![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bibliographic Data: Wigen, Kären. The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Main Argument: Using a geographical perspective on history, Wigen makes three principal arguments: that "bringing more self-consciously geographical analysis to the study of Japanese development" is "needed if we are to put together a meaningful picture of Japanese development" (20, xiii); that "both before and during its passage to modernity, the spatial patterns of the Japanese economy were the products of complex social negotiations" (21); and that "the transformation of Shimoina confirms that spatial patterns are more than a passive projection of social process" (ibid). The successful peripheralization of Shimoina and many other places like it, and the re-harnessing and redirection of Tokugawa-period networks that this process entailed, are key to understanding Japan's swift rise to the status of an imperial power on the world stage.
Historiographical Engagement: With a lot of literature on protoindustrialization in the early modern period, as well as historical geography, i.e. DeVries and Braudel.
( A geographical revolution )
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, interesting, well-written book--"a gem," as professors in the department have described it to me. When we read Wigen's second book, A Malleable Map, for seminar last year, I was given the rather unenviable task of defending it in the face of a number of criticisms, not least being that this book is a stronger work than her more recent effort. Having now read this book, I think that it's very true that The Making of a Japanese Periphery is better, mostly because it is so beautifully constructed, its evidence laid out clearly and concretely. I found one of the best aspects of A Malleable Map to be Wigen's firm grasp of the fact that regions are constructed rather than made, and it's interesting to see in this book her application of that insight to a broader realm than the government/society interactions with which the second book is largely concerned. It's also interesting to note the places where her research in this book undoubtedly led her to start thinking about the questions that inform her second. And I continue to be highly gratified by her attention to the gender dynamics of social and economic power, as well as to the hierarchies of social power across time.
I am quite certain that Wigen is fundamentally correct when she argues that the peripheralization of Shimoina (and countless other comparable regions around Japan) enabled Japan to shrug off its own peripheral/non-participant status in the global economic and political order and become an imperial core, and I would have quite liked an entire other chapter expanding this argument, particularly her fascinating, throwaway assertion that contemporary China's inability to reconfigure its spatial hierarchies was part of its ultimate inability to retain state integrity. Of course, such a chapter would have been well outside the scope of the present study, which obviously deservedly won the Fairbank Prize in 1995.
Further reading: Jan DeVries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800; Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce; People and Production; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England; Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Meta notes: On Earth as it is not in heaven, representing space temporally, or time spatially, is going to lead to some misrepresentations.
Main Argument: Using a geographical perspective on history, Wigen makes three principal arguments: that "bringing more self-consciously geographical analysis to the study of Japanese development" is "needed if we are to put together a meaningful picture of Japanese development" (20, xiii); that "both before and during its passage to modernity, the spatial patterns of the Japanese economy were the products of complex social negotiations" (21); and that "the transformation of Shimoina confirms that spatial patterns are more than a passive projection of social process" (ibid). The successful peripheralization of Shimoina and many other places like it, and the re-harnessing and redirection of Tokugawa-period networks that this process entailed, are key to understanding Japan's swift rise to the status of an imperial power on the world stage.
Historiographical Engagement: With a lot of literature on protoindustrialization in the early modern period, as well as historical geography, i.e. DeVries and Braudel.
( A geographical revolution )
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, interesting, well-written book--"a gem," as professors in the department have described it to me. When we read Wigen's second book, A Malleable Map, for seminar last year, I was given the rather unenviable task of defending it in the face of a number of criticisms, not least being that this book is a stronger work than her more recent effort. Having now read this book, I think that it's very true that The Making of a Japanese Periphery is better, mostly because it is so beautifully constructed, its evidence laid out clearly and concretely. I found one of the best aspects of A Malleable Map to be Wigen's firm grasp of the fact that regions are constructed rather than made, and it's interesting to see in this book her application of that insight to a broader realm than the government/society interactions with which the second book is largely concerned. It's also interesting to note the places where her research in this book undoubtedly led her to start thinking about the questions that inform her second. And I continue to be highly gratified by her attention to the gender dynamics of social and economic power, as well as to the hierarchies of social power across time.
I am quite certain that Wigen is fundamentally correct when she argues that the peripheralization of Shimoina (and countless other comparable regions around Japan) enabled Japan to shrug off its own peripheral/non-participant status in the global economic and political order and become an imperial core, and I would have quite liked an entire other chapter expanding this argument, particularly her fascinating, throwaway assertion that contemporary China's inability to reconfigure its spatial hierarchies was part of its ultimate inability to retain state integrity. Of course, such a chapter would have been well outside the scope of the present study, which obviously deservedly won the Fairbank Prize in 1995.
Further reading: Jan DeVries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800; Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce; People and Production; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England; Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Meta notes: On Earth as it is not in heaven, representing space temporally, or time spatially, is going to lead to some misrepresentations.
