日本的工業化如何/為何如此快速且好？
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a_ramdaniHow/Why did Japan industrialise so fast and well?
1853 was when Perry's gunships forced Japan to open up with unequal trade deals.
1904 was when the Japanese navy kicked the Russian empire's ass in the Battle of Port Arthur, and later obliterated them in the Battle of Tsushima.
Fifty years to become a World Great Power. How and why did that happen? Why didn't Japan end up like pretty much every other non-European polity in the Nineteenth Century, incapable of awakening from complacency, rejecting modern technology, brought to their knees by the Maxim gun? Did they have good iron ore? Good coal mines? A highly efficient central bureaucracy? A strong artisan class that could make the jump to industrial ingenuity?
Why/How did Japan succeed where Quing China, Siam, Persia, the Ottomans, the Mughal, and so on, failed?
ReaperReaderIt is always hard to rigorously explain the economic outcomes of a particular country at a particular time, every plausible theory seems to come up against an exception, mostly Ireland.
Japan does however share some features with the UK, home of the Industrial Revolution. They are both temperate islands offshore, but close to, the Eurasian continent, so exposed to a wide range of ideas and technologies but relatively insulated from invasion.
There are also signs of a high level of social trust in Japan. Social trust and a lack of corruption is correlated with economic development and Japan is currently 20th in the world in terms of Transparency International's corruption perceptions index (the UK is 12th, the USA 23). While this is modern data, and unfortunately no one was collecting anything comparable in the 19th century, let alone earlier, there is some evidence that these social factors can be long lasting.
The Edo-era government of Japan, from 1603 to 1867, was inward looking, but it set up the environment for development. It enforced peace internally and liberalised internal trade, including banning inter-regional customs duties (Ono, pg 22). It also improved transport infrastructure This period saw rising agricultural productivity, like Britain did, with Japan's ppoulation rising from 17.0 million in 1600 to 31.3million in 1721 (Bassino, table 1A, page 24). However, Japan's last peacetime famine was in the 19th century, not the 17th.
This period also saw rising activity in commerce, finance and what is called 'pre-modern manufacturing', also known as handicraft industries (basically, industry without the sort of massive leaps in productivity driven by new techniques and machinery that happened in Britain with the industrial revolution) ( (Bassino, table 5, page 29). The urbanisation rate rose from an estimated 6.4% in 1600 to 12.0% in 1850 (Bassino, table 3, page 27).
Markets became integrated nation wide. Education became increasingly available, in both urban and rural areas (Ono, page 33) (while England has a reputation amongst historians for being a bit backwards in terms of educating the masses, there was a network of schools throughout the country attended by the middling classes, e.g. Issac Newton, the son of a prosperous yeoman, was sent to school as a boy, and of course Scotland had a strong reputation for education from the 17th century onwards).
This is not to say that Edo-era government was 200+ years of genius administration. Policies shifted between tight regulation of private economic activity and more laissez-faire approaches, and while there are many debates on the merits of the two, I don't know of anyone who argues both are right. Managing fiscal deficits was a problem and inflation rose towards the end of the Edo period. But then the British government also made plenty of bad decisions.
Perhaps most seriously for economic development, the Japanese only had access to new European medicines and scientific discoveries via Dutch books, they could not go abroad to study. The British didn't suffer under that handicap. So by the time of the Meji government, Japan already shared many features in common with Britain: a market economy, increased economic production across multiple sectors, relative peace, a reasonably widespread educated population.
There actually was a Japanese academic, Dr Tado Umesao (an anthroplogist), who argued that, if it were not for the Edo-era policy of isolation, Japan would have achieved the Industrial Revolution about the same time (Ono, page 9, note I haven't read Dr Umesao's original work myself). This theory isn't widely accepted amongst economic historians, but this has a chunk to do with most historians' awareness of the contingency of history and the difficulty of proving such a counter-factual statement.
