Working Paper No.

07/04

Japanese Imperialism in
Global Resource History

Kaoru Sugihara

© Kaoru Sugihara
Department of Economics
University of Osaka

October 2004
This paper was presented at the second GEHN Conference, Irvine,
California (15-17th January, 2004) funded by a Leverhulme Trust
Grant: “A Millennium of Material Progress”

For more information about the participants and activities of GEHN, go

to http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economichistory/gehn/gehn.htm

Department of Economic History

London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7955 7860

Fax: +44 (0) 20 7955 7730
Japanese Imperialism in Global Resource History

Kaoru Sugihara

This paper explores the ways in which global resource

allocation affected the pattern of Japanese (and later East Asia’s)

industrialisation, and how it eventually came to underpin the course

of Japanese imperialism and aggression in the 1930s.

The Western impact on Asia during the second half of the

eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries has usually been

associated with colonial rule in South and Southeast Asia and the

forced opening of East Asian ports to foreign trade. With the coming

of colonial administration and modern transport, Asia became

incorporated into the West-dominated international order. The

exchange between Asian primary products and Western

manufactured goods grew, and Western capital flew into Asia to

finance railway construction and the development of mines and

plantations. In this story imperialism functioned as an institutional

device to ensure trade and capital flows in Western terms, that is,

under the protection of Western human security and private

property rights (For the specifically British position of imperialism of

free trade, see Gallagher and Robinson 1953). Modern political

ideas and legal institutions were introduced to Asia for that purpose.

But industrialisation was not encouraged. In fact it was often

discouraged, though not always intentionally.

1
 In order for Meiji Japan to industrialise in this

West-dominated international order, therefore, a different kind of

international division of labour with Western powers had to be found

(Sugihara 1996). As Asia’s exports to the West grew and primary

producers’ income began to rise, albeit slightly, a new demand for

modern mass consumer goods was created. Most of them were

low-wage goods, and included cheap cloths, matches, toys and

other sundries. Japan thus specialised in producing these goods,

which were not worth producing in the West where real wages were

rising, while she continued to import capital-intensive products such

as machinery and transport equipments from the West (see Figure

1). Although the demand for modern mass consumer goods in Asia

was initially confined to urban or commercialised areas, it could

potentially be extended to the vast domestic markets of India, Dutch

East Indies and China. And this demand would be better met by

those Asian manufacturers who would have the will and access to

information to mould their consumer goods around the local

consumer taste.

The Meiji government pursued labour-intensive

industrialisation by specifically targeting at this kind of market. Thus,

although the introduction of industrial technology is usually

expected to replace labour with capital, the more complex

adaptation was attempted when Western machinery and factory

system were introduced to Japan. The replacement of labour with

machinery was accompanied by the simultaneous effort of replacing

2
capital by labour wherever technology was thought to be biased

towards capital in the light of local factor endowment options. For

example, the iron frame was partially replaced by the less strong

but cheaper wooden frame, while the night-shift system lowered the

capital-labour ratio within the modern factory. In this way prewar

Japan yielded an almost a laboratory case of labour-intensive

industrialisation.

In trying to find a complementarity with Western powers on

the one hand, and with Asian primary producers on the other, Japan

abandoned uncompetitive traditional agriculture by encouraging

imports of raw cotton and sugar, and eagerly imported the

technologically advanced machinery and transport equipments from

the West till the domestic industry became competent. The only

uncompetitive sectors it sought to foster were those that were

thought essential for military purposes.

In a less coordinated way but in some specific cases not

necessarily later, China also attempted to introduce Western

technology and organisations since the second half of the

nineteenth century, and went through import-substitution

industrialisation during the interwar period. The type of industries

developed was characteristically labour-intensive, reflecting the

availability of relatively cheap labour of a good quality. Meanwhile,

South and Southeast Asia, which lacked the independent

government to pursue an industrialisation strategy, lagged behind,

and allowed the imports of East Asian manufactured goods to their

3
markets in large quantities during the interwar period. The ready

access to colonial markets in South and Southeast Asia was an

additional background to East Asia’s industrialisation.

The above is a summary of my understanding of how East

Asia’s industrialisation occurred under the West-dominated

international order. In attempting to clarify this story further by

placing it in the global context, this paper outlines East Asia’s

response to the “great divergence” (Pomeranz 2000) that took place

in the West in the nineteenth century, and discusses how it

eventually drove Japan to colonialism and aggression in the 1930s.

East Asia’s Response to the Great Divergence

The idea of the “great divergence”, which made the Atlantic

economy quite distinct from the rest of the world in terms of

resource endowments and factor prices, adds a new dimension to

our understanding of labour-intensive industrialisation in East Asia.

