Asia Economic History Seminars 2025-26

Seminar organisers: Zoey Shen, Tom Learmouth, Andy, Anggi Novianti

Venue:

Autumn Term: CKK.2.18 (Cheng Kin Ku Building) unless otherwise stated

Time: 12-1pm, unless otherwise stated

Autumn Term 2025 - 2026

28 October- Online only

Masato Shizume (Waseda) and Makoto Fukumoto (Waseda)
Modern Banking Reforms and Financial Activities of Indigenous Merchants: A Case from Japan in the Late 19th Century
Abstract:
Following the opening of the treaty ports in 1859 and Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan instituted a series of drastic reforms, successfully modernized, and achieved prolonged economic growth. Among other entities, national banks structured as joint stock companies according to the US model played a key role in the modernization of the country by providing the society with liquidity and integrating the national financial markets. We explore the factors that led to the success of the national banks by constructing new datasets characterizing the origins of the national banks and the viability of individual national banks. We then perform regressions with this database to explore the emergence of banking activities during the preceded period and to test whether the origins of the banks affected their viability and regional economic growth. Empirical results from econometric analysis and case studies demonstrate that commoners who engaged in commercial activities played a key role in Japan’s modernization as the founders of the national banks.

18 November (Rescheduled to be January 2026)

Mohd Shazwan Mokhtar (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia)
Constructing Colonial Cost of Living Index in British Malaya during the interwar years
Abstract:
TBC

25 November- In person and online

Hugh Whittaker (Oxford)
Revisiting Late Development and Compressed Development in East Asia
Abstract:
Two versions of ‘late development’ are reviewed – Dore’s version derived from Japan, and Gerschenkron’s version derived from Europe and applied to Japan, and then other East Asian countries. ‘Late development’ has always had critics on empirical grounds, but there are conceptual problems as well. These led to its waning influence from the 1990s, but some of the major problems, including unilinear evolution, are addressed under the concept of ‘compressed development,’ which offers a comparative evolutionary framework for economic and social development especially relevant to East Asia.

02 December-Online only

James B. Lewis (Oxford)
The Aftermath of the Imjin War in Early Modern East Asia
Abstract:
The talk will offer an overview of the contents of a forthcoming book from Brill, entitled The Aftermath of the Imjin War in Early Modern East Asia, edited by Rebekah Clements, Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and The Autonomous University of Barcelona and James B Lewis, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. The volume seeks to understand the regional legacy of the East Asian War of 1592-1598, also known as the Imjin War. The focus of the volume is on the human, environmental, and technological aftermath of the war to capture the long-term continuities and discontinuities at the beginning of the “early modern” period in East Asia. The volume seeks to re-orient research on East Asia during the post-Imjin period by bringing this large but often-overlooked conflict into the foreground of sixteenth to seventeenth-century East Asian and World History. The talk will focus on the theoretical propositions in Chapter One: ‘The Imjin War and the Beginnings of the Early Modern in East Asia’, by Rebekah Clements, Barend Noordam (Heidelberg University), and James Lewis.

Spring Term 2025 - 2026

03 February- Online only

03 March- Online only

Şahin Yeşilyurt (Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University)
Attracting Starlings: Locust Invasions, Taxation, and the Role of Starling Sheikhs in Ottoman Society
Abstract:
TBC

26 May- Online only