Averting a Great Divergence: State and Economy in Japan, 1868–1937 by Peer Vries

Abstract

Reviewed by: Averting a Great Divergence: State and Economy in Japan, 1868–1937 by Peer Vries Mark Metzler Averting a Great Divergence: State and Economy in Japan, 1868–1937. By Peer Vries. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 320 pages. ISBN: 9781350121676 (hardcover, also available as softcover and e-book). Peer Vries has written widely on the "Great Divergence" between industrializing Europe and the preindustrial rest of the nineteenth-century world. Averting a Great Divergence, his third book on the subject, focuses—despite the title—less on averting [End Page 390] a divergence and more on closing the gap after it opened. Japan's "catch-up" story has been famous for more than a century, but Vries's comprehensive synthesis of the Western-language literature and his many original framings along the way make this book valuable to both specialists and nonspecialists. Although he gives a start date of 1868 in the book's title, Vries goes into good detail on many aspects of late Tokugawa polity and economy, with each chapter devoting substantial sections to Tokugawa practices and legacies. In the debate sparked by Kenneth Pomeranz's book The Great Divergence, Vries opposes the claims of Pomeranz and others that Britain and China were in similar situations on the eve of the industrial revolution.1 "The world of 'surprising resemblances,' in the famous expression by Kenneth Pomeranz, actually has proved to be a world of fundamental differences" (p. 1). He argues that Japan, on the other hand, as the first Asian country to industrialize, offers much stronger grounds for comparison, a case argued also by Penelope Francks in her own book on Japan and the great divergence.2 To set the stage for considering Vries's most recent book, we can turn to his earlier work for a fuller programmatic statement: In my view, the chances that Qing China would be the first country in the world to industrialise—or even quickly catch up—were negligible to zero whereas for Britain the chances of a take-off were higher than anywhere else on the globe. That, of course, does not mean that Britain's take-off was 'inevitable': it just means that the most likely place where it might happen was Western Europe, and in particular Great Britain. Industrialisation as it took place in Great Britain … can be regarded as a 'logical', or, in any case, quite 'conceivable' continuation of the route that Britain and its economy had already taken earlier on: a route of high wages, [of] capital-intensive and energy-intensive production with ample use of wage labour, of efforts to profit from scale effects in production and exchange, of specialisation and import substitution, of gearing useful and reliable knowledge to production and of openness to innovation…. The Great Divergence was not as Peter Perdue and many others claim "a late, rapid, unexpected outcome of a fortuitous combination of circumstances in the late eighteenth century" but the outcome of "a deep, slow evolution out of centuries of particular conditions unique to early modern Europe", as they explicitly deny.3 That is, Britain's divergence began early, proceeded over centuries, and, given coal, which China also had, was otherwise nonfortuitous. Economically speaking, eighteenth-century Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate looked more like China under the Qing dynasty than it looked like Britain. Japan's own "Great Divergence" from China, Vries writes, agreeing with Janet Hunter, began in the late nineteenth century (p. 22).4 Vries followed this first conclusion with a second one that provides context for understanding the project of the present book: The second lesson would be that when it comes to explaining the Great Divergence, mainstream economic theory with its focus on free markets, fair competition, and market-supporting institutions including a 'minimal' state is fairly irrelevant at best and in most respects downright wrong. Great Britain and all the countries that took off after it, especially in their international economic relations, were not laissez-faire states. Britain's state in any case before and during take-off was not lean and [was] very proactive in the field of economic affairs. It [End Page 391] can best [be] characterised as 'mercantilist' or even 'developmental', as long as...