First, it singles out two most important factors, the ready access of

coal and the availability of vast resources in North America, which

directed the real wage in Western Europe and North America to rise,

especially since the second half of the nineteenth century (see

Table 1). On the face of it, this has little to do with what the

literature on modern Asian history has had in mind when referring to

the “Western impact”, colonialism or imperialism. Yet a swift move

towards the high-wage economy acted as a major factor for the

4
diffusion of industrialisation, by giving room for Japan, and later

China, to capture the huge Asian mass consumer market with the

use of cheap labour. Without the great divergence, the wage gap

would not have widened as fast as it actually did, and the low-wage

competition worldwide would have continued into the late

nineteenth century, making it much more difficult to form the kind of

regional specialisation which took place.

An underlying assumption for the East Asian strategy was

that the opportunities for emigration from Asia to the West were

quite limited. Since the nineteenth century Asian immigration to

North America and Australasia was severely restricted (for general

discussion on international migration, see Sugihara 1999). Table 2

suggests that the flow of Asian immigrants was discouraged by the

restriction of entry of women. After the conclusion of a gentleman

agreement with the U.S. government in 1907 the Japanese

government insisted on allowing American Japanese to be able to

marry Japanese women and bring them to the United States,

inviting a media attention to the practice of “picture bride”. Clearly,

India as a British colony and China as a country with a government

less able to negotiate with the United States, were unable to help

immigrants in this respect. Looking back, the overall effects of the

restrictive immigration policy might be interpreted to have been that

resource-rich parts of the New Continents abandoned the entry to

the international low-wage competition by opting for the intake of

5
relatively high-wage workers only, thus paving the way to

labour-intensive industrialisation in East Asia.

Second, it is important to note that the two “contingent”

factors (coal and North America) have little to do with science and

technology itself. The latter of course had a lot to do with making

these windfalls possible, but, from the East Asian point of view, the

crucial point was that the fruits of the industrial revolution, such as

steam engines and the knowledge of mechanical engineering, were

not culturally or ecologically tied to the West but were of a

universally applicable nature. Indeed the English economy during

the industrial revolution was not particularly a high-wage economy,

and, in terms of factor endowments, arguably resembled East Asia

than Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.

Of course, the windfalls themselves further generated

technological advance, to make industrial technology more efficient

to the resource-rich environment. By the time the Iwakura Mission

of the Meiji government visited Europe and the United States in the

early 1870s, it was easy to recognise that the machinery, the

factory system and railways they saw operating in the West were

too capital-intensive for the direct introduction to Japanese soil. But

this was something that they could adjust (as was the case with the

power loom partially going back to the wooden frame), since the

mid-nineteenth century technological advance was essentially an

additional development rather than fundamental change. Thus, by

the second half of the nineteenth century, industrial technology and

6
accompanying organisational innovations (such as factory system)

were made available to the East Asian economy, while at the same

time there was a tendency for the more advanced Western

economies to opt out of the international competition on

labour-intensive goods.

This leads us to the third point. The standard literature

portrays that Meiji Japan and other East Asian industrialisers were

“late-developers”, trying to catch up with the West. This is not

wrong in so far as it captures aspects of technological and

organisational borrowing and adaptation. But it is a one-sided

observation, as it ignores the peculiarly late nineteenth century

reality of a sudden widening of resource gap, as a result of the great

divergence. Italians and Swedes were beginning to enjoy the option

of emigration to the New World and the English were importing

cheap wheat from North America, and Western Europe was

gradually becoming integrated into the orbit of the high-wage

economy driven by the dynamics of the Atlantic flows of trade,

migration and capital, whereas the Japanese concentrated on

emulating the labour-intensive technology of the pre-windfall

capital-labour ratio. Thus East Asia became a more natural heir of

the English industrial revolution than the leading members of the

Atlantic economy, without actually meaning to do so.

To emphasise this connection is not to deny that the initial

conditions in East Asia played an important role in it. On the

contrary, I have argued that there was an East Asian path of

7
economic development at least since the sixteenth century with

distinctive technological and institutional characteristics (Sugihara

2003; see also Pomeranz 2001). Both labour-intensive technology

and labour-absorbing institutions were developed in the region prior

to the nineteenth century, and they provided a particularly high

degree of responsiveness to the Western impact. It is now widely

recognised that, in spite of substantial political, cultural and social

differences, the core regions of East Asia and Western Europe had

surprising resemblances in terms of the level of living standards,

proto-industrialisation and the commercialisation of agriculture at

the end of the eighteenth century. If we term this “Smithian growth”

in the culture-neutral sense, the speed and ease with which Japan

and later East Asia acquired radically different sets of knowledge

and skill makes it possible to suggest that, the East Asian path

turned out to look more like a natural heir of Smithian growth than

the Western path did.