However, despite all this evidence that Japan was like Britain in many ways, this doesn't mean that this was definitely the explanation. Another possibilty is that there is something distinct to the culture/environment of East Asia that we can't measure well, but is important. East Asia has seen many other cases of economic takeoff: Taiwan and South Korea after achieving political independence, Hong Kong under British laissez-faire rule post WWII, and China more recently, plus, arguably Singapore (a bit further away geographically but with heavy Chinese cultural influences). Obviously economic growth in East Asia can be prevented by bad enough government policies (e.g. North Korea) or widespread civil war (China was very politically unstable in the 19th and early 20th centuries), but these East Asian economies keep showing up as an outlander on economic growth models.
I'll now turn to the Meiji-era government that was in power from 1868-1912, so after the enforced opening of Japan to trade over 1853-1854.
In the Meiji-era, government was actively in favour of industrialision and promoted import substitution. Ono emphasises however that private sector dynamism was even more essential (page 56), noting that many state-owned enterprises set up during this period were loss-making until they were sold to the private sector and restructured (page 45). I also note that Sweden and Denmark had much more laissez-faire policies in the 19th century while their economies were growing too (see a comment I wrote here a month ago). The economic histography of this era indicates that economic development was mainly domestically led, rather than driven by trade (Carl, 2004).
The Meji-era governments also had some policies that were harmful to economic development, chiefly colonisation, eventually leading in to the disaster of WWII. Japanese GDP growth rates from 1880 to 1930 averaged 1.9%, good for the period but well below Japan's peformance post WWII through to 1980.
So, in summary, Japan was similar in a number of ways to Britain in the 17th-19th centuries. Arguably, its opening up to the West in the 1850s unleashed its ability to utilise those its strengths. But it's not certain, there may be some general factor across East Asian economies that we haven't yet, and maybe can't, measure, and Japan was just politically in a place to use those first in the 19th century.
Sources(not linked in text)
Jean-Pascal Bassino, Stephen Broadberry, Kyoji Fukao, Bishnupriya Gupta, and Masanori Takashima, JAPAN AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE, 730-1874, University of Oxford, Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History, Number 156, April 2017, working paper online at https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/working_papers/2840/156aprilbroadberry.pdf
Mosk, Carl. “Japan, Industrialization and Economic Growth”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. January 18, 2004. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/japanese-industrialization-and-economic-growth/
Ono, Kenichi, 2006 The Economic Development of Japan: The Path Traveled by Japan as a Developing Country, GRIPS Economic Development Forum. Available online at http://www.grips.ac.jp/vietnam/KOarchives/download_E.htm
Saito, Osamu. 2010. “An Industrious Revolution in an East Asian Market Economy? Tokugawa Japan and Implications for the Great Divergence.” Australian Economic History Review 50 (3).
And given that I linked to a comment of mine, I'll just ping myself to save the autobot, u/reaperreader
a_ramdaniFirst of all, thank you for a phenomenal effort-post! This being said, there's one point that surprised me:
many state-owned enterprises set up during this period were loss-making until they were sold to the private sector and restructured
Interesting! My understanding was that this is usually done in the opposite way: state-owned enterprises that make money get privatised, while privately-owned enterprises that make a loss but whose work absolutely needs getting done get taken care of by the State, or at least bailed out or subsidized.
Actually, has anyone ever looked at whether this is in fact the general rule, or whether the trend is actually the opposite?
One extra question for the road: how does the Sino-spheric general "Imperial Bureaucracy" model compare to that which Western (both European and Islamic) countries inherited from the Roman/Byzantine, Hellenic, and Persian/Mesopotamian/Levantine world? Education systems, civil servant exams, approaches to rights and the rule of law, intensity and effectiveness of government regulation and policing, the populace's own self-policing, self-coordination, and self-censorship, the ability to mobilize troops and effectively ensure internal and external peace, the relationship to banking systems and the ability to finance large projects while mitigating overall risk...
I'd also be interested in the Indian/Indo-China/Oceania continuum, and the institutional and trade climate of polities like the Majapahit, Angkor, Java, and Pagan Burma. My understanding is that those empires, particularly Majapahit, were sustained on trade rather than violent coertion. Is that correct? How did that affect how people related to the State? How did it affect these countries' current situation?
