The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Prehistory refers to the period before written documents. Evidence about the events of prehistory is obtained from archaeology, and from anthropological research on small-scale societies of the recent past. For the vast majority of human existence, people lived in small mobile foraging bands. In the trajectory that ultimately led to large-scale societies, six crucial transformations stand out: the transitions to sedentism, agriculture, inequality, warfare, cities, and states. We suggest that economic theory can be used to explore the causal factors behind these transitions. We sketch the nature of the evidence available from archaeology and outline basic economic ideas for non-economists. Our general method in studying a particular type of transition is to review well-documented regional cases from archaeology, together with other relevant empirical generalizations, and then construct a formal economic model to account for this body of evidence. After deriving predictions from our model, we often discuss further regional cases that were not used in the construction of the original model. We will preview the conclusions reached in subsequent chapters, briefly survey the economic literature on prehistory, and compare our framework to the theoretical frameworks used by archaeologists and other scholars.

We close with some linkages between prehistory and the modern world. We survey an empirical literature in economics arguing that regions where agriculture began early, or state formation occurred early, have higher per capita incomes or more rapid economic growth in the present. Another literature in economics involves the use of growth theory to explain the full trajectory from Neolithic agriculture to the Industrial Revolution, the recent demographic transition to slower population growth, and rising per capita incomes in advanced economies. We also discuss hypotheses about the transition from elite-dominated states in prehistory to widespread democracy today. Against this backdrop we consider the evolution of human welfare, as measured by nutrition, health, and life expectancy, from mobile foraging bands to modern societies. Theory and evidence suggest that welfare diminished in the transitions to sedentism and agriculture, and then remained low for commoners due to stratification and Malthusian population dynamics. But during the last 100–150 years the Industrial Revolution, the Demographic Transition, and political democratization have made billions of people better off. We conclude by discussing the role of climate change in prehistory, along with some lessons about the likely effects of global warming in the future.

Research on society and environment has a rich history that is challenging to access. We define socio-environmental research as structured inquiry about the reciprocal relationships between society and environment. It has evolved from early observational expeditions to today’s data-intensive, interdisciplinary work. We assemble readings from the late 1700s to the mid-1990s to showcase this legacy and organize readings into chapters. Each chapter is introduced by a prominent scholar, who discusses the context key insights. Considered over time, readings suggest certain research themes have endured, forming lineages: a focus on populations and their resource bases, sustainable management of common-pool resources, society and land, technology, and systems. As a guide, this anthology can help new researchers gain a basic vocabulary and overview of different research traditions. Current researchers can learn different ways to conceptualize society–environment relationships, supporting interdisciplinary teams. For specialists in socio-environmental research, the readings can stimulate new questions and illuminate the historic nature of contemporary ideas and concerns.

This chapter presents the first annual estimates of Liberia’s economic performance based on archival data since its declaration of independence in 1847 until 2000. A lack of easily accessible data has been one of the main reasons why Liberia has appeared so infrequently in comparative work in African economic history. The collection of data was a central component of imperial governance, and historians have relied on the legacy of those efforts; independent states had both different incentives and, often, lower capacity. However, this chapter shows that it is possible to reconstruct through qualitative records annual estimates of trade and government finances dating back to Liberia’s foundation. These estimates then form the foundation for the first series of historical national accounts which can be used to compare Liberia to other countries. They show the Liberian economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many other African economies were growing. A period of rapid economic growth began during the 1930s, which continued for much of the next half century before a catastrophic reversal from 1980. This chapter sets the stage for the more thematic chapters to follow.

We provide food for thought on some pressing questions about health inequalities – why some of us maintain good health into old age, and the inequity of infectious and Non-Communicable Diseases, both very relevant now to COVID-19. We use historical perspectives and modern examples to discuss the population explosion, social determinants of health and how development over the first 1,000 days influences later health. Some ideas are likely to be quite novel to the reader, such as the risk of disease being increased by ‘mismatch’ between our developmental environment and where and how we live later. This takes the story across the globe, from high- to low-income countries, where early development is often less healthy but economic progress is changing environments fast. Can young people in such settings escape, or has the anvil on which their bodies were forged in early life left them with unalterable inequalities? We ask who needs to ‘own’ these problems and why solutions to them have been slow to emerge. The wider, global perspective, sets the scene for the final chapter which focuses on what we can all do as individuals now that we know some of the secrets of our first 1,000 days.

This chapter provides a short introduction to the main economic approaches to the study of the long period, by focusing on the pioneer works of Malthus, Marx, Marshall, Kondratiev, Rostow and Solow. This allows us also to provide some genealogical elements to Galor's Unified Growth Theory.

In the seventeenth century, the economic center of Europe shifted from Italy to northwestern Europe, because of technological advances, institutions that promoted capital accumulation, and stronger networks of exchange in a booming Atlantic economy. The lack of all these made eastern Europe the least prosperous part of the continent. In western Europe, new crops and crop rotation patterns, improved livestock breeding, the draining of marshes, and other developments led to significant growth in agricultural productivity, though they were also socially disruptive. Demand for new consumer goods increased, spurring both global trade and local production. With a slight improvement in the climate in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with new food crops, better public health measures, and other factors, the population of Europe began to rise more swiftly than it had beforehand. Many people combined agricultural work with handicraft production, or migrated to cities in search of work, gathering together in manufactories organized by investors. Work increasingly involved the use of machines powered by hand, animals, water, wind, and – by the eighteenth century – coal. This transformation occurred first in cloth production, and then in mining, with negative effects on air quality and the environment.

In this chapter, I emphasise and try to explain the importance of historical demography for economic history, but also its relative neglect by ancient historians until very recently. Demography involves a range of quantitative measures that are useful both as proxies for economic performance and in comparison. Population sizes and trends also have explanatory power for past economic changes. Some general points about the relationship between population and economy, and what changed and what stayed the same over the last millennium BCE are followed by some more specific observations about the major periods of Greek history. The importance of environmental factors is particularly emphasised, and urbanization is a persistent theme.

The history of recent wildlife extinctions and the widespread role of humans in these events are described. Conflicting views about the role of human numbers in wildlife declines are cited. There follows an outline of the book structure, highlighting the major proximal causes of declines in Britain , including persecution, urbanisation, agricultural intensification, climate change and disease, as detailed in subsequent chapters. There are also chapters on population growth, people's perceptions of population size and the implications for conservation A comparison of population densities in a range of countries reveals that the UK, especially England, has one of the highest densities in the world. The UK therefore provides an ideal study to investigate the impacts of human numbers on wildlife declines.

Wildlife conservation in the UK is based on three main actions: landscape-scale protection of habitats, species protection, especially of rarities, and site management to maintain viable ecosystems. None of these addresses human population issues, and policies to deal with population growth vary around the world. Disturbingly, in many developed countries, there is concern about declining human numbers, and attempts are underway to promote larger families. With greater foresight, the developing world is in many cases trying to curb growth, even in countries with lower population densities than in western Europe. At the time of writing, Britain has no policy on population, and the possible components of such a policy are discussed. It will be important to maintain current small average family sizes, but most critical will be a humane but effective control of immigration. In the long term, this will be key to reversing wildlife declines in the UK.