JWSR v8n2 - JWSR Special Issue on Global Inequality - Part II




Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives: 
Unequal Exchange and Three Forms of Class Struggle 
in the Japan–US Silk Network, 1880–1890

Elson E. Boles

Elson E. Boles
Department of Sociology
Saginaw Valley State University
7400 Bay Road
University Center, MI 48710-0001
boles@svsu.edu
http://www.svsu.edu/~boles/

journal of world-systems research, viii, 1i, spring 2002, 150–212
Special Issue on Global Inequality – Part II
http://jwsr.ucr.edu
issn 1076–156x 
© 2002 Elson E. Boles

I N T RODUC TION : C R I T IQU E S OF WOR LD SYST E MS A NA LYSIS

World-Systems progenitor Immanuel Wallerstein is among the acclaimed social scientists of the th century, having initially developed an enor-
mously simplifying yet complex analysis of capitalism as a historical social 
system as expounded in a multi-volume set of sophisticated historical works and 
in collections of essays that abound with insights (Wallerstein , , , 
, , , , , ). In this great leap forward in the study of the 
development of underdevelopment, Wallerstein applied Braudel’s conception of 
a world-economy, developed from a rich historical study of the Mediterranean, 
to the formation in the long sixteenth century of an axial division of labor politi-
cally structured by an interstate system centered on Europe. Integrating analyses 
of long-run large-scale cycles, structures, and trends of capitalism as a historical 
system, Wallerstein rewrote modern history from a structural perspective and 
turned upside down the received wisdom in sociology, political science, and eco-
nomics, both on the left and right, which views states as independent units of 
analysis, each traversing its own path toward modernity and civilization. Since 
then, Wallerstein has continued to lead the world-systems school to impressive 
achievements, not least of which is locating the failures of these moderniza-
tion and Enlightenment assumptions in the very institutions and structures 

Sympathetic critics of world-system 
analysis contend that its systemic level of 
abstraction results in one-sided generalizations 
of systemic change.  Unequal exchange theory 
and commodity chain analysis similarly reduce 
distinct and historical forms of labor and 
their interrelationships to common functional 
and ahistorical essences.  Th is paper applies 
an incorporated comparisons method to 
give historical content to an understanding 
of unequal exchange and global inequality 
through a study of the Japan–US silk network’s 
formation and change during the mid 
1880–1890s.  Analysis of unequal exchange 
processes requires, in this case, an examination 
of the mutual integration and transformation 
of distinct labor and value forms —peasant 
sericulture, fi lature wage-labor, and industrial 
silk factory wage-labor—and the infundibular 
market forces they structured.  Th ese relations 
were decisively conditioned by new landlordism 
and debt-peonage, class-patriarchy, state 
mediations, migration, and by peasant 
and worker struggles against deteriorating 
conditions.  Indeed, the transitional nature of 
the silk network’s formation, which concluded 

the Tokugawa system and decisively contributed 
to Japan’s emergence as a nation-state of the 
capitalist world-economy, was signifi ed by the 
very last millenarian and quasi-modern peasant 
uprising in 1884 among indebted sericulturists, 
the very fi rst recorded factory strikes in 
1885–86, by women raw silk reelers in Kōfu, 
and by strikes among unionizing workers in 
patriarchal and mechanized silk factories in 
Paterson, New Jersey, 1885–86 (Boles 1996, 
1998).  Th e “local” conditions of each confl ict 
were molded by the interdependence of those 
conditions that constituted a formative part 
of the world-system and its development.  
In the face of struggles and intensifying 
world-market competition, Japanese and US 
manufacturers took opposite spatial strategies 
of regional expansion to overcome the 
structural constraints of existing labor forms 
and relations.  Analysis of the silk network 
permits the interconnections among seemingly 
disparate events and forms of collective protest 
within historical networks to be understood, 
revealing the world-historical dimensions of 
local developments and, conversely, the local 
faces of global inequality.

abstract

mailto:boles@svsu.edu
http://www.svsu.edu/~boles/
http://jwsr.ucr.edu/


Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

of knowledge—the geoculture—of the modern world-system. Meanwhile, the 
world-systems literature became increasingly diverse and enriched, as discussed 
in overviews by William Martin (), Peter Grimes (), and Th omas Hall 
(), for example. Th e literature includes new avenues of research, comparative 
world-systems analysis, case studies, and a number of critiques old and new. 

Synopses of world-systems analyses, however, overlook some of the more 
sophisticated critiques of world-systems analysis, including those by scholars 
who, besides Frank and Gills (), are sympathetic to or have been involved in 
the world-systems project. Among these scholars are several whose works seek to 
unify anthropological, social, and world historical perspectives (see McMichael 
, , ; Mintz , , , ; Roseberry , ; Tomich 
, , ; Wolf ). Th ey have consistently expressed dissatisfaction 
with the world-systemic level of generalization that has come to characterize 
major works of the world-systems perspective. While there is common agree-
ment that modern capitalism is a historically specifi c “system,” these critics fi nd 
world-systems works that begin and end at the grandest level of generalization 
of social systems possible to be problematic and constraining from several angles. 
I will refer primarily to Tomich’s criticisms because his are the most trenchant. I 
shall review and extend the thrust of this critique and alternative approaches to 
unequal exchange theory and commodity chain analysis. Th e body of this paper 
off ers a study of the Japan–US silk network as an example of an alternative 
approach, but one that does not aspire to the same lofty goals as world-systems 
analysis.

