Science, technology and economic development—Japanese historical experience in context

Summary

Often enough, the uniqueness of Japanese economic history has been analysed in terms of overarching ‘cultural’ imperatives. The following paper utilizes key episodes in the transition of the Japanese economy in order to suggest that its impetus lay in the political economy of the nation's relations with Western science and technology and the subsequent developments whereby technological change became institutionalized. The power of the Japanese State—forged from a heady mixture of relative backwardness, fear, and militarism—was a necessary feature of national ‘response’, and therefore an integral ingredient of the process whereby Japan began to pose a serious challenge to the superiority of ‘Western’ modes of development and change. The learning process was not, predominantly, one of national acculturation. Rather, the Japanese leadership from the Tokugawa period onwards deliberately and overtly set out to assimilate Western science and technology within an institutional framework which would ensure self-sustained and increasingly independent economic development. We end with an approach to technological systems which may be considered of more general interest to historians of modern technology.