Capitalist boom, feudal bust: long waves in economics and politics in pre-industrial Japan

This essay is an experiment in using the idea of economic long waves as a tool of historical analysis, in reference to Japan in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). Primarily, it is a formal and sustained attempt to correlate long waves in economics with political and social changes. The theoretical model employed here, that of the long wave in economics, is derived from the history of Western industrial capitalism. The study will outline and compare social and political processes from several succeeding long wave periods. The aim is to show the temporal structure of that evolution and to sketch out a set of recurring contradictions or disequilibria within the general story of development. To this end, it will look first at the place of late-Tokugawa japan within the longer trend of Japanese growth. -from Author