Th e world-systems perspective has eff ectively become synonymous with 
analyses of social systems at the structural level of abstraction. Wallerstein made 
it clear from the outset that he “was looking to describe the world-system at a 
certain level of abstraction, that of the evolution of the structures of the whole 
system” (: ). It is at this level that the “’governing’ logics which ‘determine’ 
the largest part of sequential reality” can be found. And perhaps it is only at 
this level that the very conception and existence of world-systems can be made. 
But in confl ating the “world-system level” of analysis (Hall : ) with the 

analysis of world-systems, the perspective has come to argue that there is no 
“truly meaningful social change” within the life-history of a system. And so there 
are no meaningful distinctions among social phenomena beyond the systemic-
structural generalizations, categories, or “fi elds of inquiry.” Th e point of detailed 
analysis of local conditions thus becomes one of fi nding analytical commonali-
ties among diverse phenomena and emphasizing these analytical similarities over 
their diff erences. In this way, a variety of historically specifi c circumstances and 
forms can be categorized as essentially the same and explained by their function 
in the structure of world inequality, such as in describing East Europe and New 
Spain in the long sixteenth century as “periphery.”

For the above mentioned critics, therein lies a big part of the problem: on 
its own the systemic level of generality is only as accurate as it is general. It is 
useful and insightful; but alone it cannot capture the history of systemic change. 
Th e largest part of sequential reality is not explained, but presumed, and diverse 
social phenomena are simplifi ed and reduced to functional essences. World-sys-
tems analysis is not alone in this regard. As, Tomich argues, both this perspective 
and the “mode of production” approach represented by Laclau and Brenner begin 
with,

…a priori models through which the respective historical narratives are 
reconstructed. Each reconstruction creates a privileged realm of systemic 
necessity that is at once the source and arena of the ‘laws of motion’ of the 
system, while relations and processes [differences and distinctions] outside 
this realm are treated as contingent and secondary. Thus, theory and the 
history of capitalist development and class formation are collapsed into each 
other. The privileged concept becomes identical with the ‘real history’ of the 
system. The complexities of capitalist development are thereby reduced to a 
single dimension, which comes to define its essences as a historical system. 
(Tomich : ).

World-generalization today knows no boundaries, though it is fi xated on 
them. Th is is why new debates and splits have occurred within the world-system 
school, including comparative world-systems (Chase-Dunn and Hall ) and 
an ancient world system (without hyphen) (Frank ). But if Frank’s assertions 
of a fi ve thousand year old Eurasian division of labor is based on trade data and 
other binding criteria that seem disproportionate to the claims of systemic unity 
and the relatedness of developments, there can be no question that his and other 
works are based on facts of globe-spanning processes. Th is suggests, at the very 
least, that various world-systems may not be adequately explained in terms of 
their internal “laws of motion.” At some point, a soft boundary is no boundary. 
And if this is so, then the door has been opened to rethinking and unthinking 
the timespace boundaries of causality and the very criteria of bindedness (see 
Stremlin ). Th e idea of states as independent units of analysis has been fully 

.  World-systems analysis “argues that the optimal method is to pursue analysis 
within systemic frameworks, long enough in time and large enough in space to contain 
governing ‘logics’ that ‘determine’ the largest part of sequential reality…Th is implies then 
that the task is singular. Th ere is neither historian nor social scientist, but only a histori-
cal social scientist who analyzes the general laws of particular social systems and particu-
lar sequences through which these systems have gone” (Wallerstein : ).



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

eralizations of historical processes are not built up on the basis of analysis of the 
historical specifi city and diversity of forms, but are derived from logical com-
monalities among forms that are reduced to common functional essences and in 
which their interconnections in an axial division of labor are presumed.

In opposition to this method, McMichael (, ) put forth the “incor-
porated comparisons” approach. In this approach, totality is not confl ated with 
structural generalizations of an empirical whole, rather, totality is theoretically 
conceptualized as the unity of many distinct relations and forms and thus gen-
eralizations are constructed from the diff erences among processes that are inter-
connected. Generalizations gain concreteness when based upon the complexity 
of diff erences, and conversely, specifi cities are more concrete when their general 
dimensions are revealed. In this view, neither diff erences nor generalizations 
are privileged realms of understanding, but are formative dimensions of com-
plex social processes. Th e reductionist method of world-systems analysis and 
how it diff ers from the incorporated comparison approach may be illustrated 
by contrasting the opposite readings of Marx by these two perspectives. To 
emphasize the systemic unity of various labor forms Wallerstein stresses Marx’s 
observation that exploitation of the industrial proletariat and the French and 
Irish peasants “diff ers only in form.” He argues that “We all know that for Marx 
to call something a diff erence in form means to indicate that this diff erence is 
secondary and minor and does not detract from the essential similarity of the 
two phenomena” (Wallerstein :–, original italics). It is important to 
note that Wallerstein’s intention is not really to focus on the analytical (logical) 
commonalities among labor forms, but to indicate their historical interrelation as 
elements of a capitalist division of labor. He stresses how these forms of produc-
tion are variations of exploitation within the same world-economy. In his view, 
they play certain functional roles in the global structure of inequality in which 
they are defi ned by and subjected to common pressures and dynamics of capital-
ist production and the world market. Th erefore, they are not separate “modes of 
production.” Wallerstein observes that Marx made the same point and refers us to 
his oft-cited passage: “Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton 
there would be no modern industry. It is industry which has given value to the 
colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the 
necessary condition for large-scale machine industry.” He also cites this passage: 
“Th e character of the process of production from which [commodities] originate 
is immaterial. Th ey function as commodities in the market, and as commodities 
they enter into the circuit of industrial capital as well as into the circulation of 
the surplus-value incorporated in it [industrial capital]” (Wallerstein : ).

