SOCIO-ECONOMIC HISTORY
Online ISSN : 2423-9283
Print ISSN : 0038-0113
ISSN-L : 0038-0113
Volume 68, Issue 6
Displaying 1-18 of 18 articles from this issue
  • Hiroshi KITO
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 637-645
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    The 70th annual conference of the Socio-Economic History Society took place on May 19th and 20th, 2001, at Sophia University in Tokyo. The symposium was organized by Hiroshi KITO, with Kaoru SUGIHARA and Linda GROVE as moderators. It consisted of two keynote speeches and four reports on case studies of environmental and ecological history. Kenneth POMERANTZ reviewed the 'East Asian path of development' and disfussed the divergence of China and Western Europe since the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of resources and the environment. Ryoichi YASUKUNI discussed how copper mining companies obtained fuel and timber in the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods through a case study of the Besshi fopper mine. Following these keynote speeches, three short papers were presented on the topic of ecological problems in relation to economic growth: Hiromichi TAKITA spoke on the shift to fossil fuels in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Haruka YANAGISAWA on changes in the use of common lands in south Indian cillages over the past hundered years, and Makoto UEDA on economic aspects of the ecosystem in Chinese mountain areas with reference to the Shed people (Pengmin). Finally, Osamu SAITO presented some commentes on silvicultual growth.
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  • Kenneth POMERANTZ
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 647-661
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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    Much literature normalizes a North Atlantic pattern of development, and sees a regionally specific 'East Asian' path emerging in the twentieth century. However, development patterns and economic performances in core regions of Europe and East Asia were surprisingly similar until almost 1800; Europe's divergences thereafter was shaped bu exceptional resource bonanzas. East Asian growth has been less resource-intensive, more focused on light industry and a diversified rural economy, and based on different social ideas. However, one cannot always distinguish 'Eastern' and 'Western' paths cleanly: some European economies have followed what looks like an 'East Asian' path, and vice versa. Moreover, various East Asian states have had shorter periods in which their economic strategies focused on the capital-intensive, resource-intensice heavy industry that has otherwise been more prominent in the West: this has happened during periods when those states placed a high priority on increasing their military strength. Recentry, 'East Asian' growth has spread to coastal China, but China's interior poses greater challenges; current interest in more resouce-intensive, state-centered developement strategies for those regions (which are often related to fears about dependence on the outside world for resouces) is thus unsurprising, but environmentally and socially risky.
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  • Ryoichi YASUKUNI
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 663-674
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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    Besshi copper mine was well known asa major Japanese copper mine from the close of the segenteenth century, and its copper was an important export article in the Edo period (1600〜1867). The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of forest resouces and the nature of forest management in relation to the mine, and the type of changes whice occurred. In the Edo period, it was important for those managing mines mines to secure supplies of wood for fuel. Copper mines mainly used wood for mine timber and for smelting fuel (charcoal and firewood). Wood for the Besshi mine was procured from the surrounding forests, which were rented from the Tokugawa shogunate, but as development of the mine charcoal and timber by renting the forested lands belonging to nearby daimyo [feudal lords]. When the output of copper was increased in the 1880s, these was a critical shortage of wood for fuel owing to excessive felling. Before long, coal and coke became the main fuel source, but there was a rising demand for timber for tunnel extensions and the strengthening of mine cavities. Large-scale afforestation began, and the firewood forests around the copper mine developed into timber forests in order to prepare for the demand for timber in the future.
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  • Hiromichi TAKITA
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 675-688
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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    The shift from firewood to coal in Germany has been linked to the shortage of firewood, which grew worse from the second half of the eighteenth century. However, the rapid development of environmental history since the 'oil shocks' of the 1970s has encouraged historians to revise this thesis. Here the author will comment on the two keynote speeches in relation to the 'shortage of firewood' debate. In the first and second sections, we follow Joachim RADKAU's approach in order to show where the debate stands today: The transition to fossil energy proceeded less smoothly in Germany than in England. However, the cause is now thought to be not technical factors, as was previously claimed, but fundamental socio-economic changes summed up as the 'penetration of a new view of nature as an economic resource'. In the third section, we examine the communal forest management of Siegerland in the eighteenth century, comparing it with the case of the Besshi copper mine, and discuss the merits and demerits of the introduction of modern techniques of forest management. In the last section, we use RADKAU's concept of a 'distinctively European path in environmental history' to end with an appeal for a bilateral approach combining global history and regional based total history.
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  • Haruka YANAGISAWA
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 689-708
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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    In nineteenth-century Tamilnadu (south India), a significant portion of village lands were not used by villagers for cultivation but for grazing, and as sorces of firewood, fodder, manure and so on. However, since then there has been a rapid decrease in the overall area of such common land (wasteland). In the nineteenth-century, the dominantly villages not only owned the major portion of agricultural lands but also controlled the management of village common lands and had a preferential right to occupy and privatize wasteland. However, this elite dominance started to decline at the end of the century. Some of the landless villagers acquired small bits of farmland and in the 1920s they probably started occupying wasteland for cultivation purposes. This reclamation of wastelands by the landless reflected the declining dominance of the elite and the empowerment of the labouring classes even through it also reduced the overall area of common land. This paper suggests that in the long term, the acquisition of lands by the landless may contribute to the preservation of natural resources by encouraging a more egalitarian system of control.
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  • NISHIMURA Takeshi
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 709-723
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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    This paper discusses the role of the government-minted silver rupee (the government rupee) in integrating local currency systems in British India into the gold exchange standard, through the examination of trade and monentary statistics. After the closure of the mint for the free coinage of silver in 1893, the British Government of India attempted to replace silver coins by issuing notes all over India. But many people preferred the coins and were unwilling to accept the notes. In 1900, therefore, the government abandoned the plan and decided to resume production of the government rupee, the value of which was now fixed at 1s. 4d. per rupee. In the early twenties century, long-distance trade came to be increasingly linked to coastal and inland trade, and a vast amount of government rupees penetrated into the hinterland since this was the only currency acceptable to the government rupees. In this way, most local currency systems were incorporated into the gold exchage standard, and therefore into the international gold standard. The circulation of the government rupee, with its value fixed to sterling, made this incorporation possible.
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 725-727
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 727-728
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 729-731
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 731-733
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 733-735
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 735-737
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 738-739
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 740-742
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 742-744
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • [in Japanese]
    Article type: Article
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 744-747
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • Article type: Bibliography
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 749-751
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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  • Article type: Index
    2003 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 761-765
    Published: March 25, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: August 14, 2017
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