ABSTRACT
‘Industrialization’ being the replacement of human or animal by mechanical power in production, at first glance the very idea of ‘labour-intensive industrialization’ seems a contradiction in terms. Yet economies, and individual firms within the same sector, differed in the physical proportions of capital and labour they combined to produce any given level of machine-based output. Kaoru Sugi-hara’s thesis addresses a term even longer than the history of industrialization itself. He argues that it is possible to distinguish ‘paths’ of economic development in different parts of the world, each path defined by a specific factor-bias inscribed in a sequence of choices of technique and perhaps also of organization and institution. Both the capital-intensive path in the West and the labour-intensive path in East Asia were efficient responses to their respective resource endowments. This volume, being the work of a group of scholars with diverse perspectives, is not an attempt to apply the thesis, but rather to explore its insights and limitations from different angles and in a range of geographical and chronological contexts. This final chapter reviews the significance of Sugihara’s original ‘two paths’ thesis (2000, 2003, 2007) in the literature on comparative and global economic history and international development and suggests ways in which the notion of plural developmental paths may be refined in the light of the preceding chapters.