However, if Wallerstein’s point is not to focus on analytical commonalities 
among labor forms (as opposed to the specifi city of the forms and interconnec-

discredited, and so perhaps now we can consider the possibility that the project 
of naturalizing systemic causal boundaries and governing logics is itself problem-
atic. Perhaps it is time to reconstruct world historical processes in more open-
ended and historically concrete ways that do not apriori exclude the possibility 
of connections nor assume connections with the idea of systemic boundaries, but 
embrace historical contingency and complex causality networks—a perspective 
that favors a “building up” rather than a “fi lling in,” of categories and totalities. 
Th is claim deserves more explanation.

In world-systems analysis, the most general level of abstraction of world-sys-
tems—the encompassing categories that express systemic generalizations—has 
become confl ated with total history, despite initial qualifi cations. To be sure, 
Wallerstein theoretically conceptualizes the relation of parts and their positions 
within the whole in Hegelian terms to underscore the limits of agency. But 
Wallerstein tends to shrug off  the kind of criticism made by Tomich and others 
by eff ectively misinterpreting it. Against those who think his work isn’t concrete 
enough, he notes that there are others who complain that his work is too con-
crete and detailed. If we should not confuse “totality” and “completeness,” nei-
ther should we confuse “detail” and “concreteness.” In Wallerstein’s major works 
structural analysis is treated as directly expressing the largest part of historical 
reality, or at least the largest part of it that is said to be “meaningful.” Th ere is 
then, a two-fold problem. One, structural generalization in fact does not explain 
the largest part of sequential reality, but represents a generalization about his-
tory. Th e categories of world-systems analysis that many world-system analysts 
adopt, which are even more characteristic of the unhyphenated “world systems” 
school, are one-sided expressions of history that do not capture the complex-
ity of diverse processes and events of history. In this approach, truth is said to 
be in the historical “models.” Two, in this reductionist method, which confl ates 
“theory” and “generalization,” structural categories qua large-scale, long-run gen-

.  Wallerstein quotes T. J. G. Locher, “One should not confuse totality with com-
pleteness. Th e whole is more than the sum of the parts, but it is surely also less” (: ).

.  “ To put it in Hegelian terms…at every point in the analysis, one asks not what 
is the formal structure but what is the consequence for both the whole and the parts of 
maintaining or changing a certain structure at that particular point in time, given the 
totality of particular positions of that moment in time” (Wallerstein : ).

.  World-systems analysis “argues that the optimal method is to pursue analysis 
within systemic frameworks, long enough in time and large enough in space to contain gov-
erning ‘logics’ that ‘determine’ the largest part of sequential reality” (Wallerstein : ).



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

tions) in order to construct structural categories, this is in fact the reductionist 
method of historical theorizing utilized. As McMichael () argues, the “logic” 
of class relations and contradictions specifi c to various forms of labor is reduced 
to the logic of the form’s functional role in the world-system. Diff erent forms of 
class relationships that defi ne diff erent forms of labor-capital relationships are 
reduced to analytical similarities among them across time and space. Slavery, 
peonage, sharecropping, tenant farming, commodity producing peasantry etc.—
are all subordinated to the logical common denominator among them, to a struc-
tural-functional essence. In this case, the logical common denominator is their 
generally similar function in the division of labor as defi ned by relatively less 
remuneration of the global “surplus” and their relatively similar degrees of coer-
cion. Classes are thereby defi ned functionally and they are simultaneously reifi ed 
as relationships between people and a quantity of “surplus” (a quantity of remu-
neration). Th ere is no theory of peasant production, or slavery, or wage-labor, 
etc, and the interrelation among these various labor/class relations—within and 
between core and periphery—is presumed, not examined in its evolving histori-
cal specifi city. Consequently, the actual development of the world-system, as the 
interconnections and development among forms, is unknown. Tomich thus 
contends that,

In this perspective, what classes have in common takes precedence over what 
differentiates them…The specific development of distinct forms of social 
labor and class relations is eliminated as subject matter, as are the histori-
cal relationships among these forms…The fundamental categories of class 
(as well as those of core, semiperiphery, periphery, etc.) are taken as given 
rather than theoretically reconstructed from the elements that constitute 
them in specific historical circumstances…Specific forms of class relations 
and particular local histories are reduced to their [common] positions within 
a predetermined whole. The result is a historical system without a history, a 
choreography of events within a static and immutable framework. It is as if 
the capitalist world economy had existed virtually full-blown from the six-
teenth century onward (: –).

