Economic History

By the 1940s economic history had become an established discipline not only in Western Europe and North America, but also in other parts of the world. In Japan, Tokuzo Fukuda, who studied in Germany and tried to apply the German theory of economic stages to Japan, published the first treatise on Japanese economic history in 1900. In the next few decades, besides economic stage theory, Japanese economic history was dominated by historical materialism. Analytical focus shifted from commercial activities to rural and local economic history, whereas externally much attention was paid to the economic history of England, seen as the classical homeland of capitalism (see, for example, Komatsu). In China, which became officially communist from 1949, the Marxist approaches became even more pervasive, although Marx's notion of the "Asiatic mode of production" was disavowed. Chinese economic historians were preoccupied with two issues: first, the question of transition from "feudalism" to "capitalism," and second, the contradictory but ultimately destructive impact of Western imperialism on China's economy.

For formerly colonized regions and countries the question of imperialism and the challenges of internalizing their economic history loomed large, affecting everything from periodization to the themes and theories selected for analysis. In India, for example, economic historiography, which began to flourish following independence in 1947, had to grapple with the validity of the division between "ancient India" and "modern India," designating the periods before and after European conquest, a periodization based largely on political events rather than on economic processes. In the early postindependence years, Indian economic historians, notwithstanding differences in the topics or periods of focus, displayed two main tendencies: first, a nationalist orientation in which the stable and productive character of early Indian economic and social institutions were emphasized and by implication at least the destructive impact of British rule was indicted, and second, a spatial concentration on the economic history of North India at the expense of other regions.

Periodization proved even more problematic for Latin American economic history, given the region's complex histories of European and African settlement and relations with the indigenous peoples. The region's economic historians, whether those influenced by neoclassical models of international trade, Marxist categories and stages of development, or dependency perspectives on underdevelopment and unequal exchange, largely took an external view of the region's economies as indicated by the preponderance of studies on the export sector. The emphasis on export rather than on the domestic economy began to shift in the mid-1950s, but there was continued concentration on the "modern" sector to the neglect of the "traditional" one.

The development of African economic history was a post-independence phenomenon, in which scholars grappled with various sets of generalizations made about African economic history. Geographically, the "Africa" discussed was largely confined to "sub-Saharan" Africa; thematically, there was excessive focus on trade and exchange systems, especially external trade, rather than on domestic production. Historically, the precolonial period was depicted as a static "traditional" backdrop to changes introduced by colonialism. Theoretically, there was the ubiquitous use of dichotomous models, in which change was often depicted as the abrupt substitution of one ideal type by its opposite—"traditional–modern" societies, "subsistence–market" economies, or "formal–informal" sectors. Various approaches vied for analytical preeminence, including neoclassical development theory, and dependency and Marxist paradigms.