This paper explores the ways in which global resource allocation affected the pattern of Japanese (and later East Asia’s) industrialisation, and how it eventually came to underpin the course of Japanese imperialism and aggression in the 1930s.

This study finds that the development process of the Kiryu silk weaving district in Japan from 1895 to 1930 can be divided at least into the two phases, i.e., Smithian growth based on the inter-firm division of labor using hand looms and Schumpeterian development based on factory system using...