Imposed Efficiency of Treaty Port: Japanese Industrialization and Western Imperialist Institutions

An intrinsic feature of a pre-modern society is in its fragmentary markets. Fragmentary markets are more likely to fail in the coordination of resource allocation. However, if a concentrated market is exogenously formed and the market could provide the only price to local markets, the market can work as a pivot of coordination for development. Treaty port markets imposed on nineteenth-century Japan worked as the pivot and ignited Japan's industrialization. We examine the silk-reeling industry, which was the major export industry and which led to Japanese industrialization, and the role of treaty ports in its development.