It is no surprise that Tomich, McMichael, Wolf, Roseberry, and Mintz’s inter-
pretations of Marx’s approach are the opposite of Wallerstein’s and also diff erent 

from the “mode of production” school as represented by Laclau and Brenner. 
Th is alternative reading emphasizes the specifi cities and diff erences among labor 
forms as formative elements of an evolving “rich totality” that cannot be reduced 
to structural commonalities among those elements nor determined apriori as 
“non-capitalist.” Drawing alternatively on Marx’s Hegelian conceptualization, 
the “concrete is concrete because it is the synthesis of many relations, thus a unity 
of the diverse” (Marx : , ). To be sure, they do not contend that world-
systemic patterns, such as core, semiperiphery, or periphery, do not exist. Rather, 
they point out that both views fail to examine the actual specifi cities of forms and 
their interrelationships that constitute the history of world-historical processes 
and patterns. Th us, whereas Wallerstein emphasizes structural commonalities 
among forms because they are integrated in a division of labor, the world-histori-
cal perspective seeks to examine the distinctions and local specifi cities of various 
labor-capital forms and the actual interrelations among these forms (and related 
historical processes) in the division of labor in order to capture the specifi city of 
core-periphery processes in particular periods, and thus give historical content to 
the core-periphery categories. Th us, in terms of reconstructing social structures, 
this method of incorporated comparison “does not presume a structure, but 
views structure as formed through specifi c historical relations” and the concrete 
study of those relations (McMichael : ). For example, Wolf () and 
Roseberry () address the transformation of kinship forms of production and 
ways of life in particular regions of North America in relationship to the expan-
sion of industrial capital and the wage-form as part of the expansion and his-
torical content of capitalism’s uneven development. Similarly, McMicheal (, 
), Mintz (, , , ), Tomich (, , ), off er analyses of 
slavery’s rise and demise in the Americas in works theoretically framed by the 

.  Wallerstein responds to this kind of criticism in a way that eff ectively confi rms 
the Tomich’s critique: “It is not that systems are static. Far from it. Th ey have built-in 
contradictions, and as a result of trying to deal with them, systems manifest secular 
trends. And over some longer run, the systems consequently move far from equilibrium, 
and when they do, they can no longer survive as such…Th e crucial question is to distin-
guish between the normal, ongoing life of a system and its two moments of transforma-
tion: at its beginning and at its end” (Wallerstein : ).

.  In Tomich’s contrasting Hegelian terms, “Diff erences in the demand for specifi c 
goods and the material conditions of their production, diff erences in the social condi-
tions of labor (levels of production costs, productivity, etc.), and the capacity of states and 
enterprises to organize circuits of production and exchange at once profoundly shape the 
fate of individual production zones and the scope and complexity of the division of labor” 
(Tomich : ).

.  Roseberry () continues to use the language of “capitalist” and “non-capitalist” 
when discussing “modes” of production. However, his arguments are virtually identical 
to Tomich’s in his call for historical specifi city, making “the point that we are dealing with 
determinate and contingent historical processes” and asserting that “We must, in short, 
analyze regional processes of class formation” (: ).



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

hierarchical and contradictory interrelationship between slavery and wage labor. 
Wage-labor neither defi nes capitalism, as with the mode of production school, 
nor is just a relatively costly form of production, as with the world-systems per-
spective. Rather, the industrial wage-labor regime played an historically impor-
tant role in transforming the world-division of labor. Modern slavery is not a 
non-capitalist mode of production. To explain slavery’s rise and demise, Tomich 
proposes to examine the slave-labor character of capitalism and the capitalist 
character of slavery within the world-economy.

Th e conceptualization and study of unequal exchange and commodity 
chains have been similarly bogged by structural generalization. Th e concept of 
unequal exchange remains crucial to understanding global inequality, especially 
if we mean processes other than just “trade.” Th eories of unequal exchange, from 
Prebisch (), Emmanuel (), to Braun () and Amin () never recov-
ered from the numerous problems raised by critics (Amin , Mandel , 
Dore and Weeks , Palloix , Weeks ). And this despite attempts 
numerous eff orts to rework the theory (see Amin , Bettleheim , Frank 
, Köhler , , Mandel , Raff er ). Many studies begin with 
historical overviews of capitalism according to the hierarchial nature of the 
world-economy in diff erent epochs. Ross (), for example, has suggested that 
the dynamics of unequal exchange have changed again with the decline of core 

“monopoly [industrial] capitalism” attending semiperipheral industrialization 
during the era of US hegemony. But theoretical studies soon leap into abstract 
models of trade that seem more intent on sustaining the theoretical possibility 
of unequal exchange. More akin to the nomothetic works of classical economics, 
eff orts to fi nd the right mathematical formula of unequal exchange are plagued 
by unrealistic and ahistorical assumptions, such as equal profi t rates in core and 
periphery, perfect international movement of constant capital, or equal produc-
tivity rates. 

