Reforming States, Agricultural Transformation, and Economic Development in Russia and Japan, 1853-1913

Capitalist economic development has occurred unevenly, as certain economies began sustained growth relatively early, opening up an increasingly large gap with lagging countries. This well-known fact has encouraged much research on the prospects for undeveloped economies to "catch up" to the earlier developers. Japan and Russia in the late nineteenth century were two of the first countries outside of western Europe to experience substantial catch-up growth. Beginning in the 1860s, political elites in both countries adopted wide-ranging reforms in pursuit of military modernization and its political and economic prerequisites. This paper analyzes the impact of the two states' reform programs on their countries' rural economies, which represented the vast majority of population and production. Adopting a Polanyian perspective on economic development, this paper finds that only in Japan were agrarian relations transformed so as to set off a process of capitalist economic development centered on rural areas. This divergence is explained by the different stances of the two reforming states towards landlords and peasant communities.