Finally, industrialisation diffused beyond the Western

civilisation from the late nineteenth century onwards, not because it

was a product of that civilisation but because it acquired the

culture-neutral character which transcended political, cultural and

social specificities of the West. Science-based technology, not

resource allocation, was the vital link, which encompassed a variety

of cultures and institutions and, together with the initiatives of

financial and service sector interests (Cain and Hopkins 2001;

Sugihara 2002), moved global transformation forward. Building a

8
society with science-based technology involved urbanisation and

the modernisation of social values and norms. It was not a simple

matter of the transfer of technology, but the implications of that

transfer had to be interpreted and endorsed by the culture-neutral

language, in order to convince people in different civilisations the

case for industrialisation.

The role of science-based technology in nineteenth century

global history must therefore be assessed, not only in terms of

productivity increase within the same civilisation, but also in the

context of cross-cultural (cross-civilisational) diffusion. Having

largely escaped Western colonial rule and endowed with high initial

conditions, East Asia emerged as the only region that was capable

of testing its culture-neutral quality to the full at the end of the

nineteenth century. Although the region’s size of industrial

production was relatively small at that time, the success of

culture-neutralisation of science-based technology in East Asia was

to prove crucial to the global diffusion of industrialisation for the rest

of the twentieth century.

Resources and Technology in the Age of the East-West Divide

By the early twentieth century the technological and

institutional paths of economic development of the West and East

Asia were differentiated in terms of the respective position in the

world economy. The West specialised in capital-intensive

9
technology with the use of skilled, high-wage labour, while East

Asia specialised in labour-intensive technology with the use of

low-wage labour of a good quality. Both made technological

advance over time, following different paths, and the two paths

increasingly interacted with each other. But they did not converge.

The interactions brought about technological fusion, hence a

degree of convergence, but they also reinforced and exaggerated

the divergence, largely as a result of uneven global resource

allocation.

The case of Japan illustrates the point. On the one hand, she

developed a technological and institutional capability for producing

labour-intensive goods, and successfully upgraded the type of

manufactured goods she specialised in the Asian international

market, in accordance with a slow but steady rise in living standards

and income of Asian peoples (Figures for China in Table 1 suggest

a fall in living standards, but this is consistent with the fact that

living standards of a large population in coastal China rose. The

same was true in parts of Southeast Asia. In both cases living

standards in the richer parts were similar to Japan’s). By the 1930s

the type of cotton textiles Japan was producing began to resemble

those of Lancashire, traditionally the main provider of higher-range

textiles. The Japanese strength in this competition was not just a

result of devaluation and industrial policy, but of the steady

upgrading of labour-intensive technology (including the blending

technique of raw cotton of different qualities and the introduction of

10
Toyoda automatic looms) (Sugihara 1989). Meanwhile,

import-substitution proceeded, and the more labour-intensive and

the less skill-intensive sectors of machinery industry became

progressively technologically independent.

At the same time, seeking complementarity remained

essential for Japan, because a very large section of heavy and

chemical industries, as well as the cotton textile industry, the

largest industrial sector, needed raw materials and energy from

abroad. In order to appreciate the severe resource constraints

industrialisation generate, It is useful to imagine how much land

England would have needed to industrialise in the early nineteenth

century, if there had been no foreign trade and all the fuel and raw

materials had to be domestically produced. This is the line of

thinking that led Pomeranz to argue for the significance of the trade

with the Caribbean and the “windfall” of North America.

A century later, Japan had exactly the same problem of

needing a primary producer cum non-competing importer of

labour-intensive goods or a “windfall” or both, to upgrade the

industrial structure along the labour-intensive path. Thus Japan

colonised Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1911. In both colonies she

introduced the land reform and labour-intensive technology (better

seeds, irrigation and double cropping) (Nakamura 1974), not only to

impose the land tax but also to make agricultural surplus available

for home consumption. In turn she exported manufactured goods

and offered services to her colonies. It was substantially

11
land-intensive imports, rice and sugar from Taiwan and Korea, that

Japan secured as a result. Thus, at least in the initial period of

Japan’s industrialisation, she was able to use colonial trade to her

advantage, without inviting the low-wage industrial competition from

there. Even in the interwar period, both colonies were much more

strongly tied to Japan through trade than Western colonies in Asia

were to their respective rulers. 91 per cent of Korea’s exports went

to Japan and 71 per cent of her imports came from there in 1928,

while 87 per cent of Taiwan’s exports and 69 per cent of her imports

were conducted with Japan in the same year. These figures

remained roughly at the same level in 1938.

In the regional context of labour-intensive industrialisation,

however, it is worth emphasising that there was a relatively free

technological transfer from Japan to China. After 1912 East Asia

saw the beginning of inter-state competition, with China pursuing

import-substitution industrialisation. Japan, along with the United

States and Europe, was a major source of inspiration of Chinese

industrialists and entrepreneurs. Japanese industrial technology

was transferred to Korea and Taiwan as well, in so far as it was of a

non-competing nature and was broadly conceived as enhancing the

economic strength of the Japanese empire.

