A Bridge of Rice and Silk, a Wall of Wheat and Rye: Reforming States and Agrarian Change in Japan and Russia, 1853-191

This dissertation offers a case study of the process by which capitalist economic relations pulled in regions of the world still dominated by agrarian economies and polities in the mid-nineteenth century. Its primary focus is Japan, with Russia serving as a comparative foil. Japan represents an example---the first, and still one of the few, outside of Western Europe and its former settler colonies---of a country that started from an established premodern political structure and agrarian economy to become advanced, industrialized, and capitalist. The core claim advanced by this study is that in Japan, in the decades following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the emergence of capitalism in rural areas acted as the engine for the beginning of economic development and industrialization. My argument for this claim proceeds in three steps. The first is to establish, contrary to alternative account, that on the eve of the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese economy was not structured by capitalist social relations and not governed by capitalist dynamics. The second is to analyze the processes of political transformation that swept Japan from the 1850s through the 1880s, in order to establish both what drove them and what were the key institutions changes they brought about. The case of the Great Reforms in Russia---initiated in the 1850s by the newly crowned Tsar Alexander II---is introduced to provide a "control" for the pressures placed on political elites by the competitive geopolitical and world-economic environment of the mid-nineteenth century. This comparative analysis continues in the third step of this study, which explains how capitalist development was set off in rural areas of Japan---as well as certain regions in Russia, but crucially not in the empire's established agrarian core.