modernising Japan can throw light on the paths that industrialisation was eventually to take across the globe. It has long been … what has been called ‘the single most important debate in recent global history’. Japan, as the only non-Western country to …-interpreting Japanese economic history in the light of the debate, so arguing that global historians and scholars of Japan have in fact much …

and Europe, using Japan's Tokugawa era (1603-1868) as a benchmark from which to consider public goods provision in Prussia …, China, and England. Japan is similar in size to a European country and linked to China through shared beliefs and practices …