I'm not aware of any research that has looked at profitability of SOEs before privatisation as a driver of what firms get privatised, and I haven't found any academic articles on this in a brief search (which is not to say that there isn't any research on this). The closest is that Netter (2001), in a literature review of privatisation research, does note that governments do typically choose to privatise the more profitable SOEs via share issue privatisations (SIPs) (page 240). But that's about the method of privatisation.
An other general finding of the literature is that there's quite a bit of variation in how it happens, both between countries and over time in the same country, down to local political situations. So even if there is a tendency, Japan could easily have been an exception.
But this sort of cross-country comparative research is mainly confined to 1984 onwards (apart from some discussion of the early reforming countries such as Thatcher's UK and New Zealand), when the World Bank's database starts coverage.
As for your other two questions, I don't have the foggiest sorry. My expertise is more in comparative modern economic history, particularly for Western countries, though sometimes I wander into English medieval economic history just because the roots of the Industrial Revolution get so much attention. I suggest asking these as separate questions, two separate questions. You have roused my curiosity with them and I'll be checking for answers.
Sources
ZOHLNHÖFER, R., OBINGER, H. and WOLF, F. (2008), Partisan Politics, Globalization, and the Determinants of Privatization Proceeds in Advanced Democracies (1990–2000). Governance, 21: 95-121. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0491.2007.00387.x, available online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1111%2Fj.1468-0491.2007.00387.x
Netter, Jeffry M. and Megginson, William L., From State to Market: A Survey of Empirical Studies on Privatization. Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 39, No. 2, June 2001. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jel.39.2.321
