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p r e f a c e Even by the standards of academic publishing, this book has a long history. Stephen and I began working on this project in the spring of 1993. Based on his extensive fieldwork and teaching in the Brazilian Amazon and my own fieldwork in Brazil and Venezuela, it was clear that Japanese investment and the economic development of Japan had changed the capitalist world-economy, as well as the prospects for raw materials –based development in Latin America and around the world. Our challenge was to explain the new patterns of joint ventures, the ever-larger mines, smelters, dams, and ships, and the complex mixture of positive and negative impacts that these huge projects were having in areas like the Amazon. We initially planned a comparison of four of the world’s leading raw materials industries—aluminum, copper, iron, and coal—using a number of raw materials– producing regions as case studies. As we developed our empirical analysis and theoretical model, it became obvious that we had far too many types of material and social variation to explain in the multi-material and multi-region comparison.We therefore reorganized our research agenda in two ways. We focused our analysis of Japan’s economic ascent, the topic of this book, on coal, iron, steel, and shipping, which we had identified as the linchpins and pattern-setters for Japan’s ascent.We also separated our broader theoretical model and long-term comparative analysis of the five most important and transformative cases of economic ascent and the restructuring of the capitalist world-economy over the past five centuries into another book, Globalization and the Race for Resources (2005). As we worked on these two books in tandem during Stephen’s long battle with cancer , reviewers of the earlier book and our publisher added a third major change to our agenda. We had planned to include in Globalization and the Race for Resources an extensive analysis of how the Amazon had been incorporated into the capitalist worldeconomy based on its natural resource wealth,and how the incorporation of theAmazon on the basis of its particular and often unique material and social characteristics had in turn shaped the capitalist world-economy. In order to focus that book on our theoretical argument and the empirical analysis of the transformative impacts of the ascents of Portugal, Holland, Great Britain, the United States, and Japan, the case study of the Amazon was reduced to only a small part of that book. As a result, our long-term analysis of the Amazon will be the subject of a third book, the completion of which will be my next task. Our research methods for all of these projects combined a variety of comparative, historical, and qualitative research techniques, including hundreds of interviews with government officials, industry executives, workers, and community residents; extended visits to mines, dams, smelters, and ports; building extensive industry and regional databases; secondary data analysis; and archival research. Our most important analytic technique consisted of long arguments over how to make sense of the rich empirical data we collected across industries,materials,and regions.These sometimes took place at Stephen’s farm or Murphy’s Log Cabin in Hollandale,Wisconsin, on the terrace at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Memorial Union, or, particularly during Stephen’s illness, over the phone, but the ultimate outcome was a much stronger analysis of our empirical data and a much clearer theoretical argument. Stephen’s wife, Dena, tolerated many of our long discussions and phone calls, and we both owe her thanks for that. I know that Stephen would have liked to thank his colleagues and the staff members of the UW-Madison Department of Sociology for their constant friendship. Their personal and professional support and kindness were truly extraordinary and exemplary of what collegiality is supposed to mean. Stephen’s fieldwork was supported by the National Science Foundation, Brazil’s Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa, the Howard Heinz Endowment, the University of Wisconsin–Madison Graduate School, the University of Wisconsin–Madison Global Studies Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Sloan Foundation. R. Tyler Priest, then a graduate student in history at UW-Madison,conducted invaluable archival research for us at the National Archives. I would like to thank a number of people and organizations who have facilitated the long period of research on which this book is based. My department heads at Western Michigan University, Thomas Van Valey and David Hartmann, and...

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