Critical Readings on the History of Industrialization in Modern Japan

This is a three-volume collection of 44 essays exploring aspects of the social and economic processes of Japan's industrialization from the Tokugawa period to the present. Editor Gerteis (history of modern and contemporary Japan, School of Oriental and African Studies, U. of London, England) devotes the first volume to the Tokugawa period, the second to the Meiji period, and the third to the 20th century. The Tokugawa-focused papers address such topics as class and bureaucracy, state-building, social structure and population change, international trade, material culture and standards of living, the status of the peasantry, banking and finance, the diffusion of cotton processing and trade, and commercial growth and environmental change. The Meiji-focused volume discusses rural industry and economic development, sericulture and the origins of Japanese industrialization, the role of militarization in technological progress, factor legislation and management modernization, the role of the academic elite, literacy and illiteracy, and the early history of Mitsubishi. The final volume includes papers on the role of holding companies in pre-war economic development, gender and the labor market in the textile industry, ethnicity and colonial labor, mobilizing savings in wartime, war and welfare policy, class and gender in the labor movement, and debates over corporate governance. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Christopher Gerteis, Ph.D. (2001), is a Lecturer of the History of Modern and Contemporary Japan at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London where he teaches the social and cultural history of Japan. He is author of Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). Dr Gerteis' current research investigates the intersection of consumer capitalism, industrial heritage and historical memory in the twentieth century.