Origins of Japanese Wealth and Power (PDF)

JOHN SAGERS is Assistant Professor of History at Linfield College, USA.

"Up to now, historians have asked about the origins of Japan's distinctive state-led economic system. John Sagers turns the question around and in a lucid, thought-provoking account asks how it was that samurai bureaucrats from the most feudalistic and command-oriented of regions, Satsuma, built a market-oriented economy. A great read!" - Mark Metzler, University of Texas at Austin, author of Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan

"Sagers' study is particularly interesting in that it explores political economic thought across the divide of the Meiji Restoration. He closely examines Satsuma domain and its pragmatic officials who later served in the Meiji government to highlight the continuities of political economic reasoning within early modern domainal states and the modern Japanese state." - Luke Roberts, University of California, Santa Barbara

"The first book-length study in English of official economic concepts and practices across the Meiji Restoration of 1868, this work makes a signal contribution to our understanding of Japan's transition to a modern capitalist economy. By documenting the indigenous sources of Meiji economic thinking, the author offers an important corrective to the standard view that after 1868 Japanese leaders drew inspiration almost exclusively from Western economic ideas and models. A welcome addition to the new wave of studies dealing with Japan's experience in the nineteenth century as a whole." - Steven Ericson, Dartmouth College

"[A] useful exploration of the development strategies pursued by nineteenth-century Satsuma and the early Meiji state." - Tom Havens, Northeastern University