The Economic History of Japan: 1600-1990

Written by leading Japanese scholars, this multi-volume series of modern Japanese economic history has been abridged and rewritten for a non-Japanese readership. The Emergence of Economic Society in Japan, 1600-1870 focuses on the period from the start of the seventeenth century, when a discernible consumer population begins to form within cities, to the 1870s when the start of rapid industrialization is witnessed. Focusing on the foundations of modernity laid in this period, the volume explores whether this was a process of 'alternative modernization' to that experienced in the West.