The Late Nineteenth Century As Critical Juncture: A Comparison of Russia and Japan

Around 1850, Russia and Japan were economically undeveloped countries with quasi-feudal political institutions. In subsequent decades, both states undertook programs for economic development and military buildup in order to compete with the capitalist powers of the west. This paper will compare the trajectories of these parallel state-led projects. While pre-existing domestic institutions and geo-economic relations had some influence, the outcome in each case was substantially determined by domestic political processes. In Russia, top-down reforms adjusted but fundamentally reproduced an essentially pre-capitalist structure of agrarian relations, generating political and economic pressures that would explode in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. In Japan, the interaction of strategies of state officials, rural elites, and peasants generated a fundamental transformation in its agrarian economy—to an extent that political accounts of the Meiji state often do not do justice to. Comparing Japan’s trajectory with that of Russia, instead of with an idealized conception of western European development, leads to the conclusion that state elites in Japan were able to secure a stable domestic base for their ambition to extend Japan’s military power into northeast Asia not because agrarian social relations remained “semi-feudal” but instead because they became basically capitalist. The paper will thus show that the late nineteenth century was a critical juncture in which political actions and struggles had longterm consequences for the historical trajectories of not just Russia and Japan but also East Asia as a whole, because of the long shadows cast by both the Bolshevik Revolution and Japanese imperialism.