Köhler’s recent () contribution to the debate is useful, but also symp-
tomatic of what I think is the key road block in analyses of unequal exchange 
and commodity chains: the abandonment of the concept of value and analysis of 
historical class relations. Because the historical distinction among labor forms is 
not part of world-systems analysis, there can be no theoretical analysis of value 
relationships within or among historically specifi c wage and non-wage class/
labor relations. Th e concepts of “surplus”, “surplus product”, “value”, “surplus value”, 
“profi t,” are used interchangeably in world-systems analysis precisely because dif-
ferences in form are made secondary and minor (e.g. Wallerstein : –). 
Th is perspective thus cannot theoretically grasp the self-expansion of capital 
through the value form as a defi ning characteristic of industrial wage-labor, nor 
the value relationships specifi c to the class relationships of other production 
forms. Th erefore, it cannot theorize how value is transferred among diff erent 
forms consequent to their interrelationships in historical commodity networks 
resulting in unequal exchange. Without a concept of value, local and interstate 
exploitation is an enigma. Mintz () and Tomich () have developed the 
concept of value by comparing the dynamics of slavery and wage-labor based 
on their theoretical-historical interrelationship. Unlike labor-power in the wage 
regime, slave labor did not take the commodity form and thus did not relate to all 
other elements of the production process as an exchange-value, i.e. a commodity 
(Tomich ). Th e specifi city of value relations in slave production theoretically 
reveals the structural limitations of the slave form and its demise as a historical 
process conditioned by industrial wage-labor. Modern slavery was established to 
make profi ts by meeting the needs of the industrial capital/wage-labor relation-
ship as Marx noted (above). But the value relationships specifi c to the slave form 
prevented plantations from “keeping up” with the expansionary and rationalizing 
dynamic of the world economy under the industrial wage-labor regime. But the 
value theory of slavery in this work is part of a sophisticated and concrete world-
historical analysis of irreducible contingent political-economic developments, 
and so its limitations are recognized. Th eory can only go so far. Th ick empiri-
cal description of specifi cities and contingencies is also necessary to understand 
historical change.

.  For McMichael, Tomich, and Wolf, the industrial wage labor form of produc-
tion, with its unique creation of surplus-value and relative productivity, decisively altered 
the nature of the world-economy in relationship to other distinct forms. McMichael 
writes that “While wage-labor is never the majority form of labor in the global economy, 
it is nonetheless the core of any historical theory of capitalism…Th rough the circuit of 
world money, managed by national banking systems, non-wage forms of labor embodied 
the valorizing dynamics of wage-labor, and yet retained their diff erent forms [and logics]. In 
this way, wage-labor imposed its value requirements on non-wage forms of labor via the 
market rule of the gold standard. Under this regime, other forms of labor and national 
currencies expressed their value, respectively, through the wage form and gold” (: 
, , italics added). Tomich draws on Polanyi’s “account [which] prompts consider-
ation of how the consolidation of a ‘market society’ and the capital-wage labor relation in 
Britain imposed new conditions and rhythms on production and exchange in the world 
economy as a whole. Th e wage labor regime and industrial production resulted in the 
demand for new products, the expansion of markets, and an increased velocity of circula-
tion. Free trade, the gold standard, and the ‘self-regulating market’ (in conjunction with 
the reorganization of the interstate system and the rise of British hegemony) reorganized 
and reintegrated production and exchange on a world scale” (:).



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

Unequal exchange theory in fact has never been about the study of histori-
cal developments or value relationships. And on its own terms, it has long been 
mired in a conception of the core-periphery relationships as “trade” relationships 
among “economies.” Trade—the movement of commodities across state bound-
aries—is a political process of price formation and market exploitation and it is 
certainly an important one. Th us as Wallerstein argues, “once we get a diff erence 
in the strength of state machineries, we get the operation of ‘unequal exchange’” 
(Wallerstein, : ). However, unequal exchange should not be conceptually 
be reduced to state mediations of market relationships. Exchange is only one 
moment in the cycle of production and circulation. Th e old critique of world-
systems analysis as “circulationist” is fi tting here. Omitting analysis of the other 
moments prevents understanding of the process. Th e assumption that unequal 
exchange derives from biased trade and exchange terms resulting from state 
mediations begs the question, for it fails to examine the forms, and forms of inte-
gration, of distinct value/class relationships with diff erent value relationships, 
productivities, and market structures of valorization. Lacking a concept of value, 
unequal exchange theory and world-systems analysis are unable to theoretically 
comprehend interstate exploitation in axial commodity chains. Instead, this per-
spective off ers (albeit astute) generalizations of empirical processes.

Recent studies of “global commodity chains” (GCCs), including Chase Dunn 
(), Gereffi   and Korzeniewicz (), and Wallerstein, Özveren, Pelizzon 
() explore the historical networks of the world division of labor and specify 
the changing content and spatial location of integrated production processes. 
Th e thrust of production-network analysis thus far is oriented toward long-run, 
large-scale quantitative measurement and descriptions of activities. Explaining 
how inequality results from the division of labor is not the immediate task. To be 
sure, when correlated with GNP per capita, the study of production chains does 
confi rm “an unequal distribution of wealth among their nodes” (Korzeniewicz 
and Martin :). But surprisingly scant empirical or theoretical attention 
is given to the historical relations of production and the juxtaposition of those 
relations in commodity chains. In this regard, it is ironic that a conception of 
unequal exchange (or value) plays no role in current commodity chain analysis, 
since, as Martin notes, the category was developed precisely to overcome the 

defi nitional restrictions of unequal exchange theory, being built as it is on a 
conception of trade rather than the division of labor. Perhaps explaining unequal 
exchange has become insurmountable from this perspective given the empiricist 
and generalizing thrust of commodity chain analysis, which Martin advocates. 
How disparities arise through the relations among value forms with distinct cap-
ital-labor relations, and how prices diverge from values in interstate markets as 
consequent to the very integration of diff erent forms of production of axial com-
modity chains, still remains a theoretical mystery in world-systems literature.

