By Kären Wigen
Contending that Japan's commercial and imperial revolutions have been additionally geographical revolutions, K?ren Wigen's interdisciplinary examine analyzes the altering spatial order of the nation-state in early smooth Japan. Her concentration, the Ina Valley, served as a gateway to the mountainous inside of significant Japan. utilizing tools drawn from old geography and fiscal improvement, Wigen maps the valley's changes--from a quarter of small settlements associated in an self reliant fiscal area, to its transformation right into a peripheral a part of the worldwide silk alternate, depending on the country. but the approaches that introduced those changes--industrial progress and political centralization--were the most important to Japan's upward thrust to imperial energy. Wigen's elucidation of this makes her e-book compelling studying for a large viewers.
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Extra info for The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (Twentieth-Century Japan : the Emergence of a World Power)
Sample text
As early as the 1770s, an Iida merchant gambled his personal fortune and a decade of his life on the possibility of opening a commercial shipping business to run the length of the river. A surveyor in his hire counted sixty places where the riverbed would require work or where portages would have to be improved, estimating that 2,200 days' labor by skilled stone masons, and an additional 6,525 days' input from manuallaborers, would be required for the job. Undaunted, the merchant petitioned the Bakufu for years for permission to undertake the work.
However one judges their achievement, the question of what allowed the Japanese to reach industrial and imperial power in a few decades continues to spark lively interest. It has also sparked a controversy over the depth of the mid-nineteenth-century discontinuity, with scholars debating whether primary credit for Japan's modern achievements rests with its Tokugawa heritage or rather with the bold institutional innovations of the Meiji period. Distinguishing inheritance from invention clearly calls for a vision that spans the Tokugawa/Meiji divide.
22. The concept of a "territorial anatomy of production" is introduced in Storper and Scott 1986:14. The more inclusive phraseology used here-accommodating circulation and consumption as well as production-springs from my own conviction that the economy is a coherent whole that includes all three activities, and that it is pointless to privilege anyone part of the economic circuitry over any other. Similar concerns animate the work of Carol Smith (1976a, 1976b) and Fernand Braudel (1990:460). 23.