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The uneven and combined development of the Meiji Restoration: A passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity

Jamie C. Allinson
University of Edinburgh

Capital & Class 34(3) 469 490 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0309816810378723 c&c.sagepub.com

Alexander Anievas
University of Cambridge

Abstract In this article, we examine the utility of Antonio Gramscis concept of passive revolution and its relation to Leon Trotskys theory of uneven and combined development in analysing the transformational effects of world economy and international relations on late-developing societies transition to capitalism. Although Gramsci never explicitly linked passive revolution to uneven and combined development, we argue that Trotskys theory helps make explicit assumptions present in the Prison Notebooks, but never fully thematised. In turn, we demonstrate that incorporating passive revolution into Trotskys theory further illuminates the ontology of class agencies that is often lacking in structuralist approaches to bourgeois revolutions. In illustrating these arguments, we examine the case of Japans modern state-formation process, demonstrating how the Meiji Restoration of 1868 can be conceptualised as a passive revolution emerging within the context of the uneven and combined process of social development activated and generalised through the rise of the capitalist world economy. Keywords passive revolution, uneven and combined development, Japanese development, Meiji Restoration
Corresponding author: Jamie C Allinson, University of Edinburgh Email: j.c.allinson@sms.ed.ac.uk

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Introduction
The arrival of Commodore Perrys black ships on the shores of Yokosuka in 1853 sparked a general crisis of Japanese society from which it would not soon recover. With hardly concealed threats of trade or war, these foreign barbarians shook the foundations of the Tokugawa regime (bakufu) to its core. Less than fifteen years later, sections of the Japanese warrior aristocracy would overthrow that regime, inaugurating the Meiji Restoration. Amidst the debate that soon erupted among the new ruling class over the scale and depth of the reforms, Ito Hirobumi wrote to fellow Meiji leader Kido Ko in, if we cannot rule at home, we will be unable to set matters to right abroad (quoted in Beasley, 1972: 330). And, one might add, without setting matters right abroad, the new Meiji regime would be unable to rule at home. Ito s sentiments well articulated the Janus-faced logic underlying Japans revolution from above, pressurised from withouta revolution resulting in the paradigmatic case of a successful catch-up programme of state-driven industrialisation. Japans experience also represents an example of Antonio Gramscis passive revolution, a process immanent to the uneven and combined character of capitalist development. While many recent studies have explored Gramscis passive revolution and Leon Trotskys theory of uneven and combined development1 separately, very few have illuminated their internal relations (but see Morton, 2007a; 2007b; 2010). In applying these concepts to Japanese development, we also offer a contribution to recent debates regarding the theoretical standing of inter-societal relations within historical materialisma subject, until very recently, largely unexplored within Marxism (see Anievas, 2009). As Kees Van der Pijl (2007: viii) notes, the Marxist legacy as it exists has largely failed to develop its own method in the area of foreign relations. In Capital, Marx explicitly abstracted from the inter-societal context in order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances (Marx, 1990: 727 n2). But when should such subsidiary circumstances be raised from historical contingency to be instead conceived as theoretical presupposition? That is: how can the internal (sociological) and external (geopolitical) factors in social development be united into a single, coherent explanatory apparatus (Rosenberg, 2006)? In response to these issues, we take up the Japanese case as follows. First, we examine the concepts of passive revolution and uneven and combined development in Gramsci and Trotskys work respectively, illustrating their theoretically complementary relationship. Then, focusing on Japanese development in the longue dure, we demonstrate how the Meiji Restoration of 1868 can be conceptualised as a passive revolution emerging under the world-historical conditions of uneven and combined development generalised through the rise of capitalist world economy.

Passive revolution from the perspective of uneven and combined development


Despite the many socio-historical and political differences between the local milieus in which Gramsci and Trotsky wrote, both encountered one very significant issueor more precisely, set of issuesprominent in the debates of the Second and Third Internationals. These concerned what the Austro-Marxist turned bourgeois economist Alexander Gerschenkron (1966) called the question of historical backwardness confronting late-developing states such

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as Italy and Russia. The crucial question facing revolutionary socialist praxis in such countries was whether they were ready for a strategy of independent proletarian revolutionary action: had the country passed through the necessary stage of bourgeois-democratic revolution and capitalist development sufficient to provide the material and political bases for socialist revolution?2 The classical position in this debate, taken up by the Mensheviks in Tsarist Russia, was that late-developing states remained unripe for socialist revolution. Thus, the task of the proletariat was to ally itself with the bourgeoisie in its struggle against pre-capitalist forms of rule. The minority position, articulated most forcefully by Lenin, argued for an independent proletarian strategy of leadership to achieve bourgeoisdemocratic aims. The underlying basis of these perspectives is summarised in Marxs famous dictum, directed at then backward Germany: De te fabula narratur! (This story is told of you!). The problem was that in such states as Russia and Italyand more generally any country of the second, third or tenth cultural class (Trotsky, 1959: 4)the characters of this story were not playing their assigned roles. For it was clear by the early 20th century that the development of the more advanced societies was not destined to show the less developed society the image of its own future (Marx, 1976: 91). In this sense, the course of history had proven Marx mistaken. England in her day revealed the future of France, considerably less of Germany, but not in the least of Russia and not of India (Trotsky, 1959: 378). In their different ways, Trotsky and Gramscis theoretical contributions were the necessary critical corollar[ies] (as Gramsci, 1971: 114, Q1562, put it) to Marxs 1859 Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which had stated:
No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. (Marx, 1970: 21)

In its cruder forms, the two-stage strategy of revolution of the Second International took Marxs dictum to its reductio ad absurdum, mechanistically interpreting it through an internalist social evolutionary schema, with each society conceived as developing in abstraction from the wider international capitalist context. In contrast to this methodological nationalism, Trotskys permanent revolution began from the recognition of the international character of the world capitalist system. It proposed that Russias minority working-class movement could successfully telescope the supposedly indispensable stages of bourgeois democracy and capitalist development into a single uninterrupted or permanent stage from which it would necessarily promote socialist revolution internationally. Two theories: One uniting theme Underlying Trotskys strategy of permanent revolution was his theory of uneven and combined development. From this perspective, Trotsky conceived the Bolshevik revolution as a result of the international development of capitalism of which its fate was also bound. Broadly speaking, the theoretical content of uneven and combined development can be summarised as follows. The unevenness of the entire socio-historical processfor Trotsky, its most general lawis expressed not only by the varying levels and tempos of development within societies, but also between them. At all points of the historical