Even so, East Asia’s industrialisation efforts were

fundamentally conditioned by the relatively weak resource

endowment base within the region, given the level of technology

and the availability of capital at the time. A variety of raw materials

12
and energy had to be imported from outside the empire. Imports of

land-intensive raw cotton from India and the United States, for

example, were indispensable to Japanese industrial progress in the

early twentieth century. In other words, both colonialism and the

regime of free trade in Asia and the world were important conditions

for Japan’s economic development. Japan took advantage of the

West-dominated international order of imperialism to carry out trade

and industrialisation from the late nineteenth century. By the 1920s

Japanese imperialism became a significant part of that order, and in

the 1930s it became a major force demanding an increasingly larger

role, especially in Asia’s regional order.

Japan as Resource Imperialism

As by then coal and other mineral resources were much more

systematically brought into the industrial product chain, however,

an additional, the more geologically specific problem of securing

mineral resources emerged. Clearly, the ecological specificity

mattered in the early nineteenth century too, since it was possible

to produce raw cotton only in a certain climate and coal had to be

found at a good location to serve as a competitive source of energy.

But by the early twentieth century the world was much more closely

connected through steamships and railways. In other words,

technology gradually began to help solve uneven global resource

allocation through trade.

13
 While this eased the local resource problems by lowering

freight rates, it also increased the intensity of international

competition. Put another way, the question became more of

efficiency than of availability. And efficient fuel and good quality raw

materials tended to be concentrated on the specific regions of the

world, triggering the fierce competition among the major powers for

securing mineral deposits under their control. Perhaps the most

representative good that characterised twentieth century global

resource history was oil. Estimated oil deposits were concentrated

on the United States and the Middle East. More importantly, a

handful of American, British and Dutch capital dominated the

exploration business and the sale of crude oil, partly because the

nature of the business was highly speculative and capital-intensive.

At least part of the oil industry was also driven by top technology.

Price fluctuations were frequently controlled by international

cartels.

Japan was not late in exploring domestic oil deposits, but

was in no position to enter into international competition in this

highly capital-intensive and politically sensitive industry. By 1920

the amount of imported oil (crude and refined) exceeded that of

domestic production, and by 1928 refined oil imports exceeded the

domestic refined oil production (Iguchi 1963: 212). Table 3 is an

attempt to show the large resource gap between advanced Western

countries (the United States and Western Europe) and East Asia (In

this table “Socialist Asia” [mostly China] and Japan), in terms of

14
energy consumption in coal equivalent terms. Even if these data

cannot be expected to be precise, there is little doubt that East Asia

had used much less commercial energy (mainly coal, liquid gas and

crude oil) for a person to produce a unit of GDP before the Second

World War. Table 4 implies that non-commercial energy sources

(such as firewood) remained important for East Asia even in the

1950s.

More generally, other minerals and raw materials required for

Japan’s heavy and chemical industries tended to be concentrated

on certain locations, much of it in the British Empire and sphere of

influence. Japan relied on British Malaya and Australia for iron ore,

India for pig iron, Canada for aluminum and lead, Canada and

Australia for zinc, British Malaya for rubber, and the United States

and the Dutch East Indies for oil.

The crucial turning point came with the Wall Street Crash of

1929. One of the vital assumptions that Japan had made, that is,

export earnings were to be used for imports of raw materials and

energy sources, had been severely undermined. Her exports of raw

silk to the United States collapsed, and her attempt to restore the

gold standard in 1930 had failed almost immediately, as Britain left

the gold standard in 1931. Japan reacted to this by sharply

devaluing the yen and exporting heavily to South and Southeast

Asia (Kagotani 2000). She also pegged yen to sterling in 1932, and

kept a degree of complementarity with Britain as the “imperial

structural power” by effectively remaining part of the ‘sterling area’

15
(Akita 2003), even though Japan’s economic diplomacy seeking

co-operation was not always successful (Best 2002).

A major effort was made to secure some of these raw

materials and energy sources in the form of the establishment of

‘Manchukuo’, a puppet state, in 1932. A variety of economic factors

- investment, markets and emigration - motivated Japan's advance

into Manchuria, but securing raw materials and energy sources was

certainly one of them. However, Manchuria, while absorbing vast

amounts of capital and manpower, failed to become an adequate

supply base for raw materials and energy sources. In fact, Japan's

need to import them from outside the yen bloc increased, as a result

of her commitment to the building of Manchukuo (Yamamoto 2003).

Resource issues were behind Japan’s advance to North China

as well. She wanted to secure the supply of the American-type

long-staple raw cotton produced there, and this was resisted by the

Chinese spinners of Shanghai who also needed it, and the

Nationalist government who attempted import-substitution.

