Over the past five years, the Asian Historical Statistics (ASHSTAT) Project of the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University have been publishing an impressive amount of material, of great interest to scholars of Asian economic history all over the world. Not only does their informative newsletter come out four times a year, in both Japanese and English, but since 1996 there has also been a steady flow of discussion papers dealing with a range of topics in economic and demographic history in countries as diverse as Indonesia and North Korea, Egypt and Vietnam, Russia and the Philippines. Although the purist may raise his or her eyebrows at the definition of "Asia" implicit in this galaxy of material, there can be little doubt that it has made an important contribution to the still very meagre literature on long-term statistical series for the non-western world. Many of the articles in the newsletter, and the discussion papers, also contain valuable analysis, as well as comprehensive bibliographies, so they are much more than mere compilations of data.
Of course in undertaking this herculean task, the Institute of Economic Research is drawing on its own proud traditions, going back to the publication of the Long-term Economic Series (LTES, 14vols.) on Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. Professor Teranishi reminded us this evening that the Rockefeller Foundation made it possible for Hitotsubashi University to carry out the LTES; that debt is now being repaid (with interest!) in the publications of the ASHSTAT Project. The analytical work on Japanese economic history which built on the LTES data made Hitotsubashi University famous among economists and economic historians in many parts of the world. The series of monographs by Professors Ohkawa, Shinohara, Ishikawa and Minami (to name but a few) published in English by Kinokuniya Bookstore arrived on library shelves all over the world in the 1960s and 1970s, and were eagerly read by students who were interested not just in Japan but in the lessons which Japan's economic achievements had to offer other parts of the non-western world. I especially remember reading Professor Ishikawa's monograph Economic Development in Asian Perspective when I was a graduate student in Australia, and finding it offered a unique perspective on development issues in Southeast Asia, the Indian sub-continent and elsewhere.
It is a sad fact that funding for the study of comparative economic growth over the long-term is still very limited in most parts of the world; it appears that the Japanese Ministry of Education is more enlightened than most in its support for this work at Hitotsubashi University. Neither is the careful compilation and analysis of historical statistics an activity that these days wins scholars many academic brownie points in most Departments of Economics; indeed I often wonder if Simon Kuznets would get a chair at a leading American university today. European universities are perhaps rather more tolerant, and even at times actively supportive, of this kind of research; Professor Maddison has not only published widely himself on many aspects of comparative economic growth but has helped to establish a centre at Groningen University in the Netherlands. And we should not forget that the Dutch government funded what is (at least to my knowledge) the only publication series on Asian historical statistics of comparable scope to the LTES. I refer to the sixteen volume series Changing Economy of Indonesia which was initiated by Piet Creutzberg in the early 1970s and, after his death, continued by Peter Boomgaard and a dedicated team of scholars working at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. These carefully annotated volumes, each with a comprehensive bibliography, have been of great value to students of Indonesian economic history and will continue to be mined by scholars of Asian economic history for many years to come.
Although Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as British universities do continue to support some historical work on their former colonies, it has to be acknowledged that funding for research into the quantitative economic history of Asia, Africa and the Middle East is at best erratic in Europe and student interest is low. Students with an interest in these countries prefer to study contemporary problems, both because it is much easier to get funding for such studies and because students feel, no doubt correctly, that economic history does not open many doors to interesting or lucrative employment. Few multilateral or bilateral aid agencies employ economic historians! This is in many ways a great pity; the publications of the ASHSTAT have served to demonstrate just how much valuable material on what we would now call "development problems" lies in colonial archives and in the publications of colonial governments. To take just one example; I recently had an opportunity to go through the more than fifty volumes of the Bulletin Economique de l"Indochine in the library of Cornell University. It was impossible not to be impressed at the industry of French officials such as Yves Henry who managed to combine their administrative duties with extensive travel throughout Southeast Asia and to write illuminating papers on issues such as the popular credit system in Java, rubber cultivation in Malaya and Sumatra and sugar cultivation in the Philippines. Fortunately the contributions of Jean-Pascal Bassino, Jean-Dominique Giacometti and their colleagues to the ASHSTAT Project have brought to the attention of a wider group of contemporary scholars just how much information is available on Indochina for the colonial period. Perhaps the French government could even be persuaded to emulate its Dutch counterpart and fund a series of statistical publications!
But it is Japanese scholars and Japanese univerities who, in my view, are taking the comparative study of economic growth most seriously at the present time. Economic history seems to be better integrated into the economics curriculum in Japanese universities than in much of the rest of the world, where there is a distressing tendency to follow the American model and teach a limited range of neo-classical economic theory courses, with little attempt to place such theory in any sort of historical context. Some courses on European and North American economic history are taught in many large Economics Departments in the USA, Canada and Western Europe, but they are seen as "soft options" and the best students are not encouraged to take them. Except in specialised institutions such as SOAS, courses on the economic history of most parts of Asia, Africa or the Middle East are still very limited. This of course partly represents a dearth of teaching materials; this lack can only be rectified through more research at the doctoral and post-doctoral level. But it must be admitted that the barriers to such research, especially if it is to be comparative in focus, are formidable. In the Asian context, if we include those Asian countries formerly in the Soviet Union, one would need at least six European langauges and more than a dozen Asian ones to do justice to the historical material.
Of course no one scholar has such linguistic gifts, let alone the time to explore the material on more than thirty countries in East, Southeast, West and Central Asia as well as the Indian sub-continent. The only way forward is through projects such as the AHS Project which bring together scholars from a range of countries, funds their research, and publishes it in a language which most interested scholars have at least a reading knowledge of, which is most likely to be English. Ambitious projects of this kind are not cheap, which means that they can only really be located in a wealthy country where there is a strong tradition of funding academic research either from government sources or from foundations. Given its traditions and past record of research, the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University is uniquely placed to continue to play the lead in this type of collaborative work in future. I hope very much that it will be able to build on what has already been achieved over the past five years.
iSOAS, University of Londonj