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process, and across its developmental spectrum, we find the interaction of differentially developing social temporalities. It is from within this variegated socio-historical topography that capitalism emerged. Arising late on in the peripheries of backward Europe, capital as a revolutionary social force inserted itself into this uneven developmental process, gradually gaining mastery over it, breaking and altering it, employing therein its own means and methods (Trotsky, 1936: 19). Unifying all development into a single, organic, yet internally differentiated world totality, capitalism in a certain sense realizes the universality and permanence of mans development (Trotsky, 1997: 3). It does so in particular by bringing social entities together into a dynamic of coercive comparison (Barker, 2006: 78) through which capital enforces its distinctive disciplining logic of competitive accumulation. A contradictory unity of universalising and differentiating tendencies, capitalism simultaneously exerts equalising and fragmentary pressures on social development. A whip of external necessity is thereby inflicted upon backward societies to develop in response to the military-geopolitical and economic pressures emanating from more advanced capitalist powers. Crucially, this mechanism of capitalist development presupposes the seemingly mundane fact of a multiplicity of interacting and differentially developing societies. From this first inter-societal determination (the whip of external necessity) follows a second, compounding and rearticulating the effects of the first. This Trotsky termed the privileges of historic backwardness. This was exemplified by the ruling classes of Czarist Russias being compelled by the exigencies of geopolitical-military competition to adopt the ready-made developmental achievements (technological, sociopolitical, intellectual etc.) of the more advanced Western European powers. By turning foe into tutor, Russia was thereby permitted the skipping of a whole series of intermediate historical stages (Trotsky, 1959: 3). Russias development thus necessarily diverged from the unilinear model posited by the orthodox Marxisms of the Second International, which took its cue from capitalist society conceived as a single type (Trotsky, 1959: 378). Yet this possibility of skipping stages, Trotsky claimed, was by no means absolute. Rather, it depended upon the existing levels of cultural and socioeconomic capacities within the borrower societies and, above all, we argue, the historical timing of these societies political and economic incorporation into the capitalist world economy (Trotsky, 1959: 3). Dependent upon such capacities and timingas well as the critical factor of social agencythis skipping process certainly did not automatically take place. Instead, as often occurred, the assimilation of technological, cultural and economic innovations by borrower societies resulted in their debasement through the process of adapting them to less developed social structures. The introduction of certain elements of Western technique and training, above all military and industrial into absolutist Russia by Peter the Great, for example, led to a strengthening of serfdom as the fundamental form of labour organization (Trotsky, 1959: 3). Hence, the infusion of European armaments and finance was a contradictory process, simultaneously strengthening Czarism whilst undermining its socioeconomic and political foundations. By the late 19th century, this process resulted in a structure distinguished by its peculiar combination of different stages in the historic process; an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms (Trotsky, 1959: 3, 4). This combined Russian social formation was characterised by the most advanced capitalist relations and productive techniques interacting with feudal relations in potentially

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socially and geopolitically explosive ways: mass concentrations of technologically advanced capital (particularly within the state-run military industries) imported from Western Europe, and a rapidly growing proletariat existing alongside an unreformed absolutist monarchy and a dominant landowning aristocracy. The result: the rise of a class-conscious proletariat, joining together with a majority peasant class, capable of overthrowing Czarist power and leading the worlds first socialist revolution. Russias combined developmentthe fusion of dissimilar social structures (or modes of production) within a single formationwas the composite effect of geopoliticalmilitary pressures opening the way for an accelerated development resulting in its own unique class of effects, ramifying the Russian social structure (Rosenberg, 2010). These contradictions of sociological amalgamation, as we term it, represent a third determination; again derivative of capitalisms differential development as a multiplicity of interactive societies. Trotskys theory provides a particularly rich understanding of the complexities of Marxs much derided basis/superstructure (Basis/berbau) metaphor (see Allinson and Anievas, 2010)one complemented by Gramscis writings, specifically in his formulation of passive revolution. Notwithstanding Gramscis often misunderstood criticisms of the permanentist strategy,3 he shared much of Trotskys methodological perspective (cf. Morton, 2007a; 2007b). For both, the methodological starting point was not the nation-state unit, but capitalism in its internationally conditioned world-historical development. Like Trotsky, Gramsci viewed capitalism as having united the world into a single causally integrated, but internally differentiated, ontological whole. Capitalism is a world historical phenomenon, Gramsci (1977: 69) wrote, and its uneven development means that individual nations cannot be at the same level of economic development at the same time. Exerting pressures, setting limits, and effecting transformational processes, the international dimension of capitalist development was crucial for Gramsci. International relations intertwine with the internal relations of nation-states, creating new, unique and historically concrete combinations as illustrated by the dissemination of ideologies from advanced to less developed countries, impinging on the local interplay of combinations (Gramsci, 1971: 182, Q1317). These international dimensions of capitalist development are particularly significant for Gramscis notion of passive revolution. Avoiding any mechanistic application of the concept, Gramsci stressed that passive revolution must be continually related back to this politico-military equilibrium moment (Gramsci, 1971: 1067, Q1517). Here and elsewhere, Gramsci uses passive revolution as a political corrective to the economistic tendencies of Marxs 1859 basis/superstructure metaphor, offering an interpretive criterion to understand the forces blocking the transition from capitalism to socialism. This involved a molecular process of transformation, progressively modify[ing] the pre-existing composition of forces in the ruling classes gradual but continuous absorption of its antithesis (the proletariat) (Gramsci, 1971: 58, Q1924; 109, Q1511). Passive revolution was, in turn, formulated as a concept in order to understand the specific forms of bourgeois revolution in late-developing capitalist societiesparticularly those occurring in Europe after and in reaction to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. It thus offers further theoretical content to what had been described by earlier Marxists as revolutions from above4; whilst directing attention to the molecular processes through which class demands from below are absorbed from above in periods of organic crisis. The causes of the change in the form of bourgeois revolutions, distinguishing them from an earlier cycle between the 16th and 18th centuries, were two-fold. First, the rise