Inter-East Asian competition in cotton trade was the most important

economic factor behind the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in

1937. Furthermore, the stronger China's resistance, the heavier

Japan's burden became. Even if the conflict had been resolved,

Japan would still have been largely dependent on the West for raw

fibres and for the raw materials for her heavy and chemical

industries. It was practically impossible to envisage autarky while at

the same time pursuing rapid heavy and chemical industrialisation.

16
 Even more serious were the domestic difficulties arising from

the relative shortage of land. The level of agrarian rents was

extremely high, and, in spite of high land productivity, labour

productivity remained low by international standards. This set a

ceiling for the rise in rural purchasing power and the standard of

living of the peasant household. Because the bulk of industrial

labour continued to come from the countryside, industrial wages

were kept down as well. Under these circumstances, there was a

limit to the expansion of the domestic market. The more East Asia

industrialised along the labour-intensive, resource-saving path, the

greater the resource gap between East Asia and the West became.

Furthermore, the Japanese living standards were rising, but so were

the Western, and a large gap with major Western powers remained.

It was hard to be convinced that the gap was narrowing steadily

(see Table 1) (Sugihara 1997).

Japanese oil imports rose sharply in the 1930s, and by the

end of the 1930s took up a significant proportion of domestic energy

consumption. When the Second World War broke out in Europe in

1939, it seemed too good an opportunity for Japan to miss, and

Japan seized resource-rich parts of Southeast Asia, including oil in

Borneo. This made the second American oil embargo (which

blocked the Japanese commercial fleet carrying oil from Borneo to

Japan) in August 1941 the most effective pressure on the

energy-scarce Japanese economy. Within the space of five months

she went to war with the United States. Meanwhile, it turned out to

17
be the Chinese resistance, in particular Mao’s strategy for

protracted war, that pinpointed the vulnerability of resource-scarce

Japan opting for war. Having lost both prospects of further territorial

expansion and conditions for free trade, Japan became unable to

formulate any sustainable resource strategy.

Implications for Postwar Japanese Development

The Japanese experience of imperialism and aggression

must be understood, first and foremost, by identifying the factors

that drove specific political and military actions. Economic

motivations played a part in this, but only a part. On the other hand,

the resource gap loomed large in culminating the sense of Western

domination and despair among the Japanese, often beyond the

realm of economic affairs. Resources, rather than technology,

seemed to be sustaining the East-West divide. Thus “catching up”

with the West came to be confused with securing political and

economic power with matching resources.

In fact, it must have been possible for Japan to discover a

way of extending labour-intensive industrialisation with the less

resource-intensive and the more technology-based methods. Unlike

resources, relevant Western technology was available for the East

Asian labour-intensive path to adapt. And Japan was among the

first that had absorbed Western technology efficiently for much of

the period of industrialisation. Indeed there were some Japanese

18
scientists who advocated this line of thinking in the 1930s and the

early 1940s. However, faced with the Great Depression and the

collapse of world trade in the 1930s, securing raw materials looked

more pressing needs, and Japan, diverging from the

labour-intensive path she had built up, attempted to continue

unsustainably rapid heavy and chemical industrialisation with the

hope of securing a progressively larger share of global resources. It

was the Japanese failure to come up with a more sensible strategy

that led to aggression and war. It also constituted a part of the

adjustment process of global resource allocation through violent

means.

One of the most heated postwar Japanese debates centred

on whether Japan should aim at high economic growth through the

growth of foreign trade, or expand the domestic market with the

more autonomous resource base (of coal). By the early 1960s the

decision was made to go for the former option, with the implicit but

firm understanding that imports of oil from the Middle East were to

be financed by export earnings. Export industries were expected to

combine cheap labour (by the Western standards) with technology

of a resource-saving type, and the government from time to time did

not hide its expected export earnings ratio to energy consumption

for each strategically important industry. Thus the postwar strategy

was even more dependent on the regime of free trade than prewar.

The outcome of this decision was two-fold. First, Japan steadily

19
developed resource-saving technology in the second half of the

twentieth century, to become one of the technologically most

advanced countries in the world. Japan’s per capita energy

consumption for producing a unit of GDP remains roughly a half of

that of the United States. And a number of other Asian countries

has benefited from the transfer of Japanese technology. In East and

Southeast Asia urban living conditions in the 1960s to the 1980s

were poor by Western standards, and energy consumption for

transport and household sectors was much lower than in the West

too (Darmstadter 1971; Schipper and Meyers 1992). The

labour-intensive, resource-saving path of economic development

underpinned the “East Asian miracle”.

