Introduction: Viewpoints and Methods in the Economic History of Japan

Akira Hayami
Additional contact information
Akira Hayami: The Japan Academy

Chapter Chapter 1 in Japan’s Industrious Revolution, 2015, pp 1-13 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Taken literally, economic history is an academic discipline whose purpose is to seek out the developmental processes of economic phenomena occurring in everyday life within the bounds of history. Therefore, as a field, it can be said to reside in an intermediate area between economics and history. There is not much constructive meaning in stating which field a certain discipline belongs to, since fixating on such things leaves little prospect for disciplinary synthesis or new developments. However, in comparison to cases where its content is clearly based on expressions such as “theory” or “history” within economics, when it is evident that it is in an intermediate area from the onset, its character as a discipline is no longer simple. The methods of economic history clearly have economic and historical approaches; furthermore, these contain the differences in their worldview, historical view, and adopted methodology, and so on. Consequently, even works that equally claim to be “economic history” have an extremely broad range of methods and viewpoints. In the past as well, people who were called economic historians were in some cases economists and in some cases were scholars listed amongst the names of historians. In addition, it is by no means easy to distinguish “economy” from other social phenomena, as well as psychological factors, and in some cases, the very act of handling them separately is a mistake.

Keywords: Economic History; Economic Principle; Economic Phenomenon; Intermediate Area; Economic Society (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stechp:978-4-431-55142-3_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9784431551423

DOI: 10.1007/978-4-431-55142-3_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Economic History from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().