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of a proletariat as a potentially revolutionary social force opened an unbridgeable chasm between labour and capital, impelling the latter to accommodate and form alliances with the old, aristocratic-absolutist ruling classes. Hence, as Gramsci saw, the Jacobin model of bourgeois-subaltern class alliance was no longer a viable option. Second, under economic, ideological and particularly geopolitical-military pressures from those countries that had already undergone bourgeois revolutions, fractions within the existing ruling classes were compelled to effect their own capitalist transformations given the inability of the bourgeois to do so themselves (Davidson, 2003: 112). Modern European states were born through successive waves of class struggle combining social struggles, interventions from above of the enlightened monarchy type, and national warswith the later two phenomena predominating (Gramsci, 1971: 115, Q10II61). The temporal and spatial sequencing of capitalist transitions were, therefore, central to the form subsequent revolutions took. They were, as Perry Anderson notes, historically interrelated the sequence of their connexions entered into the definition of their differences. Their order was constitutive of their structure (Anderson, 1992: 116). Gramsci never explicitly linked passive revolution to uneven and combined development. Nevertheless, Trotskys theory helps make explicit certain presuppositions never fully thematised in Gramscis Prison Notebooksassumptions present in a practical state, but not a conceptual form.5 Incorporating passive revolution into Trotskys theory of uneven and combined development, in turn, illuminates the ontology of class agencies often lacking in more structuralist accounts of capitalist revolutions.6 The series of passive revolutions in post-Napoleonic Europe can be thus conceived as emerging internally from the staggered nature of capitalist industrialisation, developing within the interactive context of a European multi-state system, boiling over in a cauldron of revolutionary class conflict (Morton, 2007b).

The peculiarities of Japanese development: Taking the passive revolutionary hyper-route to capitalist modernity
The interwar debate As the only Asian country to escape subaltern status while making the transition to capitalism in the 19th century, the question of Japans development has generated an enormous body of literature. Among the first and most vital of these debates were the inter-war Symposium on the Development of Japanese Capitalism and responses to it.7 In this period, Marxists such as Fukumoto Kazuo, Yamakawa Hitoshi, Noro Eitaro, Yamada Moritaro and Hani Goro all sought to understand a social formation founded upon a similar legacy to that of Italy and Russia (Nakumara, 1992: 4). One finds striking parallels between the Nihon shihonshugi ronso (Japanese capitalism debate) and the central question addressed by Trotsky and Gramscithat of revolutionary strategy in a society simultaneously backward and advanced. Indeed, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) split around the question of whether to pursue an independent proletarian revolution. The Ro no -ha (worker-peasant faction) developed an analysis that, at first sight, appears similar to Trotsky and Gramsci. They argued that a bourgeois revolution was not necessary in Japan, as the Meiji Restoration was in essence a bourgeois revolution that had established in the Taisho and Showa periods a democracy on the basis of capitalist social relations. In response, leading Ko za-ha (symposium faction) theorist Noro Hani

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argued that the Meiji Restoration was no bourgeois revolution, but rather the installation of an absolutist regime which merely accomplished the removal of pure feudal landholding relations and in its place put unified landownership under the sovereignty of the absolute monarch (Hani, quoted in Hoston, 1986: 212). The Ko za-ha maintained that the 1875 replacement of (feudal) dues with a land tax did not abolish such relationships: rather, they persisted in semi-servile forms of tenure such as labour service, sharecropping and the overall extremely high level of rents in the Japanese countryside. These conditions provided Japanese capital with its peculiar half-feudal and militaristic character (Hirano, 1948: 4, 67). The task of the JCP was therefore to abolish the absolutist elements of the Japanese state and encourage agrarian reform, only then moving on to the business of workers revolution (Hoston, 1991: 567). The weaknesses of the arguments in this debate reveal almost as much as the enormously productive research it generated. Both the Ro no -ha and the Ko za-ha acknowledged the decisive impact of international pressures on the course of the Meiji Restoration and subsequent transformation of Japanese social relations and its divergence from any model of bourgeois revolution (Takahashi, 1930: 7; Hirano, 1948: 153155). Yet neither group integrated these insights into its theories, as Gramsci and particularly Trotsky had. Both were in fact committed to a stagist view of historythe difference being that the Ro no -ha thought that Meiji Restoration constituted the bourgeois stage, and the Ko za-ha that it constituted the absolutist or semi-feudal one. We suggest that a reading of the Meiji Restoration as a passive revolution within the context of capitalisms uneven and combined development helps us move beyond some of these limitations. In analyses of the Meiji Restoration, we can broadly delineate three key intertwined themes of these debates: (1) the extent to which the Japanese developmental case refutes or reinforces classical social theories of development; (2) the relative weighting of internal and external factors, and the relationship between these spheres, in explaining the origins and trajectory of the transition to capitalism and (3) the precise nature of this transition that is, whether the Meiji Restoration can be defined as a bourgeois revolution. The unifying question here is the extent to which the causes and pattern of Japanese development followed or deviated from the classic transition from feudalism to capitalism pioneered in Western Europe. It was precisely to this classical developmental model that both the Ro no -ha and Ko za-ha sought to fit the Japanese casean attempt followed by subsequent generations of scholars in explaining the Japanese economic miracle. Tokugawa Japan is conceived as a form of European feudalism, thus explaining the Meiji reformers ability to promote such a rapid, successful transition to capitalist modernity (e.g. Norman, 1940; Landes, 1965; Moore, 1966; Anderson, 1974; Halliday, 1975; Howell, 1995; Brenner in Harman and Brenner, 2006). Yet here we see the limits of endogenous models of social development, since the contrasts between Tokugawa Japan and Europe were more significant than their similarities. In order to adequately understand these differences, we need to first trace the more general uneven and combined process of Japans development. Japanese development in the longue dure Japans pre-modern history illustrates well both the presence of elements of uneven and combined development and the difference between those elements and the later geopolitical pressures of the capitalist era that led to the Meiji passive revolution. The geographical position of the Japanese archipelago placed it at the edge of the China-centered