Second, this has been achieved through land-intensive

imports from North America and Australasia and oil imports from the

Middle East, under the regime of free trade enforced by the

structural power (especially with respect to the military and key

currency) of the United States. Table 5 confirms the persistence of

a very large trade deficit of Japan (and NIES) with the Middle East

in the most recent years, part of which has been settled,

multilaterally, through Europe’s trade surplus with the Middle East

and Japan’s trade surplus with Europe. To some extent the United

States also played a role similar to Europe in this context. From the

perspective of this paper, postwar Japan has therefore solved only

a half of the prewar problem, by lowering energy intensity

substantially. The other half remains essentially as it was in the

20
1930s, in so far as global resource allocation and the stability of the

international economic order remain substantially beyond Japanese

control. The sheer gap between technological capability and

resource vulnerability continues to affect Japan’s foreign policy.

21
Selected References

Akita, Shigeru 2003. Igirisu Teikoku to Ajia Kokusai Chitsujo –

Hegemoni Kokka kara Teikokuteki na Kozoteki Kenryoku e –

(The British Empire and the International Order of Asia: From

the Hegemonic State to Imperialist Structural Power), Nagoya

Daigaku Shuppankai, Nagoya.

Best, Antony 2002. “Economic Appeasement or Economic

Nationalism? A Political Perspective on the British Empire,

Japan and the Rise of Intra-Asian Trade, 1933-37”, Journal of

Imperial and Commonwealth History, 30-2.

Cain, P. J. and A. G. Hopkins 2001. British Imperialism, 1688-2000,

second edition, Longman, London.

Darmstadter, Joel 1971. Energy in the World Economy: A Statistical

Review of Trends in Output, Trade, and Consumption since

1825, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore.

Gabaccia, Donna 1996. “Women of the Mass Migrations: From

Minority to Majority, 1820-1930”, in Dirk Hoerder and Leslie

Page Moch eds, European Migrants: Global and Local

Perspectives, Northeastern University Press, Boston.

Gallagher, John, and Ronald Robinson 1953. “Imperialism of Free

Trade”, Economic History Review, 6-1.

Iguchi, Tosuke 1963. Gendai Nihon Sangyo Hattatsu-shi II Sekiyu

(The History of the Development of Contemporary Japanese

Industries, Volume 2: Oil), Kojunsha Shuppankyoku, Tokyo.

22
Kagotani Naoto 2000. Ajia Kokusai Tsusho Chitsujo to Nippon (The

International Commercial Order of Asia and Japan), Nagoya

Daigaku Shuppankai, Nagoya.

Maddison, Angus 1995. Monitoring the World Economy, 1820-1992,

Development Centre, OECD, Paris.

Maddison, Angus 1998. Chinese Economic Performance in the

Long Run, Development Centre, OECD, Paris.

Maddison, Angus 2001. The World Economy: A Millennial

Perspective, Development Centre, OECD, Paris.

Nakamura, James 1974. “Incentives, Productivity Gaps, and

Agricultural Growth Rates in Prewar Japan, Taiwan and

Korea”, in Bernard Silberman and H. D. Harootunian eds,

Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho Democracy, Princeton

University Press, Princeton, N.J.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe,

and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton

University Press, Princeton.

Pomeranz, Kenneth 2001. “Is There an East Asian Development

Path?: A Long-term Comparisons, Constraints and

Continuities “Journal of the Economic and Social History of the

Orient, 44-3.

Schipper, Lee and Stephen Meyers 1992. Energy Efficiency and

Human Activity: Past Trends, Future Prospects, Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge.

23
Sugihara, K. 1989. “Japan's Industrial Recovery, 1931-1936”, in Ian

Brown ed., The Economies of Africa and Asia during the

Interwar Depression, Routledge, London.

Sugihara Kaoru 1996. Ajia-kan Boeki no Keisei to Kozo (Patterns

and Development of Intra-Asian Trade), Mineruva Shobou,

Kyoto.

Sugihara, K. 1997. "The Economic Motivations behind Japanese

Aggression in the late 1930s: Perspectives of Freda Utley and

Nawa Toichi", Journal of Contemporary History, 32-2, 1997.

Sugihara, Kaoru 1999. “Kindai Sekai Shisutemu to Ningen no Ido

(Migration in the Modern World System)”, in Kaoru Sugihara

ed., Ido to Imin: Chiiki o musubu Dainamizumu, Iwanami Koza

Sekai Rekishi, vol.19, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.

Sugihara, Kaoru 2002. “British Imperialism, the City of London and

Global Industrialization”, in Shigeru Akita ed., Gentlemanly

Capitalism, Imperialism and East Asia, Palgrave, London.

Sugihara, Kaoru 2003a. “The East Asian Path of Economic

Development: A Long-term Perspective”, in Giovanni Arrighi,

Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Selden eds, The Resurgence of

East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives, Routledge,

London.

