Penelope Francks

Biographic Data

ID99221
NAMEPenelope Francks
GIVEN NAMESPenelope
FAMILY NAMEFrancks
SIGNATUREFRANCKS P
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Leeds
ORCID0000-0003-1014-7033
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS50
TOTAL CITATIONS34
AUTHOR COUNT49
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1979
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2024
H-INDEX4

  • The reconceptualisation of the industrial revolution and why it matters for Japanese studies

    Open AccessPenelope FrancksARTICLEJapan Forum2024References: 31

    The concept of the industrial revolution remains central to most accounts of the birth of the modern world, including, whether consciously or not, standard interpretations of Japan’s modern history. However, recent decades have seen a burgeoning of research into the onset of industrialisation in Britain and elsewhere in Europe that has led to a significant reassessment of what the classic industrial revolution actually involved. Historians of Jap…

  • Middlemen of Modernity

    Penelope FrancksARTICLEJournal of Japanese Studies2023

    Reviewed by: Middlemen of Modernity: Local Elites and Agricultural Development in Modern Japan by Christopher Craig Penelope Francks (bio) Middlemen of Modernity: Local Elites and Agricultural Development in Modern Japan. By Christopher Craig. University of Hawai'i Press, 2021. xii, 261 pages. $68.00, cloth; $28.00, paper. Ever since the interwar period at least, historians of Japan have been debating the changing structure of agriculture and rur…

  • Industriousness and divergence

    Open AccessPenelope FrancksARTICLEAustralian Economic History Review2022

    Quantitative comparisons of living standards across Eurasia continue to conclude that the eastern side of the “great divergence,” including Japan, lagged behind the leading regions of Europe from early‐modern times onwards. The “industrious revolution” model attributes this to the early spread in Europe of markets for labour and consumer goods. By contrast, in Japan, persistent household self‐sufficiency must have precluded improvements driven by…

  • A Bowl for a Coin

    Open AccessPenelope FrancksARTICLESocial Science Japan Journal2021

    Commodity history has been something of a boom topic in recent years, with the publication of works ranging from the engagingly popular to the seriously academic—a recent review article deals with monographs on items ranging from guano and cocaine to matsutake mushrooms (Specht 2019). This popularity owes something to the growing interest in the history of consumption, material goods, and ordinary life, but it has also emerged as an excellent veh…

  • Diet and the comparison of living standards across the Great Divergence

    Open AccessPenelope FrancksARTICLEJournal of Global History2019References: 4

    The assessment of relative living standards, dominated by food, has been central to analysis of the timing and causes of the Great Divergence. Comparative quantitative measures of real incomes and food availability have generated the conclusion that living standards on the western side of Eurasia, in particular in England, were already higher than those observable on the eastern side by the seventeenth century, with the divergence widening therea…

  • Simon Partner. The Merchant’s Tale

    Open AccessPenelope FrancksARTICLEThe American Historical Review2018

    The Merchant’s Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan is Simon Partner’s third excursion into the difficult territory of Japanese microhistory. It is also surely his most successful in treading the fine line between biography—necessarily based, in the cases of “ordinary” people, on limited sources—and descriptive history within which the protagonist is no more than a representative of the times. This success partly reflects the exciting l…

  • Japan and the Great Divergence

    Open AccessPenelope FrancksBOOKJapan and the Great Divergence2016

    This text offers an accessible guide to the ways in which our growing knowledge of development in early-modern and modernising Japan can throw light on the paths that industrialisation was eventually to take across the globe. It has long been taken as read that the industrial revolution was the product of some form of â European superiorityâ dating back to at least early-modern times. In The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz challenged this assu…

  • Marketing and Consumption in Modern Japan by Kazuo Usui (review)

    Penelope FrancksARTICLEJournal of Japanese Studies2016

    Reviewed by: Marketing and Consumption in Modern Japan by Kazuo Usui Penelope Francks (bio) Marketing and Consumption in Modern Japan. By Kazuo Usui. Routledge, London, 2014. xvi, 260 pages. $168.00. This is a book with marketing in its title that really doesn’t do what it says on the cover. Essentially, it is a historical account of the development of the retail system, focusing almost exclusively on the ways in which retail forms were imported …

  • Capital as Will and Imagination

    Penelope FrancksARTICLEEnterprise & Society2015

    Reviewed by: Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle by Mark Metzler Penelope Francks Mark Metzler. Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xvii + 295 pp. ISBN 9780801451799, $49.95 (cloth). Mark Metzler has been in the forefront of moves to treat Japan’s economic history not as a unique curiosity explicable only to…

  • Was Fashion a European Invention

    Penelope FrancksARTICLEFashion Theory2015Cited by: 5References: 4

    It is still widely assumed that the emergence of fashion was a uniquely European phenomenon and that, conversely, non-Western clothing systems must have remained static and “traditional.” Hence, in the case of Japan, clothing modernity continues to be equated with the adoption of Western-style dress. This article presents evidence that, through the period of Japanese economic growth and industrialization from the eighteenth century to World War I…

  • Simple pleasures

    Open AccessPenelope FrancksARTICLEJournal of Global History2013Cited by: 2References: 8

    Contrary both to Pomeranz's argument for the comparability of pre-industrial living standards across Eurasia and to the accumulating evidence of the extent of growth in the Japanese economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, quantitative historical comparisons of living standards consistently place Japan on a level with the least developed parts of Europe and imply that the living conditions of ordinary Japanese people only began to appr…