Both unequal exchange and commodity chain analysis have neglected the 
study of the historical forms of labor and their interrelations in the division of 
labor. Th e body of this paper makes use of the incorporated comparisons method 
to reconstruct agencies and changes in the social relations, labor forms, and 
struggles of the Japan–US silk network to highlight local and interstate inequal-
ity. It seeks to explain social change through the study of specifi c relations in part 
of the th century world division of labor. A concrete understanding of unequal 
exchange may be achieved by analyzing how historical forms of class relations, 
labor, and value are interrelated and shape market forces in historical production 
networks. Th e categories of “unequal exchange,” “commodity chains,” and “class 
relations/forms of production,” do not have to be treated as independent “fi elds 
of inquiry”—as though they directly express empirically discrete historical phe-
nomena. Rather, the meaning of these conceptions, as well as that of “core” and 
“semiperiphery” may be relationally defi ned as dimensions of social processes 
constructed through the study of the Japan–US silk network. In this respect, 
this paper is not about unequal exchange or commodity chains or class relations 
per se, but about formative aspects of systemic inequality of modern society. Th e 
point is not to develop a fi eld of research or a grand theory of unequal exchange 
or global inequality but to understand concretely how classes and interstate 
inequalities formed and changed both locally and globally in a single process of 
mutual formation and transformation.

T H E JA PA NUS SI LK N ET WOR K AT A GL A NC E : T H E A RGU M E N T

Th e mutual formation of distinct production forms, with their particular 
labor/capital value relationships and their specifi c interrelationships forming 
axial commodity chains is fundamental to the process of interstate value trans-

.  “Th is chain of the transfer of surplus value frequently (often? almost always?) 
traverses national boundaries, and when it does, state operations intervene to tilt the 
sharing among bourgeoisie towards those bourgeois located in core states. Th is is 
unequal exchange, a mechanism in the overall process of the appropriation of surplus 
value” (: ).

.  “Any understanding of core-peripheral relationships via commodity chains 
research requires the development of a large set of commodity chains over a signifi cant 
period of time” (Martin : ).



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

fers or unequal exchange. As an alternative to the dilemmas of world-systems 
models, unequal exchange theory, and production chain analysis, this paper 
adopts an incorporated comparison approach to examine the agencies and struc-
tures of the Japan–US silk network. In this section, the conceptual framework 
and main arguments are introduced.

Th e formation of the Japan–US silk network marked the end of historical 
society—the Tokugawa system—and contributed to the formation of Japan as a 
modern state of the capitalist world-economy. Th e formation of the Japan–US 
silk network during  – was a key part of Japan’s incorporation. Th e 
transitional nature of the process is clearly demonstrated by the rapidly changing 
labor-capital relationships and forms of collective protest in the network, includ-
ing Japan’s very last millenarian peasant uprising in  among indebted sericul-
turists; its very fi rst known factory strikes in –, by women raw silk reelers 
in Kōfu; and by strikes among unionizing workers in patriarchal and highly 
mechanized silk factories in Paterson, New Jersey, – (Boles , ). 
Th e “local” conditions of each confl ict were molded by the interdependence of 
their circumstances—the division of labor—of the Japan–US silk network. 

In view of their interdependence, the forms of production and protest in 
the Japan–US silk network are not treated as though each has a self-contained 
logic or pattern. Each locale was a point of convergence into which entered the 
conditions of the other relations. By purchasing raw silk and sustaining raw silk 
production in Japan, the factory relations of mechanized silk production in the 
US entered into the historical environment of peasant sericulture and rebellion, 
as well as raw silk reeling, patriarchal relations, and mill strikes by women work-
ers in Japan. Conversely, the social relations and conditions of sericulture and 
raw silk reeling in Japan, through raw silk exports, entered into the conditions of 
factory production and gendered class confl icts in Paterson, New Jersey.

If these capital-labor forms were interdependent, they were nevertheless 
unequal. Silk production relations in Japan became subordinated to industrial 
manufacture relations in the US, expanding and changing to fulfi ll US factory 
and consumer demand for raw silk. At the most general level of abstraction, 
unequal exchange was the combined result of the very juxtaposition of distinct 
labor-capital and material relations. As suppliers to the highly mechanized and 
productive US silk manufacturing industry, Asian producers of raw silk were 
far less productive per person and far more numerous in absolute terms. As a 
result, they faced greater market competition with each other as producers-sell-
ers of cocoons or labor-power in mills. Th e relatively few engaged in industrial 
manufacture intensifi ed market competition as oligopolistic buyers of raw silk 
and as oligopolistic sellers of fi nished goods. Th e conjoining of historically spe-
cifi c industrial wage and non-wage forms within the Japan–US silk network thus 

created and sustained infundibular markets—relatively competitive at one end 
and oligopolistic at the other.

Th e “hourglass” shape of the production chain resulted in diff erent market 
pressures that eff ectively altered the prices of value magnitudes. Market pres-
sures in competitive sectors lowered prices of certain goods below their value. 
Th us, at the point of interstate exchange, the low price of raw silk was not simply 
a manifestation of intense class exploitation between landlords and peasants 
who produced cocoons or within the Japanese mills between owners and work-
ers. Rather, the integration of specifi c forms of production and class relations 
through markets created the uneven pressures on the prices of commodities 
(including currencies) in those markets which resulted in the “de-valorization” 
(price-lowering) of the exchange-value of raw silk. Th e buyer of raw silk gained 
a greater magnitude of value than was represented in the given quantity of 
money. 