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tributary trade system, as Giovanni Arrighi (2007: 314) calls it, somewhat insulated from intensive incorporation into that system (Hall, 1970: 7). As an imperial frontier society of sorts (Van der Pijl, 2007: 767; on Japan as frontier, see 1023), the Japanese were able to selectively borrow and improve upon the innovations of Chinese civilization, which had subsequent consequential effects on Japanese development (cf. Totman, 2004: 3144). In these ways, Japan fits Justin Rosenbergs (2006) expanded conceptualisation of uneven and combined development, capturing the multilinear and interactive dimension of social development.8 Yet this combined inter-societal development greatly differed from the endemic warfare and military expansionism of the European multistate system. This contrast is all the more instructive because of the initial apparent similarity of the starting points of Europe and Japan. Japanese social structure of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (11851573 CE), can be viewed as a form of feudalism. By the end of the 12th century, statesociety relations were characterised by the emergence of an increasingly powerful provincial military aristocracy (the bushi or samurai), the creation of a military establishment with broad civil powers (the shogunate), and an increased dependence upon lordvassal relations in the exercise of power (see Hall, 1970: 756; Mason and Caiger, 1997: 7480). The dynamics of Japanese development thus witnessed a process similar to the political accumulation of feudal Europe (Brenner, 1986). In the absence of capitalist production relations, the evolving samurai class had little incentive to systematically develop labour-saving technologies. In order to increase their incomes, the samurai, as an exploiting class like the European lords, had little choice but to do so by redistributing the wealth and income away from their peasants or from other members of the exploiting classes (Brenner, 1986: 31). Consequently, Japanese politics alternated between more and less severe periods of civil war, as samurai sought to extend their domains and seize the decaying remnants of imperial tax lands (see Totman, 1993: 1521). This period eventually issued in the rule of a supreme military commander9 at the apex of a shifting pattern of competitive political accumulation. However, the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate was no mere analogue of the European experience. The near-absence of intra-systemic military competition and extra-systemic geographical expansion on the Chinese periphery for over five hundred years (1400 1900) (Arrighi, 2007: 314, 316) contributed to this trajectory. If Arrighi is incorrect in his reasoning for Chinas peaceful relations with its East Asian neighbors (cf. Van der Pijl, 2007: 89109), he nevertheless elucidates a key factor in explaining the divergent developmental patterns between Europe and Japanspecifically the absence of centralised state formation. Japan was Europe in microcosm, James Fulcher notes (1988: 232), the imperatives of internal inter-state competition produced local absolute states but the international isolation of Japan made a national absolute state unnecessary. While illuminating, Fulchers argument must be qualified. By the end of the Muromachi era, Japanese society was in the midst of the highly destructive period of warring states (sengokujidai), which eventuated in the consolidation of power in the hands of the Tokugawa house by 1600. The closed country (sakokou) policy of the Tokugawas was a response to the early mercantilist overtures of the Portuguese and the Dutch. The success (never total) of that policy depended in part on Japans geographical isolation from these European powers, but also required a measure of coercive centralisation. Hence, under the transformed bakufu-han system, the

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Tokugawa shoguns came to exert a central authority over regional lords (daimyo ), court aristocracy and its strategically placed allies (Havens, 1998: 234). There emerged a hierarchy of sovereignty, from shogunate to intermediary domains whose acknowledgment of Tokugawa legitimacy ensured that different interests would be resolved within broad strictures stipulated by the shogunate. Consequently, Japan could safely maintain a multiplicity of states within the state (Howell, 1998: 120, 119, emphasis added). Thus, the Japanese experience diverged significantly from that of feudal and absolutist Europe. Tokugawa rule never developed into the redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination of the absolutist state characterized by the displacement of politicolegal coercion upwards towards a centralized, militarized summit (Brenner, 1982: 81; Anderson, 1974b: 18, 19). Rather, the Tokugawa system is best understood as constituting a distinct tributary mode of production (Trimberger, 1977), combining certain characteristics attributed to both feudalism and the absolutist state, but not reducible to either. The Tokugawas ruled through an economical system of indirect control through the daimyo (Fulcher, 1988: 231). Each han represented an economic unit, in which the samurai were transformed from feudal retainers to bureaucratic stipendiaries, but tributary control was institutionalised in practices such as the restriction of daimyo s military forces and the sankin ko tai, whereby the daimyo had to leave their wives and children permanently in Edo whilst bi-annually attending the shoguns court there (Halliday 1975: 4). This clarification is necessary in order to delineate the trajectory behind the Meiji passive revolution. The ultimate foundation of the Tokugawa system remained the exercise of samurai control over the land. Organised under the go-nin-kumi system, groups of five peasant households were responsible for the payment of a rice tribute collected by the samurai. This tribute was then transferred upward to the daimyo who, in turn, gave a portion of rice to the shogun. The samurai and daimyo were not, however, equivalent to feudal lords exercising direct personal control over cultivators working and living on the lords lands. Rather, they most approximated a state class utilising centralised political apparatus to extract surplusesas tax or labour servicesfrom a peasantry it did not personally control (Trimberger, 1977: 878). These two different methods of surplus-extraction entail distinct dynamics of social (re-)production as characterised by Chris Wickham (1985) in terms of the contrasts between a feudal coercive rent-taking system and a tributary state tax-raising one. A key difference between the ruling classes of these two systems was their proximity to the production processthe relative separation of the former and the near-total separation of the latter from the production process. Since the tributary state did not need to control the economic and social lives of its subjectsinstead simply requiring the funding that enables it to pursue its chosen objectivesthe exploiting classes more often lived in the urban centres from where they impersonally ruled the peasantry (Wickham, 1985: 1867, 1856). This was exemplified in the Japanese case by the daimyo and their samurai retainers, who resided in the highly urbanised castle towns (Hall, 1955). After 250 years of Tokugawa rulepremised upon a particular inter-societal context in the early mercantile period of capitalismthe dynamics of this system produced a crisis which, in an altered inter-societal context, led to the Meiji Restoration. Tokugawa Japan was anything but economically and technologically stagnant.10 Instead, the institutionalisation of tributary relations opened space for new economic forces to develop (Barker, 1982: 13). The Tokugawa system witnessed a gradual increase in wage labour, the yielding of subsistence to commercial agriculture, new agricultural

