The great silk exchange: Globalization of trade and technological diffusion in historical perspective

In this dissertation, I have used the historical development of global silk trade and industries as a case study to analyze the dynamic role of trade and technological diffusion on the patterns of long-term national economic growth. The dissertation surveys the long history of global silk trade and production and provides both a statistical and modeling framework that emphasize the central role of knowledge diffusion, accumulation and learning in long term economic development. The major part of the dissertation focuses on the trade of raw silk as a standardized commodity in the late 19th and early 20th century, with the U.S. and European silk manufacturers as the consumers, and Japanese, Chinese and Italian raw silk producers as the suppliers.;It aims to shed light on several important issues on the development of this global trade and the central question related to the patterns of economic growth among the major trading countries. First, it examines factors, which accounted for the patterns of trade and technological integration among the global silk industries. Second, it answers the more important question of why Japanese raw silk exports out-performed the rest of the world, in particular, China. Third, the dissertation examines the crucial linkage between the development of the raw silk industries and the process of industrialization in China and Japan.;The dissertation shows that the trade in raw silk had impelled the rise of Pacific economic integration, specifically the unique trade and technological linkage between the Japanese raw silk industry and the U.S. silk manufacturing industry. Using data from Japanese, Chinese and English sources and adopting modern analytical and statistical tools of economics, I show that rapid productivity advances were the most important factor behind the success of the Japanese raw silk sector. It then demonstrates that this divergence in productivity progress between the Chinese and Japanese silk sectors is due to the enormous capacity of Japanese to absorb modern science, technology and institutions. Finally, my dissertation argues that the differential process of industrialization in China and Japan in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries largely accounted for the contrasting performance of the two national industries.