Title: Labour-intensive Industrialisation in Global History: Asian Experiences and Comparative Perspectives

Contact Information: Kaoru Sugihara, Professor of Economic History, Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University, 1-7 Machikaneyama-cho, Osaka, 560-0043 Japan. Ph: 81-6-6850-5229. Fax: 81-6-6850-5274. Email: sugihara@econ.osaka-u.ac.jp

Other Organizers: Tirthankar Roy (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research)

Description: The proposed session considers aspects of this route of industrialisation, primarily during the last two hundred years and its global significance. In so far as it is relevant to the understanding of the diffusion of industrialisation since the nineteenth century, the experience in the earlier period will be referred in the discussion. Renewed appraisal of resource- and capital-saving, labour-intensive technology and the institutions which supported it will be made, with its environmental implications in mind. The connection between labour-intensive industrialisation and demographic patterns, which had been taken up in the proto-industry literature but not fully developed with regard to the non-European world, will also be relevant to our concern. Finally, we strongly wish to involve scholars specialising in Africa and Latin America, as well as in Europe and North America, to create a dialogue richer than those that had been possible in the more Euro-centric formats.

Participants: Kaoru Sugihara (Japan); Masayuki Tanimoto (Japan); Douglas E. Haynes (USA); Jan de Vries (USA); Osamu Saito (Japan); Kenneth Pomeranz (USA); Gareth Austin (UK); Ravi Arvind Palat (USA); Michel Hau (France); David Clayton (UK); Patrick O'Brien (UK).