ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the process of Japanese economic development from the first stages of industrialisation in the nineteenth century, through the upheavals of the inter-war and wartime periods, to the ‘miracle’ of the postwar decades. It analyses the forces behind the ‘labour-intensive path’ of industrialisation and the subsequent impact of the global instabilities that transformed Japan’s international relations and determined the economic role of the empire. It shows how continuities between prewar, wartime and postwar economic structures subsequently facilitated rapid acceleration in growth, under the conditions of the world economy up to the 1970s. Its themes reflect those of current research into Japan’s economic history: on the one hand, the significance of the small-scale, labour-intensive and ‘traditional’ sectors of the economy and, on the other, the regional and global context within which Japan became a great economic power.
