Simple Pleasures: Food Consumption in Japan and the Global Comparison of Living Standards (2013)
Contrary both to Pomeranz's argument for the comparability of pre-industrial living standards across Eurasia and to the accumulating evidence of the extent of growth in the Japanese economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, quantitative historical comparisons of living standards consistently place Japan on a level with the least developed parts of Europe and imply that the living conditions of ordinary Japanese people only began to approach those of the industrialized West once imported modernization had been absorbed. This article uses concepts derived from comparative consumption history to go deeper into this issue, arguing that, from at least the late eighteenth century, Japanese living standards were changing in ways that paralleled equivalent developments in Europe. Through the consumption histories of a set of `transformative' products -- rice, tea, tobacco, and sugar -- it seeks to demonstrate the potential for comparative qualitative analysis of living standards and to show that, in Japan as in Europe, the `transformation of desire' paved the way for industrialization.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Wood, Donald C.;
(2012)
Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village
(/isis/citation/CBB001421795/)
Article
Infante-Amate, Juan;
Molina, Manuel González de;
(2013)
The Socio-Ecological Transition on a Crop Scale: The Case of Olive Orchards in Southern Spain (1750--2000)
(/isis/citation/CBB001421938/)
Book
Gunn, Geoffrey C.;
(2014)
Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam: The Great Famine and the Viet Minh Road to Power
(/isis/citation/CBB001422637/)
Book
Hahn, Barbara;
(2011)
Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617--1937
(/isis/citation/CBB001220603/)
Article
Voskuil, Lynn;
(2012)
Robert Fortune, Camellia sinensis, and the Nineteenth-Century Global Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB001200844/)
Book
Sharma, Jayeeta;
(2011)
Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India
(/isis/citation/CBB001421813/)
Book
Hoyle, R W;
(2013)
The Farmer in England, 1650--1980
(/isis/citation/CBB001422268/)
Article
Ortega, José Guadalupe;
(2014)
Machines, Modernity, and Sugar: The Greater Caribbean in a Global Context, 1812--50
(/isis/citation/CBB001421520/)
Article
Lee, Tom;
(2014)
Southern Appalachia's Nineteenth-Century Bright Tobacco Boom: Industrialization, Urbanization, and the Culture of Tobacco
(/isis/citation/CBB001421783/)
Book
G. Roger Knight;
(2018)
Sugar, Steam and Steel: The Industrial Project in Colonial Java, 1830-1885
(/isis/citation/CBB104279760/)
Book
Sarah Besky;
(2020)
Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea
(/isis/citation/CBB480361893/)
Article
Loconto, Allison;
(2014)
Sustaining an Enterprise, Enacting SustainabiliTea
(/isis/citation/CBB001421216/)
Article
Arao, Miyo;
(2006)
White Sugar Production in [the] Owari Clan during [the] Horeki Era (1751--1763)---Focusing on the Original Author of the Tousei Hiketu
(/isis/citation/CBB000774072/)
Thesis
Christopher Robin Jamie Craig;
(2015)
The Middlemen of Modernity: Local Elites and Agricultural Development in Meiji Japan
(/isis/citation/CBB491654362/)
Book
Liedtke, Rainer;
(2012)
Die industrielle Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB001420995/)
Article
Ferguson, Dean T.;
(2014)
Nightsoil and the “Great Divergence”: Human Waste, the Urban Economy, and Economic Productivity, 1500--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001421528/)
Article
Kin Sum Li;
(2022)
A Bowl of Good Tea in the Northern Song Dynasty: Using Modern Examples to Understand the Daguan chalun 大觀茶論
(/isis/citation/CBB521772318/)
Essay Review
Matthew Mauger;
(2018)
Writing Tea’s Empire
(/isis/citation/CBB579357935/)
Article
Megan Zandstra;
Derek Byerlee;
John Lynam;
(2023)
Rice: The Colonial Origins of Food Crop Research in West Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB148420391/)
Book
Swindell, Ken;
Jeng, Alieu;
(2006)
Migrants, Credit and Climate: The Gambian Groundnut Trade, 1834--1934
(/isis/citation/CBB001422392/)
Be the first to comment!