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techniques (though few mechanical), expansion of rural industry, the growth of commercial networks independent of the state, and the growth of existing markets and the emergence of new ones (Crawcour, 1974; Smith, 1959). Yet, notwithstanding these economic transformations and the relatively high growth rates of the Tokugawa era, only isolated regions developed distinctly capitalist relations (see Howell, 1995). In Japan, there was no functional equivalent to the English enclosures, which forced the peasants off the land thereby creating the reserve army of labour needed to establish the free labour market necessary for the development of capitalist social relations. Instead, the late Tokugawa period actually witnessed a shortage of labour (Trimberger, 1977: 92, 91). Nonetheless, the commercialisation of tributary social relations led to increased social stratificationwithin and between classesthereby intensifying class conflict, as exemplified in the recurrent waves of peasant uprisings and protests from the 1840s onwards (see Bix, 1986; White, 1995). Commercialisation was in part stimulated by the luxurious urban lifestyle maintained by the daimyo and samurai, in turn, partly causing indebtedness to the merchant classes (cho nin) and internal differentiation within the aristocracy that undermined the samurais economic position. As the sankin ko tai (alternate residence) system required the daimyo to spend time in the capital of Edo, they had to maintain permanent residences both at home and in Edo. In these ways and others, the shogunate purposely encouragedfor reasons of political controlvarious forms of luxurious displays of wealth by the aristocratic classes. Though these effects were spread throughout the entire aristocrat class, the samurai were hardest hit (see Hall, 1970: 199 213; Norman, 1975: 165168). These creeping molecular transformations to inter-ruling class relations within the Tokugawa tributary modecoupled with the subsequent external pressures from the West (see below)account for the apparently odd class behavior (Smith, 1960: 371) of the samurai during the Meiji Restoration. In order to maintain internal stability, the Tokugawa rulers had deliberately separated the samurai from the means of production (land ownership), eliminating their fiscal and military autonomy (Landes, 1965: 170; see Ikegami, 1995: 150157, 184). Consequently, samuraidaimyo relations became steadily more impersonalised, breaking down the strong bonds of loyalty that had existed in earlier eras (Howland, 2001: 361). These changes also cut the final thread linking the samurais aristocrat warrior privileges to the traditional requirement of property ownership. Hence, to restrict or even abolish these rights did not arouse fears for the safety of property since the power of the samurai class had become almost exclusively based on office-holding, and this monopoly was not immediately in danger because no other class had yet the experience, education, and, confidence to displace warriors in administration (Smith, 1960: 3789). The interests of the samurai became intertwined with that of the state bureaucracy which they sought to preserve through political and ultimately revolutionary means. The samurais transformation into a bureaucratic state class was thus fundamental to its ability to function as relatively autonomous agents in the transition from one mode of production to another. Detached from the means of production, these bureaucrats could operate as an independent social forcethe leading agents of what Ellen Trimberger termed a dynamically autonomous state apparatus emerging in periods of economic transition characterised by a constitutive absence of consolidated class controlusing their control over state resources to promote a new mode of production (Trimberger, 1977: 867).

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The motive for such revolutionary transformation was supplied by the increasingly diminished economic position of the samurai. As an urban consumer class whose members were already living beyond its means, large swathes of samurai fell into poverty, producing a lumpen aristocracy worse off than most commoners (Hall, 1970: 200; Moore, 1966: 236; Howland, 2001: 362). This was a class, then, lacking any political or socioeconomic stake in the prevailing tributary mode of production, or the emerging relations of petty-commodity production. Thus most of the Meiji Restoration leaders were mostly lower-class samurai from the Satsuma and Cho shu regions, financially backed by sections of the merchant classes of Osaka and Kyoto (notably Mitsui) whostill lacking the agrarian massesplayed little active role in overthrowing the bakufu. Hence Meiji was a radical upheaval, but within a very limited circle of Japanese society (Akamatsu, 1972: 295, 287, 295). In power, the restorationist samurai not only abandoned their historic aristocratic class privileges, but actively abolished them through the liquidation of the class-like status system of the shimin in promoting the construction of a new social structure (i.e. capitalism). By degrees, the Meiji officials decided to overthrow the Bakufu and supplant the daimyo class. In that sense, their action really did have a revolutionary character even while it represented a certain continuity of class rule from feudal to modern times (Akamatsu, 1972: 304; Norman, 1975: 358). While peasant conflict and protest both revealed and further accelerated the disintegration of the Tokugawa regime (Bix, 1986), during the events of the revolutionary period proper, the peasants role was very minor. The central agents of the Restoration were clearly the samurai. The Meiji Restoration thus represented a passive revolution in which the state replaced the local social groups in leading a struggle for renewal, becoming a policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals (Gramsci, 1971: 115, Q10II61). While the Tokugawa regime was beset by internal contradictions and crises, it is nevertheless curious that the samurai ended up orchestrating the development of capitalist social relations. If anything, the dynamics of the late Tokugawa society era reveal a tendency towards a re-feudalisation of society, were it not for the encroachments of the advanced capitalist states (see Moore, 1966: 236; Anderson, 1974: 4156; Moulder, 1977: 48, 8889; Trimberger, 1977: 86; Barker, 1982: 29). For no clearly capitalist social forces to push the samurai in such direction had developed. As the problematic11 interwar intellectual Takahashi Kamekichi put it (1930: 4), the Tokugawa feudal system was dragged from the hothouse of its development by the pressure of Euro-American capitalisms. In order to understand the specifically capitalist nature of the Meiji Restoration, we must then go beyond internalist accounts and examine the inter-societal determinations of Japans transition.

The Meiji Restoration as passive revolution under conditions of uneven and combined development
With the theory of uneven and combined development, Trotsky articulated three causal factors derivative of the international constitution of the capitalist world system: (1) the whip of external necessity; (2) the privileges of backwardness; and (3) what we call the

