ABSTRACT
Introduction We have, throughout this edited volume, focussed on the primacy of ideas, perforce those which have consequences in the ‘real world’ on both events and people. The most famous economist of all time, Adam Smith (1723-1790) refers to ‘theories of political oeconomy’ [sic],1 in The Wealth of Nations (1776), but only in passing and only three times; he notes that ‘different theories . . . have had a considerable influence, not only upon the opinions of men of learning, but upon the public conduct of princes and statesmen’ (1776: Book I, 12). A philosopher’s ‘duty’, speaking broadly, wrote Karl Marx (1818-1883) is not just to use ideas to ‘interpret’ the world but to ‘change’ it, words also carved on his tomb in Highgate Cemetery in London (Marx, [1854] 1969: 15). In more recent times, another well-known economist, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) in turn noted ‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood’ (Keynes, 1936: 383). Ideas had flowed in both directions between ‘East’ and ‘West’ for millennia, ranging from ancient religious beliefs to modern scientific concepts, just as material goods were shipped in their train across the ‘Silk Roads’2 linking the land-mass continents. Joseph Needham (1900-1995), the Cambridge historian of science, has shown in extraordinary detail how a two-way traffic evolved across the centuries between China and the West (see Needham, 1954). But ‘China’s influence on the world’s knowledge started to decline at about the time when modern science and technology were developing in Europe’ (see AndreossoO’Callaghan’s chapter in this volume, note 11). Initially, East Asian (mainly Chinese) ideas had been taken up by European Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century (see Clarke, 1997) and these are said to have shaped Western Economics thinking at that time, taking the case of the French Physiocrat economist, Francois Quesnay (1694-1774) a physician to the Royal Court at the time, as an example. He proposed a philosophy of ‘natural order’ which would bring prosperity to France, as he thought it had done so in China (see Jacobsen, 2013). He argued in his Le Despotisme de la Chine, written in 1767, that ‘Oriental Despotism’ might be a model for the West. It is
even said that the notion of ‘laissez-faire’, or ‘laissez passer’ associated with his line of thought – but coined by his colleague, Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759) – had ‘Daoist’ origins – in terms of the philosophy of ‘wu-wei’ meaning namely ‘to do nothing’ – but this remains a moot point (see Gerlach, 2005). In turn, we can note that Adam Smith in fact wrote about China long before the ‘Middle Kingdom’ knew anything about him (see Warner, 2014: 38). In fact, he mentions China 63 times in The Wealth of Nations (1776), and the East Indies on 56 occasions but only refers to Japan in eight instances. It is ironic that Karl Marx (Makesi) (1818-1883) who only knew of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ tangentially over a century and a half ago, wrote about it quite often – as a commentator on international affairs in the New York Daily Tribune from 1852 to 1861 – as well as at other times with his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels (Engesi) (1820-1895) acting as ‘ghost-writer’ (see Marx, 1853). This was some years before he published the first volume of Das Kapital/ Capital in 1867 and ‘well before the Chinese knew anything at all about the said Dr Marx’ (Warner, 2014: 4). In the first volume, he only refers to China four times however, to Japan just three and the East Indies a mere two. In due course, Western ideas became known outside the countries in which they originated and eventually were passed on to East Asia (see the chapters by Das, Trescott, Yagi, Hong and Rasiah and others respectively, in this volume). New Economic notions spread very quickly during the age of the Enlightenment across the Atlantic and to Europe, even to Russia. Smith’s two major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [TMS] (1759) and particularly The Wealth of Nations [WN] (1776) in time found their respective readerships.3 As there were close links between Britain and France, Smith had visited Voltaire, (FrançoisMarie Arouet, 1674-1778), at his home in Ferney. The latter philosophe was one of the early European thinkers to interpret history in terms of Economics, although his views were mainly expressed piecemeal. As well as the aforementioned Quesnay (see Vignery, 1960), Smith kept in touch with other economists on the Continent but went on to criticize their notions of ‘Mercantilism’ and ‘Physiocracy’. The influence of Smith thus spread across Europe; his books were wellreceived in Germany, for example, at first – if later superseded by the works of Friedrich List (1789-1846), who emphasized the role of the State in national development (see Tribe, 2007), as well as those of Marx whose critique of the capitalist system was to attract attention from its radical intellectuals (see Kurz et al., 2011). As Joan Robinson (1903-1983) notes, such views ‘bear the stamp of the period when it was conceived’ – comparing Marx, Marshall and Keynes (Robinson, 1960: 1). After a few decades, these new notions spread to the ‘East’, many thousands of miles away, by land and by sea, to the region we have focussed on, to initially Japan and then China (see the chapters by Liu, Trescott as well as Metzler and others respectively in this volume). It was shown earlier in this edited collection how Japan was the first to encounter Western ‘modernity’ in a significant way in the mid-nineteenth century but it had earlier learned a good deal from the Netherlands by way of
what was known as ‘Ranguku’ in the seventeenth century (meaning literally ‘Dutch study’ from the early visitors who occupied the trading-post of Dejima quarter of Nagasaki in Japan and by extension ‘Western learning’). New scientific knowledge and technologies from the West had significantly passed through this portal (see Jansen, 1984). But the movement became obsolete after the British and American incursions occurred after the last decades of the Tokugawa regime (1853-1867). Later, Japanese students were sent to the Netherlands and they soon brought home Western Economics4 (see the chapter by Ohtsuki in this volume) with ‘a disproportionate significance for the development of economics in the Meiji period’ (Morris-Suzuki, 1989: 49). Other European influences were to prevail. Japanese scholars were acquiring a working knowledge of English, French or German (1989: 50). Indeed, Japan was to be ahead of most of East Asia by a long-ish chalk in embracing the ‘new’. In order to stand up to the West, it had to have the ‘right’ tools, indeed ‘Western’ ones in order to do this. It was thus to institutionalize the ‘Rich State and Strong Army Policy’ (fukoku kyohei) of the Meiji regime over the period 1868-1912, which was originally taken from an ancient Chinese text of the Warring States period of the Zhou Dynasty from 475 bc onwards. Similarly, Western economic ideas were translated into Japanese somewhat more quickly than in the Chinese case (see the chapter by Yagi in this volume). Japan also had a literacy-rate of 40 per cent, possibly comparable to Western Europe in 1868, whereas China achieved only around 5 per cent. Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was substantively translated into Japanese by 1882 (see the chapter by Sakamoto in this volume) but a comparable rendering in China did come somewhat later, in 1902 (see the chapter by Lai in this volume). Both of these renderings were treated with much intellectual enthusiasm at the time but were only intelligible to an elite audience (Borokh, 2012). Western Management ideas also spread alongside Economics, first to Japan, then to China, as in the case of the work of US theorist and practitioner, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) (see Warner, 1994). His main book was entitled Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911 (Taylor, 1911) and initially translated into Japanese by Yukinori Hoshino in 1912 and later into Chinese by Mu Xiangyuin in 1916 (see Morgan, 2003). Sun Yat-sen’s Industrial Plan (shiye jihua), a form of Taylorism on a macroeconomic scale, came out originally in Chinese in 1921 and in English a year later (Sun, 1922), as The International Development of China, as an early step in articulating an integrated economic development plan for a unified nation (see Warner, 2014).