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r/詢問歷史學家
日本的工業化如何/為何如此快速且好？
1853 年，佩里的武裝直升機迫使日本開放不平等的貿易協定。
1904年，日本海軍在旅順港海戰中擊敗了俄羅斯帝國，隨後在對馬海戰中消滅了俄羅斯帝國。
五十年成為世界強國。這是如何以及為何發生的？為什麼日本最終沒有像十九世紀幾乎所有其他非歐洲政體一樣，無法從自滿中覺醒，拒絕現代技術，被馬克西姆大砲擊倒？他們有好的鐵礦石嗎？好煤礦嗎？一個高效率的中央官僚機構？一個強大的工匠階級可以實現工業獨創性的飛躍嗎？
為什麼/如何日本能夠成功，而清朝、暹羅、波斯、奧斯曼、莫臥兒等卻失敗了？
嚴格解釋特定國家在特定時間的經濟結果總是很困難，每一個看似合理的理論似乎都會遇到一個例外，尤其是愛爾蘭。
然而，日本確實與工業革命發源地英國有一些共通點。它們都是近海溫帶島嶼，但靠近歐亞大陸，因此接觸到廣泛的思想和技術，但相對免受入侵。
也有跡象顯示日本社會信任度很高。社會信任和廉潔與經濟發展有關，根據透明國際的貪腐認知指數，日本目前在世界上排名第 20 位（英國第 12 位，美國第 23 位）。雖然這是現代數據，不幸的是沒有人在 19 世紀收集任何可比較的數據，更不用說更早的數據了，但有一些證據表明這些社會因素可以長期持續。
1603年至1867年的日本江戶時代政府雖然是內向型政府，但卻為發展創造了環境。它加強了內部和平並實現了內部貿易自由化，包括禁止區域間關稅（小野，第 22 頁）。它也改善了交通基礎設施。這段時期，農業生產力不斷提高，就像英國一樣，日本人口從 1,600 年的 1,700 萬增加到 1721 年的 3,130 萬（Bassino，表 1A，第 24 頁）。然而，日本上一次和平時期的飢荒是在19世紀，而不是17世紀。
這段時期，商業、金融和所謂的「前現代製造業」（也稱為手工業）的活動也不斷增加（基本上，這種工業沒有像英國那樣在新技術和機械的推動下實現生產力的巨大飛躍。工業革命）（（Bassino，表 5，第 29 頁）。都市化率從 1600 年估計的 6.4% 上升到 1850 年的 12.0%（Bassino，表 3，第 27 頁）。
市場在全國範圍內一體化。無論是城市還是農村地區，教育都變得越來越普及（小野，第33 頁）（雖然英國在歷史學家中因在教育大眾方面有點落後而享有盛譽，但全國各地都有一個學校網絡，中等收入的學生就讀）例如，伊薩克·牛頓（Issac Newton）是一位富裕自耕農的兒子，他小時候就被送去上學，當然蘇格蘭從 17 世紀開始就在教育方面享有盛譽）。
這並不是說江戶時代的政府是200多年的天才政府。政策在對私人經濟活動的嚴格監管和更自由放任的做法之間轉變，雖然對兩者的優點存在著許多爭論，但我不知道有誰認為兩者都是正確的。管理財政赤字是一個問題，通貨膨脹在江戶時代末期上升。但隨後英國政府也做出了許多錯誤的決定。
也許對經濟發展來說最嚴重的是，日本人只能透過荷蘭書籍獲得歐洲的新藥物和科學發現，他們無法出國學習。英國人並沒有遭受這種不利影響。因此，到明治政府時期，日本已經與英國有許多共通點：市場經濟、多個部門的經濟生產增加、相對和平、教育程度相當高的人口。
實際上有一位日本學者，多度梅尾博士（人類學家），他認為，如果沒有江戶時代的孤立政策，日本大約在同一時間就實現了工業革命（小野，第 9 頁，註我自己沒有讀過梅尾博士的原著）。這個理論並未被經濟史學家廣泛接受，但這在很大程度上與大多數歷史學家對歷史偶然性的認識以及證明這種反事實陳述的難度有關。
然而，儘管有所有這些證據表明日本在許多方面與英國相似，但這並不意味著這是絕對的解釋。另一種可能性是，東亞的文化/環境有一些獨特之處，我們無法很好地衡量，但很重要。東亞還有許多其他經濟起飛的案例：實現政治獨立後的台灣和韓國、二戰後英國自由放任統治下的香港、最近的中國，再加上可以說是新加坡（地理位置稍遠，但中國人較多）文化影響）。顯然，糟糕的政府政策（例如朝鮮）或廣泛的內戰（中國在 19 世紀和 20 世紀初期政治上非常不穩定）可能會阻礙東亞的經濟成長，但這些東亞經濟體不斷以局外人的形像出現。經濟成長模型。
現在我要談談 1868 年至 1912 年執政的明治時代政府，也就是 1853 年至 1854 年日本強制開放貿易之後的情況。
明治時代，政府積極支持工業化，推動進口替代。然而，小野強調，私部門的活力更為重要（第 56 頁），他指出，在此期間成立的許多國有企業一直處於虧損狀態，直到被出售給私營部門並進行重組（第 45 頁）。我還注意到，瑞典和丹麥在 19 世紀實施了更多的自由放任政策，同時它們的經濟也在增長（請參閱我一個月前在這裡寫的評論）。這段時期的經濟史表明，經濟發展主要是國內主導的，而不是貿易驅動的（Carl，2004）。
