Cotton and the Peasant Economy: A Response to 'Superior' Foreign Fibre in Early Modern Japan

This paper explores the comparative features of the production and consumption of cotton goods in Japan, before the introduction of Western technology and institutions in the late nineteenth century. Similar to the European regions, cotton was a foreign fibre for Japan until the first half of the second millennium. Although the success of the import substitution was common to both Europe and Japan during the early modern period, the direction of changes in this regard appear to be rather different. In fact, Japan's cotton industry in the mid- nineteenth century differed from those of European countries, specifically with respect to the phase of mechanization. Was this simply the reflection of the backward nature of the Asian economy in the early modern period? This paper attempts to account for this difference by identifying the course of Japan's industrial development, thus proposing an alternative argument to the explanation that merely attribute this difference between the Japanese and European cotton industries to so-called 'economic backwardness'.