ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in detail the changes in the Italian arid Japanese class structures which were produced by—and became the conditions for—their respective ruling groups' attempts to move from semi-periphery to core. This chapter assesses the features which distinguished them such that Japan would overtake Italy in crucial respects before the Second World War and be in a position to surpass Italy, in almost every respect, during the post-war period. In industrial production, Italy and Japan shared a similar profile, with the predominance of intermediate goods and the protected growth of government-subsidized and politically-favored monopolistic heavy industry. The struggle for world hegemony had its own unstable dynamic which helped worsen the cyclical economic troubles; those troubles in turn made the world politics of the era more desperate than any before or since. Both Italy and Japan had been on the rise during the preceding boom, exporting silk and importing capital goods to build up textile production and rudimentary heavy industry.
