Establishment of the economic society 17--18th century

Author: (Japan) Fusao Hayashi / (Japan) Masao Miyamoto, edited by Li Yiping and others
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 1997-11-01
Features: The History of the Japanese Economy, it can be said that this book represents an important milestone in the maturation of quantitative economic history in Japan, also known as the New Economic History. After the publication of the 8-volume set, the Japanese academic review gave it high praise, calling this economic history "representing the current level of quantitative economic history" and highlighting "many noteworthy arguments."① Undoubtedly, the extensive content and specific issues covered by this multi-volume economic history, spanning from the late medieval period to the present and covering nearly four hundred years, will require in-depth academic research for review and commentary. This is not the task of this article. As the supervising translator, here I would like to briefly review and introduce the relevant aspects of the New Economic History's growth in Japan as represented by the 8-volume set. Although the 8-volume set is titled The History of the Japanese Economy, it is not a comprehensive economic history of Japan; it examines merely the development of Japan's economy from the late medieval period to the present, covering less than four hundred years. However, these four hundred years represent a period of Japan's history with the richest content and most dramatic changes. The compilers naturally limited their examination to these four hundred years, not only for this reason. A deeper reason lies in their long-standing systematic and in-depth research on the late medieval period, which reveals the intrinsic connections between Japan's pre-modern and modern societies. They convincingly present the late medieval period, modern period, and contemporary period as a continuous and interconnected whole—viewing the late medieval period as the stage that created the prerequisites for industrialization, the modern period as the stage of industrialization, and the contemporary period as the stage of economic growth after industrialization. The significance of this holistic examination and interconnected grasp extends beyond the innovation in the editorial format; more importantly, it signifies the unification of economic history and economic theory. The New Economic History is precisely the unification of economic history and economics. In Japan, economic historians and economists have traditionally been distinct disciplines. With the Meiji Restoration as a dividing line, there was a certain division of labor between the economic history of the late medieval period and the research on the modern period. Economic history was classified as a branch of history, which indicates that economic history and economics were actually separated. The long-standing, mutually closed division between them was only broken in the 1960s by the research of Japan's "New" economic historians, who applied quantitative data and quantitative analysis.