powerhouse and began its rapid ascent in the global economy. Its expansion strategy integrated raw material procurement, the redesign of global transportation infrastructure, and domestic industrialization. In this authoritative and engaging study, Stephen G. Bunker and Paul S. Ciccantell identify the key factors in Japan's economic growth and the effects this growth had on the reorganization of significant sectors of the global economy. Bunker and Ciccantell discuss what drove Japan's economic expansion, how Japan globalized the work economy to support it, and why this spectacular growth came to a dramatic halt in the 1990s. Drawing on studies of ore mining, steel making, corporate sector reorganization, and port/rail development, they provide valuable insight into technical processes as well as specific patterns of corporate investment. East Asia and the Global Economy introduces a theory of \"new historical materialism\" that explains the success of Japan and other world industrial powers. Here, the authors assert that the pattern of Japan's ascent is essential for understanding China's recent path of economic growth and dominance and anticipating what the future may hold.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan went through massive welfare expansions that sparked debates about citizenship. At the heart of these disputes stood African Americans and Koreans.Reinventing Citizenshipoffers a comparative study of African American welfare activism in Los Angeles and Koreans' campaigns for welfare rights in Kawasaki. In working-class and poor neighborhoods in both locations, African Americans and Koreans sought not only to be recognized as citizens but also to become legitimate constituting members of communities. Local activists in Los Angeles and Kawasaki ardently challenged the welfare institutions. By creating opposition movements and voicing alternative visions of citizenship, African American leaders, Tsuchiya argues, turned Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty into a battle for equality. Koreans countered the city's and the nation's exclusionary policies and asserted their welfare rights. Tsuchiya's work exemplifies transnational antiracist networking, showing how black religious leaders traveled to Japan to meet Christian Korean activists and to provide counsel for their own struggles. Reinventing Citizenshipreveals how race and citizenship transform as they cross countries and continents. By documenting the interconnected histories of African Americans and Koreans in Japan, Tsuchiya enables us to rethink present ideas of community and belonging.

This article presents a narrative of the unfolding of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) since the theory was first formulated in 1986. The first part recapitulates the foundations of the theory, and documents the spread of the SDT to the point that it now covers most European populations. Also for Europe, it focuses on the relationship between the SDT and the growing heterogeneity in period fertility levels. It is shown that the current positive relationship between SDT and TFR levels is not a violation of the SDT theory, but the outcome of a \"split correlation\" with different sub-narratives concerning the onset of fertility postponement and the degree of subsequent recuperation in two parts of Europe. The second part of the article addresses the issue of whether the SDT has spread or is currently spreading in industrialized Asian countries. Evidence gathered for Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan is presented. That evidence pertains to both the macro-level (national trends in postponement of marriage and parenthood, rise of cohabitation) and the micro-level (connections between individual values orientations and postponement of parenthood). Strong similarities are found with SDT patterns in Southern Europe, except for the fact that parenthood is still very rare among Asian cohabiting partners.

Do external imbalances increase the risk of financial crises? This paper studies the experience of 14 developed countries over 140 years (1870-2008). It exploits the long-run data set in a number of different ways. First, the paper applies new statistical tools to describe the temporal and spatial patterns of crises and identifies five episodes of global financial instability in the past 140 years. Second, it studies the macroeconomic dynamics before crises and shows that credit growth tends to be elevated and short-term interest rates depressed relative to the \"natural rate\" in the run-up to global financial crises. Third, the paper shows that recessions associated with crises lead to deeper slumps and stronger turnarounds in imbalances than during normal recessions. Finally, the paper asks to what extent external imbalances help predict financial crises. The overall result is that credit growth emerges as the single best predictor of financial instability. External imbalances have played an additional role, but more so in the pre-WWII era of low financialization than today.

In Beyond the Metropolis, Louise Young looks at the emergence of urbanism in the interwar period, a global moment when the material and ideological structures that constitute \"the city\" took their characteristic modern shape. In Japan, as elsewhere, cities became the staging ground for wide ranging social, cultural, economic, and political transformations. The rise of social problems, the formation of a consumer marketplace, the proliferation of streetcars and streetcar suburbs, and the cascade of investments in urban development reinvented the city as both socio-spatial form and set of ideas. Young tells this story through the optic of the provincial city, examining four second-tier cities: Sapporo, Kanazawa, Niigata, and Okayama. As prefectural capitals, these cities constituted centers of their respective regions. All four grew at an enormous rate in the interwar decades, much as the metropolitan giants did. In spite of their commonalities, local conditions meant that policies of national development and the vagaries of the business cycle affected individual cities in diverse ways. As their differences reveal, there is no single master narrative of twentieth century modernization. By engaging urban culture beyond the metropolis, this study shows that Japanese modernity was not made in Tokyo and exported to the provinces, but rather co-constituted through the circulation and exchange of people and ideas throughout the country and beyond.

This paper is concerned with the development of national primary education regimes in Europe, North America, Latin America, Oceania, and Japan between 1870 and 1939. We examine why school systems varied between countries and over time, concentrating on three institutional dimensions: centralization, secularization, and subsidization. There were two paths to centralization: through liberal and social democratic governments in democracies, or through fascist and conservative parties in autocracies. We find that the secularization of public school systems can be explained by path-dependent state-church relationships (countries with established national churches were less likely to have secularized education systems) but also by partisan politics. Finally, we find that the provision of public funding to private providers of education, especially to private religious schools, can be seen as a solution to religious conflict, since such institutions were most common in countries where Catholicism was a significant but not entirely dominant religion.

Between 1880 and 1910, Japanese exports increased in volume, changed composition, and shifted from leading industrialized countries toward poorer Asian neighbors. Using a new dataset disaggregated by product and trade partner for the universe of Japanese exports, we find extensive margins accounted for 30 percent of export growth, with trade costs and market size associated with successful market entry. There was also considerable persistence in maintaining market presence and exit was rare. These stylized facts provide insight into both the country’s economic development, as reflected in its exported products, as well as the demand conditions of its trade partners.