The reconceptualisation of the industrial revolution and why it matters for Japanese studies

Abstract

The concept of the industrial revolution remains central to most accounts of the birth of the modern world, including, whether consciously or not, standard interpretations of Japan’s modern history. However, recent decades have seen a burgeoning of research into the onset of industrialisation in Britain and elsewhere in Europe that has led to a significant reassessment of what the classic industrial revolution actually involved. Historians of Japan understandably have little time to take such developments on board and have therefore tended to rely on what is now an out-dated model as the background against which to describe the Japanese experience of industrialisation and modernisation. The purpose of this ‘think-piece’/literature survey is therefore to outline the ongoing reconceptualisation of the industrial revolution and to provide some examples, using the English-language literature, of the ways in which the work of historians of Japan in various fields might be viewed from the new angle that it offers. In this light, such work can be seen as opening a rare window on to ordinary lives over the distinctive course of the first non-Western example of a reconceptualised industrial revolution.