Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Households and Living Standards in the Literature -- Chapter 3: The Context of Women’s Work and Household Labour in Japan -- Chapter 4: Housework and the Nature of Consumption Goods -- Chapter 5: Conclusion.

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...