Britain and Japan: A Comparative Economic and Social History since 1900 (review)

Britain and Japan: A Comparative Economic and Social History since 1900. By Kenneth D. Brown (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1998) 269 pp. $79.95 cloth $29.95 paper.

Brown employs a modified version of the structural model by A. H. Halsey in Trends in British Society since 1900 (Macmillan, 1972) as a basis for exploring the rise of Japan and the relative decline of Britain during the twentieth century. His introductory chapter sets the stage by describing both countries before World War I in terms of their key institutional systems: production (the economy), reproduction (social structure), power and authority (formal structures of government and mechanisms of social control), and ritual (the values and cultural practices that bind society together). Of the remaining six chapters, four are devoted to production and reproduction in successive eras--the "Great War" to the "Great Crash," 1914 to c. 1930; the Great Crash to the end of World War II; the recovery and the long postwar boom, 1945 to c. 1970; and post-boom developments, 1971 to 1995. Two chapters are devoted to power and ritual over longer periods of time--1914 to c. 1940 and 1945 to c. 1995. There is no overarching interpretation provided at the end, although the introduction to each chapter does make a stab at conceptualizing what is to follow, and there are occasional references to scholarly controversies.

The emphasis throughout is on the presentation of relevant data and observations, assiduously garnered from the secondary literature about both countries and summarized with impressive clarity. Perhaps befitting what is described in a blurb on the back cover of the book as "the first genuinely comparative study" of Britain and Japan, narration within the sociologically inspired categories of the model prevails over interpretation. As a mere long-time resident of Oxford, I cannot really assess the accuracy and balance of Brown's treatment of Britain's economic and social development, but it does strike me as plausible on the whole. As a specialist in modern Japanese history, I was impressed not only with his explication of Japan's fairly well-documented economic development but also--and more significantly--with the judiciousness of his description of developments in the "power" and "ritual" spheres, on which considerably less evidence or exploration in English exists. Thanks to the demands of his model and his determination to avoid the essentially Eurocentric "society of internal paradoxes" approach that has characterized so much generalist writing on Japan (5), he has managed to track down material and provide nuanced explanations that render the achievements and deficiencies of twentieth-century Japan comprehensible to a Western audience. In the process, he has also identified a number of issues--among them, the impact of family-owned companies on economic growth in Britain and Japan during the 1920s and the economic mobilization of both countries during World War II (47, 90-91)--on which fruitful comparative work might be carried out in future.

Ann Waswo
St. Antony's College, Oxford

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