ABSTRACT
First Published in 1966. Any person who resides in any one of the principal oriental countries is bound to stimulate a western mind to consider the differences between his own and eastern civilizations, and the reasons for these differences. During a dozen years as an economist in Japan, India and China, a number of conclusions which the author first formed tentatively have gradually become convictions. One of these is that if economic forces play the important part in western countries which most thoughtful people attribute to them, they must be even more important in the Orient, because of the greater pressure of population upon the natural resources in those countries. A second is that many of the striking differences between occidental and oriental cultures are adaptations of the same human clay to differing economic conditions. Since the opening and settlement of the New World, the West has been pressed in a new mould, leaving the East of to-day in a medieval cast. A third is that detailed studies of the evolutionary movements now in process in several eastern countries would throw very useful light upon the origins and nature of the competitive system which has characterized the modern economic history of the West. This volume fills the need for fuller understanding of India’s economic changes, especially those having to do with the growth of capitalistic enterprise, led the government of India to institute a remarkable series of investigations into several aspects of Indian life.
