ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the conventional versions of industrialization with English textiles and trade looms large. Trade was central to British industrialization because the principal fiber of the textile revolution, cotton. Commodities industrialization almost always goes with a sharp increase in trade. Although joining the international economy may not increase the financial resources or incentives available for industrialization, it is bound to increase knowledge of technological alternatives. Bombay's textile mills, like slightly younger counterparts in Osaka and Shanghai, boomed during World War I, when shortages of shipping provided protection from European goods. European ingenuity and entrepreneurship together with previously accumulated capital and budding markets led to the industrialization that was the secret of Europe's centuries-long domination of the world economy. Until World War I, manufactured goods accounted for only about one-fourth of Japanese exports; silver and timber made up some of the rest, but farm goods were dominant.