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contradictions of sociological amalgamation. All three can be used in explaining the Japanese developmental process. As Germaine Hoston writes, Much as Russian Tsar Alexander did in response to the Crimean War of 185456, the oligarchs ruling in the name of the Meiji emperor launched the Meiji reforms in the 1870s to strengthen Japan militarily enough to oppose external pressures from more advanced Western capitalist societies. Consequently, both Russia and Japan shared a pattern of backwardness and accelerated economic development from above yielding a combination of aspects of different modes of production in both cases (Hoston, 1986: 5, 63). How could such different countries as Russia and Japan have undergone such a similar developmental process? The necessary starting point to answer this question lies in the shared timing of Russia and Japans industrialisation drives and modern state-formation processes in relation to the interactive development of world capitalism. This recalls Phillip McMichaels (1990) methodology of incorporated comparison, whereby specific instances of state formation processes are dialectically related as constitutive moments in a single world-historical process. The whole thereby crystallises via comparative analysis of its parts as moments of a differentially developing, interactive self-forming whole (McMichael, 1990, 386; cf. Morton, 2009). Hence, variations in the actual process whereby the same historical development manifests itself in different countries have to be related not only to the differing combinations of internal relations with the different countries, but also to the differing international relations (Gramsci, 1971, 84, Q1924). For two-and-a-half centuries, Japan remained on the margins of the developing world capitalist order, thereby maintaining its independence from Western colonisation. Yet, by the mid-19th century, the external environment from which the ruling class had sought to isolate itself was being radically transformed. By the mid-19th century, Perry Anderson (1974: 392) remarks, the advent of the industrial revolution in Western Europe had created a capitalist world market of a type that had never existed in the 16th and 17th centuries, with a pulling power that could transform backward agrarian regions within a few decades. This pulling power of the world economy and the historically unprecedented developmental gulf that opened between capitalist and non-capitalist regions radically transformed the intensity of the geopolitical-military forces now facing the Tokugawa bakufu. The original European challenge to Japan was posed by Portuguese and Spanish trading networks linking distant nodes in non-capitalist societies to provide goods that were not locally available. The source of their profit was in buying low and selling high, rather than in the exploitation of labour at the point of production (Rosenberg, 1994: 107). These were not yet capitalist empires, and their economic and military capacities were relatively meagre. The Portuguese and Spanish who ventured to the Orient in the sixteenth century were stretching their capacities to the limit... their staying power rested as much on the weakness of the people they conquered as on their special military superiority (Hall, 1970: 135). The determined resistance of the Tokugawa shogunate was thus enough to deter such adventurers, as the Japanese social structure represented a level of development more or less similar to those of the Portuguese and Spanish mercantilist empires. When the Dutch and English later entered Asian waters in the 17th century, they too still lacked the will and material backing to exert any major effort to open up the Chinese and Japanese markets. After a century-and-a-half, then, both China and Japan were able to control the Westerners (Hall, 1970: 136). Again, the reason was the

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comparative developmental closeness between these early agrarian capitalisms and the tributary structures of Japan and China. The great divergence, as Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) terms it, between the two would only come in the early 19th century and after with the emergence of an industrialising world capitalist economy, somewhat overcoming the barrier of sheer geographical distance. Emerging from societies in which competition on the basis of exploited wage labour had become predominant, the Europeans and Americans competing to open Japan in the 19th century were of a different sort. As industrial capitalist societies, they had both the technologyin the form of the steam ships and arms produced by industrialisationand the imperative to conquer Japan. Whichever group of nationally based capitalists could conquer Japan would, it was hoped, reap the windfall profits that accrue to industrialised commodities sold in pre-industrial markets. Britains crushing success in reducing India and China to de-industrialised colonies provided an example to be emulated and feared. Indeed, the fate of China in the Opium Wars of 183842 made a lasting impression on the best minds in Japan whose writings despite censorship and suppression sounded a clarion call for national defense and even the adoption of Western industry and military science (Norman, 1940: 38; See Jansen, 2002: 2702). This demonstration effect of the Chinese defeat was further compounded by the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853, and soon followed by European intruders. The question with which Japans traditional ruling class was soon confronted was no longer that of whether Japan should enter the world system, but how, on what terms and under whose power (Barker, 1982: 38). In a 1858 memorandum, bakufu official Hotta Masayoshi summarised and dismissed as worse than useless two of the most widely recommended policies of the time: a policy of resistance by force and a policy of grudging accommodation (Totman, 1980: 10). Instead, noting the vast changes in world conditions in general of recent times, including the concluding of treaties and open trade, Japan should act accordingly as military power always springs from national wealth, and means of enriching a country are principally to be found in trade and commerce. Thus, Hotta concluded, the correct policy
should be to stake everything on the present opportunity, to conclude friendly alliances, to send ships to foreign countries everywhere and conduct trade, to copy the foreigners where they are at their best and so repair our own shortcomings, to foster our national strength and complete our armaments, and so gradually subject the foreigners to our influences until in the end all the countries of the world know the blessing of perfect tranquility and our hegemony is acknowledged throughout the globe. (quoted in Totman, 1980: 11)

What were the likely results of the two courses Hotta dismissed? The bakufu seemed at first incapable of anything but grudging accommodation. After Perrys arrival, the Tokugawa house publicly admitted its weakness by consulting the daimyo on how to respond. This was a major blow to the shogunate, whose legitimacy was founded on military supremacy (Hoston, 1991: 558). The impression of incoherence was compounded when the shogun sought the backing of the (hitherto symbolic) emperor, thereby opening the discursive ground later used by the Meiji Restorationists. Furthermore, the Tokugawa house was itself divided and the eventual seizure of power by its ruthless

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scion, Ii Naosuke led only to the further imposition of unequal treaties at the hands of Western powers. This path seemed to lead unambiguously to colonial subjugation, and hence the loss of the samurais material basis in the prebendal state apparatus. Most of the daimyo offered a different response to the shoguns consultation: outright defiance. The lumpen aristocracy of the samurai were particularly inclined to this course. They violently opposed the Western presence, using their martial skills to cut down the hapless foreign interlopers. Their slogan was sonnou-joui: revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians. As revere the Emperor implied, this course would lead to armed confrontation with the bakufu itself. Even were such a confrontation to be successful (as, in a sense the Meiji Restoration was), the victors would be without the resources to expel the barbarians as they wished. The eventual outcome was a third course, somewhat similar to Hottas proposal and favoured by a propitious international conjuncture. The middle-ranking samurai of the to zama (distant) han of Choushu and Satsuma moved from a position of defiant opposition to the foreign presence to emulation of its techniques, in order to overthrow the internally fractured bakufu. Incapable of militarily beating the barbarians, Choushu leaders such as Saigo Takamori sought earnestly to join them. The imperial succession following the death of the Ko mei emperor in January 1867 provided the opportunity for these restorationists to strike. In November of that year, the last Tokugawa shogun, Yoshinobu, placed his prerogatives at the disposal of the Emperor representing a transfer of power to the Choushu -Satsuma coalition. The victory of the Choushu -Satsuma coalition in the ensuing Boshin warwon by a conscripted army with British aidsealed its position as the Piedmont of Japan. Even before the Restoration, then, it had become evident that maintaining Japanese sovereignty required the development of military capabilities equivalent to those of the advanced Western powers. This meant borrowing Western military technologies and organisational forms. Given the institutional underpinnings of what William McNeill (1984) termed the industrialization of war, the Meiji leaders were compelledoften beyond their original intentionsto institute reforms promoting capitalist social relations and national identity (cf. Westney, 1987). These included the creation of a literate and patriotic citizenry shaped by a common educational system; a strong industrial base; improved communications and transport networks; and state structures that could extract the necessary resources to build all these. These organisational forms were all innovatively borrowed from Western Europe and the USA. By the end of the Meiji period, Eleanor Westney (1987: 5) writes, there were few organizations in the major Western industrial societies that did not have their counterparts in Japan. Lacking other suitable agencies and under military threat from the West, the primary task of reconstituting state and society along capitalist lines fell to the Meiji bureaucratic state class. The involvement of the Japanese State in industrialization is the clearest and most graphic illustration of international political competition motivating strenuous efforts to industrialize (Sen, 1984: 125). The Meiji state came effectively to function as capital (see Barker, 1978). Taking on the role of capital accumulator, state agencies sought to embed the value relation throughout Japanese society. To this end, the Meiji oligarchs launched a series of land and tax reforms in the 1870s, including the abolition of han jurisdictions and caste distinctions; the permitting of the commutation of dues and right to buy, sell and leave land; and the introduction of universal conscription. Such was Japans mimetic process of state-led combined development as the primary channel