  • The Historical Consumer

    Open AccessPenelope Francks, Janet HunterBOOKHistorical Consumer2012

    This book explores the rise of consumerism and the expanding variety of goods available in Japan. Japan is placed within the comparative context of the 'consumer revolution' in Europe and North Americ

  • Cultivating Commons

    Penelope FrancksARTICLESocial History2012

    Cultivating Commons: Joint Ownership of Arable Land in Early Modern Japan." Social History, 37(1), pp. 112–113

  • Inconspicuous Consumption

    Open AccessPenelope FrancksARTICLEThe Journal of Asian Studies2009Cited by: 3References: 21

    The growth of consumption and the emergence of the consumer have become major fields of study in the history of Europe and North America but have been largely neglected by historians of Japan, especially economic ones. This paper argues that, in Japan as elsewhere, the "birth of the consumer" predated the onset of industrialization-hence was not simply a function of the opening of the country to Western modernity-and that the growth of consumptio…

  • Agriculture in the Modernization of Japan (1850-2000)

    Penelope FrancksARTICLESocial Science Japan Journal2008

    Teruoka Shūzō is one of the generation of scholars of Japanese agrarian history who carried the Marxist traditions forged in the great prewar debates over the nature of Japanese capitalism forward into the postwar years. The fruits of his long career of research in the field were originally brought together as Nihon Nōgyō 100-nen no Ayumi (1996). This was reissued in 2003 as Nihon no Nōgyō 150-nen (150 Years of Japanese Agriculture) with new mate…

  • Consuming rice

    Penelope FrancksARTICLEJapan Forum2007Cited by: 1References: 21

    While historians of Europe and North America have been devoting increasing attention to the history of consumption, much less interest has been shown in the historical development of the now much-vaunted, contemporary Japanese consumer. In particular, there has been little analysis of the historical growth in the consumption of ‘traditional’, ‘indigenous’ goods, in contrast to the foreign-inspired goods seen as embodying Western modernity. This p…

  • Rural Economic Development in Japan

    Penelope FrancksBOOKRural Economic Development in Japan2006

    1. Rethinking Rural Japan Part 1: The Nineteenth Century: The establishment of the diversified rural economy 2. Rural Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century 3. The Rural Economy and the Household 4. Power, Policy and Resistance in the Nineteenth-Century Countryside Part 2: The Agrarian Transition, 1890-1920 5. The Rural Sector and Urban Industrialization 6. The Household and the Village in Transition 7. The Agrarian Question: The Rural Economy…

  • Multiple Choices

    Open AccessPenelope FrancksARTICLEJournal of Agrarian Change2005Cited by: 3References: 22

    Much of the historical literature on the forms of industrialization has assumed that agriculture and industry must develop along separate and specialized lines, linked only at the macro level through inter-sectoral resource transfers. This paper uses the Japanese historical case, combined with the recognition, in much work on contemporary developing and developed countries, of the significance of diversification as a rural household strategy, to …

  • Rice for the masses

    Penelope FrancksARTICLEJapan Forum2003Cited by: 4References: 5

    The adoption, following the Rice Riots of 1918, of a policy of 'imperial self-sufficiency' in rice is generally regarded as a triumph for Japan's ­industrial interests, securing as it did lower food prices for wage-earners, and as a major cause of the 'agricultural problem' of the inter-war years. However, when viewed against the background of developments in the rice market and in Japan's international trade in rice from 1890 onwards, it can als…

  • Governing the Rice Market

    Penelope FrancksARTICLEEuropean Journal of East Asian…2002

    ‘GOVERNING THE RICE MARKET’: AGRICULTURE AND THE STATE IN INDUSTRIAL EAST ASIA* BY PENELOPE FRANCKS ‘Governing the Rice Market’: Agriculture and the State in Industrial East Asia The nature of the state’s relationship with the economy has been the major focus of controversy within the debates which have raged over the causes of both the rise of the East Asian ‘miracle’ economies and the crisis which has now come to afflict a number of them. Regar…

  • Rural Industry, Growth Linkages, and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Japan

    Open AccessPenelope FrancksARTICLEThe Journal of Asian Studies2002Cited by: 4References: 21

    In recent years, a considerable change has taken place in the way in which analysts of economic development have come to understand the nature of the growth process in rural areas and the relations between agricultural and nonagricultural activity as industrialization takes place. Growing awareness of the significance of nonagricultural activities in rural areas, of rural industrialization, and of the "livelihood diversification strategies" adopt…

  • Japan and an East Asian model of agriculture’s role in industrialization

    Penelope FrancksARTICLEJapan Forum2000Cited by: 1References: 3

    This article summarizes the results of a recently completed study of agricultural change and agricultural policy in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, in order to consider what might be learnt, as regards agriculture's role in the economy during and since industrialization, from placing Japan in a comparative East Asian context. It outlines the broad similarities in the experience of the agricultural sector in the three countries as 'miracle growth' took p…

  • Agriculture and Economic Development in East Asia

    Penelope Francks, Johanna Boestel et al.BOOKAgriculture and economic…1999

    Preface Conventions Contents 1. Agriculture and Industrialisation: the East Asian Case Agriculture's Role in Development Agricultural Adjustment An East Asian Model of Agriculture's Role in Industrialisation? Questions and Hypotheses 2. East Asian Agriculture: Patterns and Trends The Agricultural Environment The Economic Organisation of Agriculture Agriculture in the Economy Conclusion: the Pattern of Change in East Asian Agriculture 3. The Role …

  • Lever of Empire

    Penelope Francks

  • A Reviews of

    Penelope Francks, Joseph O’mahoney

    Simon Partner, Toshie: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004. xv + 195pp. These two books both describe the twentieth-century histories o