Abstract
This thesis addresses a central question within the field of economic and social history: the ‘Great Divergence’ debate, which seeks to understand why the West prospered while the rest of the world did not. It explores its Asian counterpart, the ‘Little Asian Divergence,’ through a comparative study of the mechanized
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cotton textile industry in India and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scholars have previously explained this divergence by focusing on aspects like labour productivity, labour organization, and technology adoption. I widen the scope, and argue that differences in productivity and work organization stemmed from broader institutional developments under distinct State regimes in India and Japan, with broader implications for their industrialization trajectories. I examined these contrasting outcomes of Japan’s developmental State and India’s colonial State through an analysis of their respective trading organizations and their interrelationship with the textile commodity chain. In addition, I studied the implications of such divergent institutional conditions on business strategies and on the organization and composition of the textile workforce. The thesis comprises five core chapters alongside an introduction and a conclusion. Here, I briefly summarize the main arguments. I investigated how trade organizations differentially shaped access to raw material resources (raw cotton) and markets (for yarns and fabrics), which, in turn, conditioned business strategies adopted by firms. In Japan, State-assisted development of trade organizations, which were closely integrated with its textile industry, ensured access to raw cotton and markets for its textile products. India, conversely, was embedded in colonial trade patterns and its resultant trade organization was insufficient for its industrial needs for raw cotton and (external) markets (chapters 3 and 4). In this thesis, I further argue that differences in the broader economic developments in terms of an expanding market for labour also shaped households’ decisions to supply labour, which in interaction with internal institutions further shaped the industries’ strategies (chapter 5, co-authored with Prof. dr. Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk). The final chapter examines how constraints in access to raw materials and markets for final goods shaped labour intensive strategies of Indian mills and their impact on the industry’s work organization and wages (chapter 6, again co-authored with Prof. dr. Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk). This is the only chapter that was not comparative in nature due to restrictions in data-accessibility and time related issues due to Covid.
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