"In this book Peer Vries is the first scholar to provide an extensive test of the claim that industrialization in East … Asia, in particular in Japan between the Meiji Restoration and World War Two, would have been much more labour intensive … than industrialization in the West. He does this by systematically comparing the role and importance of labour and capital …

1. Introduction / Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara -- 2. Labour-intensive industrialization in global history : an …. Proto-industrialization and labour-intensive industrialization : reflections on Smithian growth and the role of skill …-intensive industrialization in the rural Yangzi Delta : late imperial patterns and their modern fates / Kenneth Pomeranz -- 7. From peasant …