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of primitive accumulation engendered under the conditions of capitalisms uneven and interactive development (Morton, 2007a: 47). The particularly rapid pace of Japans transition to capitalism was indeed a conscious decision taken by Meiji leaders. The new Meiji regime undertook massive industrialization under the slogan fukoku kyo hei (enrich the country, strengthen the military), its goal to match in a few decades the achievements that England and France had required more than a century to produce (Hoston, 1986: 5). Like other late industrialisers developing under the impetus of geopoliticalmilitary forces, Japans ability to do so was engendered first by the privileges of backwardness, as well as the precise timing of its industrialisation in relation to the historical development of the capitalist world economy and states system. This timing of the international conjuncture of the Meiji restoration, on the cusp of free trade and imperialism in the development of capitalism, was recognised as crucial by the inter-war historians (see e.g. Hirano, 1948: 3) and subsequent scholars. As Francis Moulder argues (1977: 92), during the free trade era of imperialism (approx 1800s1880s), Japan was shielded from full incorporation into an expanding world capitalist economy by those Asian regions in closer geographic proximity to Western Europe. During this period, the advanced capitalist countries were busy exploiting the large, resource-rich areas of India, Indonesia and especially China. These regions formed buffer zones shielding Japan from Western imperialism. Crucial here was the absorption of the British Empire in China and India, and a simultaneous drastic rise in imperial defence costsanother result of the industrialisation of war. Consequently, the admiralty sought to reduce naval expenditures through cutting the size of naval stations overseas, thereby diminishing their presence in the Far East. British policymakers were thus less inclined to extensively intervene in Japanese affairs of the time (Sugiyama, 1988: 289). Further, since it was viewed as being relatively resource poor, and lacking in articles of interest for trade, European statesmen saw opening Japan as more trouble than it was worth (Moulder, 1977: 9293, 12829). Although the US and European powers began signing trade treaties and establishing diplomatic ties with the Tokugawa regime during the 1850s, their central economic and strategic interests lay elsewhereparticularly in China, which would bear the brunt of imperial assault. During the crucial transition years from the era of free trade imperialism to the new imperialism (18481875) industrial capitalism became a genuine world economy (Hobsbawn, 1975: 47). This was accompanied by a number of extra-European colonial wars and rivalries, along with the successive waves of interventions from above of the enlightened monarchy type, and national wars that Gramsci noted (1971: 115, Q10II61) within Europe and the USA. These included the Piedmont-Austrian War (18489), the German-Danish War (184850), the Anglo-Persian War (18567), the Second Opium War (185660), the Crimean War (18536), the Russian war in Circassia (185964), the Italian Civil War (18619), the American Civil War (18615), the Franco-Mexican War (18623), the Italian-Austrian War (1866), and the FrancoPrussian War (18701). It was this fortuitous balance of international forces, as E. H. Norman termed it (1940: 46), that provided the vital necessary breathing-space for Japan to shake off the restricting fetters of feudalism relatively free from Western encroachment.

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Yet this fortuitous conjuncture of international forces seems less contingent when viewed from the perspective of capitalisms uneven and combined development. From this approach, the conjuncture of wars for national unification and revolutions from above within Europe emerge from the chain of interconnected industrial revolutions, staggered in space and time, stretched across northern Europes long nineteenth century (ibid.). This East-West plane of unevenness, as Justin Rosenberg (2010: 25) argues, elicited rapid alterations in the Continental balance of power, themselves attendant upon the dynamic historical unevenness of industrialisation across Europe, undermin[ing] established geopolitical configurations. This was witnessed in the period of the New Imperialism (1880s onwards), which saw the emergence of new industrialising capitalist powers in the Westparticularly the newly unified German and American states, along with Russiachallenging British hegemony. The result was a sharpening of the competitive struggle among the Western capitalist powers for energy resources and new markets, leading to a vast expansion of colonial acquisitions and informal modes of imperialism. Had the Western nations reached Japan at this time, Moulder (1977: 93) writes, rather than in the 1850s, Japan, though smaller and poorer than China or India, might today be burdened by a colonial heritage. By the 1880s, however, Japan had built a new army and navy, having already begun its state-led transformation into an industrial capitalist power. Unlikely to withstand a serious European military engagement, the Japanese state was nevertheless strong enough to make any such effort relatively costly. For very different reasons, European statesmen now again turned their attention to the easier and more traditional targets of imperialist plundering such as India and China, as well as annexing new swathes of land in Africa and the Middle East. And, having demonstrated its newly acquired military power in its surprise victory against China (18945), Japan proved a likely candidate as ally or junior partner for British policymakers whom, in the face of multiple geopolitical challengers, were desperately looking for strategic partners. Thus, instead of being conquered or relegated to subaltern status, Japanese sovereignty and power was enhanced through the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1902 (Moulder, 1977: 93). The upshot of these specifically inter-societal determinations on Japans transition to capitalism was a near-classic case of combined development: an amalgamated social structure fusing different stages of developmentin this case, an intertwining of tributary and capitalist social relations. Given the exigencies of the historical situation, E. H. Norman wrote,
Japan skipped from feudalism into capitalism omitting the laissez-faire stage and its political counterpart. Thus speed was a determining element in the form which modern Japanese government and society assumed. The speed with which Japan had simultaneously to establish a modern state, to build an up-to-date defense force in order to ward off the dangers of invasion (which the favorable balance of world force and the barrier of China could not forever postpone), to create an industry on which to base this armed force, to fashion an educational system suitable to an industrial modernized nation, dictated that these important changes be accomplished by a group of autocratic bureaucrats rather than by the mass of the people working through democratic organs of representation. (Norman, 1940: 47)