明治時代政府也制定了一些不利於經濟發展的政策，主要是殖民政策，最終導致了二戰的災難。1880 年至 1930 年，日本 GDP 成長率平均為 1.9%，在當時水準上表現良好，但遠低於日本二戰後至 1980 年的表現。
因此，總而言之，日本在許多方面與 17 至 19 世紀的英國相似。可以說，1850 年代對西方的開放釋放了它利用這些優勢的能力。但不確定的是，東亞經濟體中可能存在一些我們尚未、也許無法衡量的普遍因素，而日本只是在政治上能夠在 19 世紀首先利用這些因素。
來源（未在文本中連結）
Jean-Pascal Bassino、Stephen Broadberry、Kyoji Fukao、Bishnupriya Gupta 和Masanori Takashima，《日本與大分歧》，730-1874，牛津大學，經濟和社會歷史討論論文，第156 號，2017 年4 月，工作論文在線： https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/working_papers/2840/156aprilbroadberry.pdf
莫斯科、卡爾. 「日本、工業化和經濟成長」。EH.Net 百科全書，由 Robert Whaples 編輯。2004 年 1 月 18 日。網址 http://eh.net/encyclopedia/japanese-induscialization-and-economic-growth/
Ono, Kenichi，2006 年《日本經濟發展：日本作為發展中國家走過的道路》，GRIPS 經濟發展論壇。線上提供： http://www.grips.ac.jp/vietnam/KOarchives/download_E.htm
齋藤、修。2010.「東亞市場經濟的工業革命？德川日本及其對大分歧的影響。” 澳洲經濟史評論 50 (3)。
鑑於我鏈接到了我的評論，我只需 ping 自己即可拯救汽車人，u/reaperreader
首先，感謝您的非凡努力！話雖如此，有一點讓我感到驚訝：
有趣的！我的理解是，通常是相反的方式：賺錢的國企私有化，而虧損但又必須完成工作的私人企業則由國家照顧，或至少救助或補貼。
其實，有沒有人想過，這到底是普遍規律，還是趨勢恰恰相反呢？
順便提一個問題：中國圈的一般「帝國官僚機構」模式與西方（歐洲和伊斯蘭）國家從羅馬/拜占庭、希臘和波斯/美索不達米亞/黎凡特世界繼承的模式相比如何？教育制度、公務員考試、權利和法治的途徑、政府監管和治安的力度和有效性、民眾的自我治安、自我協調和自我審查、動員軍隊和有效保障內部秩序的能力和外部和平、與銀行系統的關係以及為大型專案融資同時降低整體風險的能力...
我也對印度/中南半島/大洋洲連續體以及滿者伯夷、吳哥、爪哇和異教緬甸等政體的製度和貿易環境感興趣。我的理解是，這些帝國，特別是滿者伯夷，是靠貿易而不是暴力脅迫維持的。那是對的嗎？這對人們與國家的關係有何影響？它對這些國家的現狀有何影響？
我不知道有任何研究將私有化前國有企業的盈利能力視為企業私有化的驅動因素，而且我在簡短的搜索中也沒有找到任何關於這方面的學術文章（這並不是說沒有對此沒有任何研究）。最接近的是，Netter (2001) 在一篇關於私有化研究的文獻綜述中確實指出，政府通常會選擇透過股票發行私有化 (SIP) 將利潤更高的國有企業私有化（第 240 頁）。但這是關於私有化的方法。
文獻的另一個普遍發現是，無論是在國家之間還是在同一個國家中，隨著時間的推移，這種情況的發生方式都存在很大差異，具體取決於當地的政治局勢。因此，即使有這種趨勢，日本也很可能是個例外。
但這種跨國比較研究主要限於1984年以後（除了對柴契爾夫人的英國和紐西蘭等早期改革國家的一些討論），即世界銀行資料庫 開始涵蓋的時期。
至於你的另外兩個問題，我沒有什麼最抱歉的。我的專長比較是比較現代經濟史，特別是西方國家的經濟史，儘管有時我會因為工業革命的根源受到如此多的關注而涉足英國中世紀經濟史。我建議將這些作為單獨的問題提出，兩個單獨的問題。你激起了我對它們的好奇心，我將檢查答案。
來源
ZOHLNHÖFER, R.、OBINGER, H. 和 WOLF, F. (2008)，黨派政治、全球化和先進民主國家私有化收益的決定因素 (1990-2000)。治理，21：95-121。doi:10.1111/j.1468-0491.2007.00387.x，可上網取得 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1111%2Fj.1468-0491.2007.00387x
Netter, Jeffry M. 和 Megginson, William L.，《從國家到市場：私有化實證研究綜述》。經濟文獻雜誌，卷。39，第 2 期，2001 年 6 月。https: //pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jel.39.2.321