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David Howell uses proto-industrialism to explain the Japanese transition from the feudalism of the Tokugawa period to capitalism in the Meiji and later eras. Proto-industrialism, a concept borrowed from European economic history, refers to rural manufacturing for long-distance trade. Howell shows the Hokkaido herring fertilizer trade represents a good example of proto-industrialization in nineteenth-century Japan, where commercial production by a dispersed network of small contract-fishery operators employing some wage labor was transformed into a new capitalist mode in which large entrepreneurs came to dominate through the wage-labor systems and floating factory ships. Howell concludes that proto-industrialism in mid-nineteenth-century Japan suggests that Japan's economic success from the late nineteenth century onward is not simply the result of Meiji government policies, but reflects long-term economic changes underway in the Japanese economy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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