Books by Penelope Francks

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.

Provides an alternative view of the role and significance of the rural economy in Japan's emergence as an economic power prior to World War II. This book argues that rural people played an active part in determining the course of Japan's agrarian transition. It describes the development of a diversified, proto-industrial rural economy.

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 America, contributing to the analysis of the ways in which consumption and everyday life change in the course of economic development.