24
Sugihara, Kaoru 2003b. “Kindai Kokusai Keizai Chitsujo no Keisei

to Tenkai – Teikoku, Teikokushugi, Kozoteki Kenryoku – (The

Formation and Development of the Modern International

Economic Order: Empire, Imperialism and Structural Power)”,

in Yuzo Yamamoto ed., Teikoku no Kenkyu – Genri Ruikei,

Kankei –, Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, Nagoya.

Yamamoto, Yuzo 2003. ‘Manshukoku’ Keizaishi Kenkyu (Studies in

the Economic History of ‘Manchukuo’), Nagoya Daigaku

Shuppankai, Nagoya.

25
 Table 1 Comparisons of Per capita GDP, 1820-1950: East and West

1820 1870 1890 1913 1933 1950

Western Europe 1,270 2,086 3,688 *3,851 5,013

United States 1,257 2,445 3,396 5,301 4,783 9,561

Japan 669 737 1,012 1,387 2,120 1,926

China 600 530 540 552 578 439

World 667 867 1,510 2,114

Sourcesand Notes: Maddison 2001:264 and 206, supplemented by Maddsion 1998:

158 and Maddsion 1992:196 and 212. Figures from different sources only rou
conrrespond to one another. *1932.

Table 2 Proportion of Female Migrants to the United States, 1820-1928

Asia Northwestern Europe

Indian 1 Belgian 36
Chinese 5 Dutch 37
Korean 17 Swiss 37
Japanese 33 Scandinavian 38
Welsh 40
Sotheastern Europe English 42
Bulgarian 10 German 42
Rumanian 18 Scottish 42
Greek 23 Irish 48
Italian 25
Russian 31 Americas
Polish 34 Mexican 32
Portuguese 37 Spanish American 34
Jewish 46 Canadian 39

Source: Gabaccia 1996: 92.

26
 Table 3 Trends in Energy Consumption by Country or Region, 1925-1965

1925 1938 1950 1965

Energy C. GDP Population Energy C. GDP Population Energy C. GDP Population Energy C. GDP Population
United States 717.7 731,402 116,284 669.4 699,805 130,476 1,201.0 1,455,916 152,271 1,881.6 2,607,294 194,303
Western Europe 499.4 813,821 205,600 599.8 1,040,727 220,534 600.0 1,286,544 256,616 1,132.9 2,623,071 286,640
USSR 25.3 231,886 158,983 176.3 405,220 188,498 303.3 510,243 180,050 880.6 1,068,117 230,900
Socialist Asia 23.7 277,878 480,425 27.3 296,914 513,336 43.1 247,535 557,065 323.0 537,542 746,769
Japan 30.5 107,948 59,522 62.4 169,367 71,879 45.8 160,966 83,563 188.6 586,744 98,883
NIES/ASEAN 6.0 109,042 96,469 19.4 146,411 119,998 12.1 146,034 158,637 51.2 303,986 227,238
World 1,484.5 2,964,514 1,982,918 1,790.1 4,144,739 2,248,936 2,610.9 5,336,099 2,524,547 5,474.6 10,770,826 3,327,615

1925 1938 1950 1965

Energy C. Energy C. Energy C. per Energy C. Energy C. Energy C. per Energy C. Energy C. Energy C. per Energy C. Energy C. Energy C. per
per GDP per capita GDP per capita per GDP per capita GDP per capita per GDP per capita GDP per capita per GDP per capita GDP per capita
United States 981 6,172 114 957 5,130 134 825 7,887 126 722 9,684 140
Western Europe 614 2,429 126 576 2,720 106 466 2,338 120 432 3,952 124
USSR 109 159 17 435 935 12 594 1,685 107 824 3,814 190
Socialist Asia 85 49 41 92 53 41 174 77 97 601 433 449
Japan 283 512 17 368 868 13 285 548 24 321 1,907 32
NIES/ASEAN 55 62 5 133 162 5 83 76 13 168 225 38
World 501 749 993 432 796 805 489 1,034 1,235 508 1,645 1,691

