Reclaiming Ground: Japan’s Great Convergence

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues in this endeavor, Federico Marcon, Ian Jared Miller, and Robert Stolz as well as to Brett Walker. For their patient and perceptive readings of versions of my own work, I thank Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Eric Dinmore, Fabian Drixler, Geoff Eley, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Andrew Gordon, Robert Hellyer, David Howell, Mark Metzler, Geoffrey Parker, Kenneth Pomeranz, Daniel Lord Smail, and Amy Beth Stanley.

Notes

¹ See, for instance, Manning, ‘AHR Forum’, and O’Brien, ‘Metanarratives in Global Histories of Material Progress’ and ‘Ten Years of Debate on the Origins of the Great Divergence’.

² Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. See especially the preface to the second 2007 edition.

³ For the argument that Western economic and political success has deep roots, see, for instance, Aldcroft and Sutcliffe, Europe in the International Economy, 1500-2000; Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations; Morris, Why the West Rules; and Thompson, The Emergence of the Global Political Economy.

⁴ O’Brien, ‘Ten Years of Debate on the Origins of the Great Divergence,’ 12. Pomeranz too is careful to include references to Japan’s different trajectory.

⁵ Walker, ‘Ijin naru shūren’.

⁶ Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 311.

⁷ Vries, ‘Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial?’, 410–11.

⁸ See also Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not.

⁹ For a collection of essays looking at nature from this wide range of perspectives, see Daston and Vidal, The Moral Authority of Nature.

¹⁰ See my argument in Reconfiguring Modernity.

¹¹ The phrase ‘biological Old Regime’ comes from Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 70. See also Marks, The Origins of the Modern World, 22–32.

¹² Lieberman, Strange Parallels, especially Vol. 2, and Lieberman, ‘What Strange Parallels Sought to Accomplish’.

¹³ De Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’.

¹⁴ Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier, 6.

¹⁵ Albritton Jonsson, ‘Adam Smith in the Forest’, 53.

¹⁶ Albritton Jonsson, ‘The Origins of Cornucopianism’.

¹⁷ Latour, We Have Never been Modern, 10–11.

¹⁸ Udagawa Yōan, Botanika kyō [Botany sutra]. Edo: Udagawajuku, 1822.

¹⁹ For a clear articulation of nature’s centrality to fascist ideology, see Neocleous, Fascism. I have written on the role of nature in Japanese and German critiques of fascism, comparing Maruyama Masao with Horkheimer and Adorno, in ‘The Cage of Nature’.

²⁰ Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 157, Figure 3.3.

²¹ The first such operation in the West was in America, at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846. Geddes, ‘Banishing Consciousness’, 76.

²² For a rich, insightful account of medicine and other sciences in Japan, see Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan.

²³ Levy, Modernization. I am indebted to Ian J. Miller for his allowing me to read ‘Tokyo’s Electric Modernity: Japan in the Age of Global Energy’ where he provides an insightful analysis of energy’s relationship with concepts of modernity.

²⁴ Alan Macfarlane compares England and Japan with the health-giving properties of tea in mind. Macfarlane, The Savage Wars of Peace, especially Chapter III, 105–80.

²⁵ Howell, ‘Fecal Matters’, and Perez, ‘Kuso Happens’.

²⁶ Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan, 197. Drixler, Mabiki, reveals how early modern Japanese kept their human population in line with the available resources.

²⁷ Kimoto, ‘Kazoku, jendā, kaisō’.

²⁸ Allison, Precarious Japan.

²⁹ For Marx, one of the most systematic and emphatic efforts is Foster, Marx’s Ecology. Also of interest is Ted Benton, The Greening of Marxism. For John Walker, Adam Smith and others, see Albritton Jonsson’s Enlightenment’s Frontier and ‘Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce’.