Th e expansion and profi ts of mechanized silk production in the US were 
thus based not only on greater productivity and labor exploitation within the 
production process of US silk factories, but this simultaneously conditioned 
(lowered) price of raw silk below its value, and thus provided value subsidies to 
US producers.

I am not suggesting that unequal exchange can be explained solely within 
an analysis of the Japan–US silk network. Th e purchasing power of the US 
dollar was not the result only of the relations of production and productivity of 
US silk factories. Th eoretically, it refl ected a preponderance of certain kinds of 
production relations in the US, their integration with other forms of production 
in other areas, and consequent price-reducing and price-infl ating market and 
political forces.

Generalizations of unequal exchange relations “remain an empty phrase if 
one does not know the elements on which they are based” (Marx : ). Th e 
relations and interrelations of production that resulted in ever-lower priced raw 
silk were the result also of contingent local relations, processes, and agencies that 
were specifi c to the labor-capital relations of th century silk production in Japan 
and the US. Technological limitations and technological advances in production, 
a rising landlord class and rising working class, and intensifying class-patriarchal 
relations of exploitation in both the US and Japan, decisively conditioned value 
magnitudes and prices of labor both within and among the production nodes. 
Patriarchy “devalued” the labor of women workers and allowed the price of raw 
silk to be lower than it otherwise would be. US manufacturers could and did 
seek to reduce their costs by thwarting the growing (patriarchal) union control 
of production and rising labor costs.



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

of incorporated comparison within a commodity network may therefore reveal 
the world-historical dimensions of local events and, conversely, the local faces of 
global capitalist expansion and unequal exchange (Tomich ).

GLOBA L PRO C E S S : T H E JA PA NUS SI LK N ET WOR K’ S 
FOR M ATION

Th e explosive pace of mechanized silk production in the US after  
was matched by an explosive growth of raw silk production for export from 
China and Japan. Th is culminated in the formation of the Japan–US silk net-
work between –. Prior to that time, most US raw silk imports had come 
from China, of which ten percent was shipped directly to the US and another 
fi fty-three percent indirectly through London. About thirty percent of total US 
raw silk imports came from Japan. However, imports of Japanese raws rapidly 
increased thereafter and by  the US imported more raws from Japanese 
than China. By , US imports of raws from Japan surpassed imports from all 
other countries combined, averaging over fi fty percent of total imports between 
–. Th e percentage of imported Chinese raws by comparison fell to an 
average of about twenty-three percent during the same years. 

Japan also began to export more of its raws to the US than to all other 
countries. In , the year of the Chichibu rebellion, merchants began to regu-
larly ship most of Japan’s raw silk to the US rather than to France. Th ese trends 
became a structure. Between –, more of Japan’s raw silk was shipped on 
average to the US than to all other countries combined. Th e Japan–US silk 
network thus formed, and at the same time, so did a China-France silk network 
form. As a result, in contrast to the wild swings of raw silk prices in the British, 

Th e price-lowering patriarchal relations of factory production that condi-
tioned unequal exchange cannot be presumed, for they were not automatic. Th ey 
were created and changed as women workers were incorporated into production 
activities in new ways, and resisted worsening conditions in a continuing cycle of 
social and production contradictions. When Japanese entrepreneurs faced ever-
intense competition to meet ever-increasing US demand, they also of course 
sought to reduce costs and change production relations to their advantage, which 
worsened conditions and led to the Kōfu strikes. Th ese developments hastened 
eff orts to remake class-patriarchal relations of production, which transformed 
the unequal exchange relationships and the characteristics of the Japan–US silk 
network.

One striking outcome was the opposite spatial strategies of local expansion 
that US and Japanese entrepreneurs took to cope with labor unrest and compe-
tition. Entrepreneurs in Paterson decentralized silk manufacturing operations 
to annex facilities in smaller towns, where they hired semi-skilled women and 
child laborers to operate new semi-automated and mass-production machinery. 
Filature owners in Japan gained greater control over female workers and circum-
vented the day-labor form of production by concentrating work in large-scale fi l-
atures in “silk cities” and by hiring young unskilled women from indebted peasant 
households to live in adjacent factory dormitories. Technology did not improve 
signifi cantly, but costs were dramatically reduced and output was increased both 
per person and absolutely as new producers established facilities and existing 
producers enlarged factory size. 

In rural areas of Japan the triumph of local landlords/creditors over indebted 
peasants was more devastating and extensive. At no other period before or since 
did so much rural land come into the control and private ownership of the rural 
wealthy than during the s. Th e Chichibu rebellion of  among small-plot 
holding sericulturists facing unprecedented land forfeitures, was the last armed 
peasant uprising that was inspired largely by millenarian fi gures and deities, but 
also by compatible notions of equality and freedom of the concurrent Liberty 
and People’s Rights Movement, Japan’s fi rst nationwide struggle for Western 
representative government and civil liberties. Both movements were crushed 
by government military forces. In the following era of government oligarchy 
landlordism became rampant. Peasant resistance to the untrammeled expansion 
of rural banking and landownership, and to perhaps the lowest cost sericulture 
industry on the planet had been cleared away.