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This combined formation is not, however, to be grasped in a mechanical way but rather as emerging in the crises and responses of the actors in Japanese society. The Meiji reforms abolished the legal and economic basis of the samurai class and prebendal power over the direct producers. However, the abolition of the dues of the samurai class was achieved at the expense of the peasants, rendered notionally free but in fact still subject to semi-servile agrarian relations (Hirano, 1948: 4). By this time, Japans uneven development had produced a highly concentrated urban capitalist sector, contrasting sharply with conditions in the countryside that many Marxists came to see as vestiges of feudalism (Hoston, 1986: 9). The origins of Japans agrarian class crisis, which intertwined with industrial class struggle in the 1920s and to which imperial fascism was a response, lay in this ramified social structure. A consequence of this combined development, as seen elsewhere in interwar Europe, was an increasingly radicalised anti-capitalist movement on both the right and leftthe former finding its class origins in a perpetually crisis-ridden agrarian sector, along with an economically squeezed petty-bourgeois (see Moore, 1966; Halliday, 1975). The mass right-wing movement of agrarian nationalism (No honshugi) was nevertheless, according to Havens, sufficiently compatible with the prevailing statist outlook to provide at least tacit support for Japans military rulers, in its racial and national myths, its idolizsation of the rural Gemeinschaft, and its predisposition to conflict with the Western sources of cultural degeneracy (Havens, 1974: 319). The inherent instabilities resulting from Japans combined development would act as a geopolitical feedback loop through Japanese imperialism of the early 20th century and inter-war years, which was (in part) an externalisation of domestic crises. In the context of the fragmented world economy of the 1930s, Japanese policymakers embarked upon an aggressively expansionist foreign policy in search of much needed raw materials and secure markets for Japanese surplus capital (see Holston, 1986: 247250; Matin 1995: Part II; LaFeber, 1997).

Conclusion
Ernest Gellner (1991: 20) once wrote of the industrial (and Neolithic) revolution,
the new social order, due to be ushered in by history, was so radically discontinuous and different from its predecessor that it simply could not be anticipated or planned or willed This point in no way applies to the subsequent diffusion of a new social order, once established and successful in one location. On the contrary: once a new and visibly more powerful order is in existence, it can be, and commonly is, consciously and deliberately emulated. Those who emulate may also end up with more than they intended and bargained for, but that is another story.

We have attempted to tell the story of the Meiji Restoration as the pre-eminent case of such emulation. We argued that in order to understand Japans hyper-route to modernity, Trotsky and Gramscis concepts of uneven and combined development and passive revolution are indispensible. Throughout its history, the Japanese archipelago was the site of a diffusion of productive, cultural and governmental techniques from the Sinocentric system of greater North-East Asia. From these inter-societal dynamics and the related whip of internal necessity within the Japanese archipelago itself emerged the

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peculiar tributary system of the Tokugawa shogunate, and its enormous, well armed, well trained and under-employed aristocratic class. Tendencies towards the dissolution of that system were already evident in the two centuries after the founding of the Tokugawa bakufu. Yet we cannot understand the impact of those tendencies and the resolutions of the crises they caused without looking at the inter-societal determinations involvedand these must be taken at the level of the internal relations between uneven and combined development and passive revolution. At the beginning of its rule, the Tokugawa house shrewdly and effectively closed the country to foreign influence. By the mid-19th century, however, the epochal social changes wrought by industrialisation had produced a different international context, one that both compelled and allowed the introduction of industrialisation and capitalist social relations in Japan. It was by no means inevitable that Japanese society would take this course. The decay of the tributary system and the example of China provided the motivated and trained men who were able to respond to the challenge of the West, but only by restructuring the state to undermine the privileges of the very class from which they came. In doing so, they exemplified the process of passive revolution under conditions of uneven and combined development, or, as Trotsky put it, the curious historical twist by which the tasks of one class are carried out by another. Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to Colin Barker, Katsuhiko Endo, Harry Harootunian, Ken Kawashima, Kamran Matin, Adam Morton, Justin Rosenberg, Peter Thomas, Owen Miller and two anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Of course, all omissions and errors are our own. Alex Anievas would also like to thank the Cambridge Political Economy Trust Fund for their generous financial support. Endnotes
1 See e.g. Rosenberg (2006, 2007); Matin (2007); Allinson and Anievas (2009, 2010); Davidson (2009); Ashman (2009); Shilliam (2009). 2 For an anthology of these early debates sketching the origins of Trotskys strategy of permanent revolution, see Day and Gaido (2009). 3 Gramsci rejected Trotskys specic reformulation of permanent revolution. Yet Christine Buci-Glucksmanns (1979: 211) and Frank Rosengartens (19845: 92) explanations of this in terms of a contrast between Gramscis national approach and Trotskys internationalism are off the mark, as Thomas (2009) lucidly demonstrates. 4 The two terms are not, however, synonymous: passive revolution refers to a much wider dimension of processes, as other contributions to this volume demonstrate (cf. Morton, 2007a). 5 We would like to thank Peter Thomas for helping us clarify this important point. 6 In the specic Meiji case, class agency primarily took the form of an intra-ruling class conict played out in the context of a more generalised societal crisis entailing elements of intensied inter-class struggle throughout 19th-century Tokugawa society (pp. 910 below). We would like thank one anonymous review for pushing us to clarify this. 7 Here, we build on Germaine Hostons (1986) excellent study of the interwar debate, which also points to the recurrent problem of uni-linearity facing Japanese Marxists. 8 But see our criticisms of potential concept over-extension in Allinson and Anievas (2009). See also the related arguments in intellectual history by Andrew E. Barshay (2004).

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9 Hence shogungeneralissimo. 10 Recent scholarship conrms this picture of a dynamic Tokugawa economya far cry from the perpetually stagnant Asiatic mode of production (e.g. Howell, 1995; Francks, 2002). 11 Takahashi went onto drift into proto-fascism, a position we clearly do not endorse.

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Author biography Jamie C. Allinson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh. His dissertation is provisionally entitled Uneven

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and combined development and Arab nationalism: The social origins of Jordanian foreign policy from the Baghdad Pact to the Iraqi Revolution. He is a corresponding editor of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. Alexander Anievas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. His dissertation is entitled Capitals, states, and conflicts: International Political Economy and Crisis, 19141945. He is on the editorial boards of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and has recently edited a book collection, Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism.

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