Sources:
All figures for energy consumption, Darmstadter 1971; all figures for GDP and population, Maddison 1992, Maddison 1998 and Maddison 2001. Includes estimates.
Notes:
1) Energy consumption is expressed in million metric tons (coal equivalent). GDP is expressed in million 1990 dollars, and population in thousands. Energy consumption per GDP is
in metric tons; Energy consumption per capita is in thousand metric tons; Energy consumption per GDP per capita is in thousand metirc tons. Commercial inanimate energy only.
Excludes human effort and that of draft animals as well as the output and consumtion of veretal fuels such as firewood and dung. Covers solid fuels (coal, lignite), liquid fuels
(crude oil), natural gas, and hydroelectricity.
2) Western Europe refers to Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany (including East Germany for 1950 and 1965), Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and .
United Kingdom. Energy consumption calculated from Darmstadter 1971, 654-59 and 664. GDP and population from relevant pages of Maddison 1992 and 2001.
3) For GDP for USSR, 1928 figure was used for 1925.
4) Socialist Asia refers to mainland China for 1925 and 1938, China, North Korea and Monglolia for 1950, and the three countries plus North Vietnam for 1965. Energy consumption
calculated from Darmstadter 1971, 729 (Communist Asia). Population and GDP for 1950 and 1965 from relevant pages of Maddison 1992 and 2001. A half of Vietnam's GDP and
population figures were assigned to North Vietnam. GDP for 1925 and 1938 were calculated from Maddison's 1998 estimate for 1933 (Maddison 1998, 158), assuming per capita
GDP being constant between 1925 and 1938.
5) NIES/ASEAN refers to Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, present Indonesia and Thailand for 1925 and 1938; South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya and
present Singapore, and Thailand for 1950 and 1965. Energy consumption calculated from Darmstadter 1971, 677-81. For GDP for Philippines and Thailand, 1928 figure was used
for 1925. For GDP and population for 1950 and 1965, the territorial coverage is Malaysia rather than Malaya.
6) 1925 figure for world population was calculated by multiplying the 1929 estimate (Maddison 1992, 226) by the ratio of the 1925 population of all the regions included in this table
to the 1929 population of the same. 1938 figure for world population was obtained by multiplying the Maddsion 56 countries sample figure for 1938 (Maddsion 1992, 210) by the
ratio of his 199 countries estimate for 1929 to his 56 countries sample figure for the same year. 1925 figure for world GDP was calculated in the same way as world population,
using the 1929 estimate (Maddison 1992, 227). China 's GDP for 1929 was calculated as per 4). 1938 figure for world GDP was obtained in the same way as world population,
using Maddison's 56 countries sample figure for 1938 (Maddison 1992, 211).

27
 Table 4 Relative Weight of Commercial and Non-commercial Energy, c.1956

Commercial Non-commercial Total

Africa 48 51 100
North America 97 3 100
Central America 65 35 100
South America 55 45 100
Asia (incl Middle East) 42 58 100
Europe 93 7 100
Oceania 87 13 100
World 85 15 100

Source and Notes : Darmstadter 1971, 818. Taken from UN, Proceedings of the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy ,
vol.1, The World's Requirements for Energy: The Role of Nuclear Energy , New York, 1956, pp.18-20. Communist countries are excluded from
tabulation.

Table 5 Changes in the Balance of Trade of the Middle East with Major Trading Partners, 1985 to 2000
(million dollars)

1985 1990 1995 2000

Exports Imports Balance Exports Imports Balance Exports Imports Balance Exports Imports Balance
United States 9151 9940 -789 18972 13970 5002 16419 19064 -2645 36519 23711 12808
Japan 20955 12966 7989 28524 10467 18057 25539 8954 16585 44728 11506 33222
NIES 6551 4444 2107 12319 5687 6632 19412 7352 12060 40945 15659 25286
ASEAN 2298 995 1303 3920 2918 1002 5021 4647 374 13759 6736 7023
China 1764 194 1570 1366 579 787 1960 3915 -1955 9174 7538 1636
Europe 28624 37906 -9282 35245 52665 -17420 27646 57561 -29915 46615 68237 -21622

Sources: IMF, Direction of Trade Statistics Yearbook , and Taiwan Statistical Yearbook ., relevant years.

28
 Figure 1 Japan, Intra-Asian Trade and World Trade, c.1900-1930

the West

m. p.p.

India m. Japan
p.p.

m. p.p. m. p.p.
m. (m)
p.p. m. →p.p.

Southeast Asia p.p. China

m.

Note: m. refers to manufactured goods, p.p. primary products. Since the late nineteenth century India
exported cotton yarn to China in large quantities, but from the end of the 1910s, it was replaced by the
exports of raw cotton. China exported a small amount of silk textiles in turn.

29
LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC HISTORY

WORKING PAPERS OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC HISTORY

NETWORK (GEHN)

For further copies of this, and to see other titles in the department’s group
of working paper series, visit our website at:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economichistory/

01/04: State-Building, The Original Push For Institutional Changes

in Modern China, 1840-1950
Kent Deng

02/04: The State and The Industrious Revolution in Tokugawa

Japan
Kaoru Sugihara

03/04: Markets With, Without, and In Spite of States: West Africa in

the Pre-colonial Nineteenth Century
Gareth Austin

04/04: The World Coffee Market in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth

Centuries, from Colonial to National Regimes
Steven Topik

05/04: The Role of the Chinese State in Long-distance Commerce

R. Bin Wong

06/04: Imperialism, Globalization, and Public Finance: The Case of

Late Qing China
Harriet T. Zurndorfer

07/04: Japanese Imperialism in Global Resource History

Kaoru Sugihara