East Asian Route of Industrialization? The Case of Japan, 1868-1937

In this book Peer Vries is the first scholar to provide an extensive test of the claim that industrialization in East Asia, in particular in Japan between the Meiji Restoration and World War Two, would have been much more labour intensive than industrialization in the West. He does this by systematically comparing the role and importance of labour and capital in Japan and in a number of Western countries at a similar stage of their industrial development. He uses macro-economic data as well as specific observations by people at the time. It turns out that there is no reason to distinguish a specific labour-intensive Japanese route of industrialization. His comparative analysis provides us with a better understanding of the logic of industrialization in both West and East.