Kommentar |
In the early 2000s, academic scholarship and the business press alike emphasized the increasing importance of countries such as China, India, Turkey, and others to the global economy. These countries “challenged the West” (Amsden 2001), where industry either declined or stagnated, by absorbing ever larger shares of manufacturing capacity and world GDP. In recent years, similar observations have been made for several African countries leading to the creation of the slogan “Africa rising”.
In this course, we will trace the historical industrialization efforts of two non-western countries: Japan, where industrialization began in the 1870s, was the first non-western nation that managed to catch up to the leading economies of the West by the 1970s. Ethiopia, where initial efforts at industrialization were made in the 1890s, experienced periods of development that alternated with periods of decline. However, starting from the early 2000s, the Ethiopian economy entered a phase of sustained economic and industrial development, turning the country into one of the prime examples of “Africa rising”.
After reviewing the concept of industrialization and how it is intertwined with the historical division of the world in “the West - and the Rest”, we will analyze the origins and trajectories of both countries’ economic development paths. We will discuss the effects of government policies and market forces, and how social structure and culture might have affected industrialization. In line with a more transnational view on history, we will also discuss what role the transnational dimension played, paying particular attention to Japanese-Ethiopian networks and processes. Throughout the course, the thematic discussion will be anchored within overarching methodological and conceptual issues of writing the history of non-Western economies such as reflecting on one’s own positionality, language, and interpretation issues, and how to find and assess sources.
Der Kurs findet eher asynchron statt. |
Literatur |
Amsden, Alice H.: The Rise of “the Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies, Oxford/New York 2001.
Clapham, Christopher: Ethiopian development: The politics of emulation, in: Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 44 (1), 01.03.2006, S. 137–150. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/14662040600624536
Frankema, Ewout and Van Waijenburg, Marlous: Africa Rising? A Historical Perspective, in: African Affairs 117 (469), 15.06.2018, S. 543-568. Online: https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/ady022
Ito, Takatoshi and Hoshi, Takeo: The Japanese Economy, Second Edition, Cambridge, MA, 2020. (Chapters 3 & 4)
Marcus, Harold G.: Haile Selassie’s Development Policies and Views, 1916–1960, in: Lepage, Claude (Hg.): Études éthiopiennes, Vol. I. Actes de la Xe conférence internationale des études éthiopiennes, Paris, 24–28 aout 1988, Bd. 1, Paris 1994, S. 641–648.
Ohno, Kenichi: The History of Japanese Economic Development: Origins of Private Dynamism and Policy Competence, London 2018.
Shiferaw, Bekele: Ethiopia’s Transition from a Traditional to a Developing Economy, 1890s–1960s, in: The Oxford Handbook of the Ethiopian Economy, Oxford 2019. |