PhD defence Aditi Dixit: The Asian ‘Great Divergence’

Why did the West grow rich while the rest of the world did not? In her PhD thesis ‘Asian Divergence in an Age of Globalisation’, Aditi Dixit examines this ‘Great Divergence’ through its relatively understudied Asian counterpart. She will defend her dissertation on 17 May.

Japan’s developmental State Japan and India’s colonial State

Developments in the mechanised cotton textile industries of India and Japan diverged widely in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Scholars have previously explained this divergence from aspects such as labour productivity, labour organisation, and technology adoption. Dixit now broadens the scope and argues that differences in productivity and labour organisation stemmed from broader institutional developments under specific state regimes.

In Japan, the national state supported the development of trade organisation, Dixit notes. Close links with the textile industry ensured access to requisite raw materials and markets. India, conversely, was embedded in colonial trade patterns. Here, the trade organisation had weak links with the country’s industrial needs.

Dixit further argues that differences in the broader economic developments in the terms of an expanding labour market conditioned households’ decisions to supply labour. Also, she writes for instance, these shaped the differential gender compositions of the textile labour-force.