Studies of these local struggles and developments by others have not con-
sidered their interrelations within the Japan–US silk network. Analysis of the 
network’s unequal division of labor permits the connections among seemingly 
disparate events and forms of collective protest to be understood. Th e method 

.  About . percent of US raw silk imports came from France, and . percent 
from Italy. Sugiyama, S., () pp. , .

.  Ishii, Kanji () p. . 
.  Sugiyama () p. .
.  By the mid-s “more than half the total silk exports from China was ear-

marked for direct shipping to France” (Sugiyama, S.  p. ) During the – 
period merchants directly shipped the majority of China’s raw silk to France rather than 
Britain. Th is turn around was partially initiated by the French government and private 
banks which, at the instigation of the Lyons Chamber of Commerce, established a steam-
ship line between Shanghai and Marseilles (Eng, :). French banks also created a 
new credit system to facilitate the silk imports and Lyonnaise merchants formed a buyers 
association to purchase silk in mass quantities. As to France’s imports, during the same 
– period about  percent of the country’s raw silk imports were re-exports from 



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

French, and US markets during the – period, a new and more settled 
regularity of price changes emerged.

Th e world silk industry came to be dominated by these two networks but 
as the result of a number of world-historical events. A prebine blight during 
the s ruined the European silk sericulture. France’s silk industry began to 
recover when Britain “opened” China and shipped large quantities of inexpensive 
raw silk to London and on to Lyons, among other places. However, the French 
industry was transformed. Silk manufacturers took drastic cost-cutting mea-
sures to circumvent organized and Luddite-like urban workers by increasing 
mechanization, expanding putting-out networks, and moving entire factories 
to rural areas to take advantage of rural desperation and patriarchal norms with 
the use of cheap female labor. Th e number of textile jobs in Lyons, for example 
collapsed. In  about eighty thousand textile workers labored in the city but 
by  the number had fallen to about thirty six thousand. As the number of 
rural women workers increased, the continental silk industry became provincial-
ized and feminized.

Th e rise of Britain’s trade in China brought recovery to the French silk 
industry. Ironically this and the growing strength of British trade and fi nance 
in general also sounded the death-knell for the British silk industry (and Italian 
sericulture by virtue of competition with the growing imports of cheaper raws 

from China by British shippers). British Parliament passed the Cobden Treaty 
to further promote free trade in  which abolished protective tariff s on silk 
imports from the continent. Many British producers, unable to compete with the 
continental silk manufacturers despite rapid gains made in the mechanization 
of silk production, moved their operations wholesale during the – period 
to the US where they would fl ourish within a protected market of high-income 
consumers. Th e decline of Italy, and an overabundance of silk workers on the 
continent (also partly caused by growing mechanization), supplied English silk 
industrialists in the US with skilled silk laborers. 

Th ey immigrated across the Atlantic in search of better opportunities at the 
time that British silk capitalists and their equipment arrived in Paterson, New 
Jersey. New jobs were created and new life was given to the city’s machine-shop 
industry. Wages were high as labor was scarce. To stretch productivity (surplus 
value), British industrialists invested in new labor-saving machinery. Previously 
a leading center of industrial machine shops including the Colt Arms company 
and various producers of cotton textile machinery and locomotives, the skilled 
machinists in Paterson began making key innovations in silk machines. Th e 
three-tiered spinning frames invented by the Danforth Locomotive and Machine 
Company, for example, “were to revolutionize the thrown-silk business; a ‘fact 
recognized...by veteran English silk manufacturers in this country’ by .” 
Th at year observers began referring to Paterson not as the “New Manchester” of 
America but, with even greater confi dence, as the new “Lyons of America.”

In the two axial silk networks that formed, Japan and China began specializ-
ing in the low-technology and labor-intensive production of raw silk which sup-
plied the relatively advanced technology and capital intensive silk manufacturers 

Britain, while  percent was shipped directly from China. Imports of raw silk directly 
from Japan to France comprised only  percent during the same period, and via Britain 
re-exports, about the same (Sugiyama, S. , pp. , , , ). By , “Lyon sup-
planted London as the central market for the distribution of Asiatic silk” (Eng, :).

.  See Sugiyama’s () tables on raw silk prices in the London, French, and US 
markets, pp. , , .

.  As Sione explains silk manufactures “introduced the power looms as a way to 
break the strikes of militant workers, who had been counting on their skills to protect 
their bargaining power, and control access to jobs. Reactions to mechanization, how-
ever, increased entrepreneurs’ resolve to fi re skilled, expensive, and militant weavers and 
replace them with workers [women in particular] willing to accept employment at lower 
wages. Th e expulsion of urban and skilled, but also rural silk workers took place through-
out Europe.” Sione () p. .

.  Sione () p. .
.  See Strumingher’s work on nineteenth century French peasant women who, like 

their Japanese counterparts later in the century, left the rural home industry and moved 
to urban areas, especially Lyons, to work in the fi latures where their work and techniques 
were closely supervised. Strumingher, Laura () “Les canutes de Lyon (–)” 
Mouvement Sociale  (October-December), pp. –.

.  “Th e collapse of the British silk industry created spare capacity. As mills closed 
down, quantities of surplus machinery were sold and shipped to the United States.” 
(Margrave :) On English migrants he writes, “Old established centers of excellence 
in silk manufacture in Britain, such as Coventry and Macclesfi eld, entered a period of 
rapid decline. ...Increasingly during the period –, workers, entrepreneurs, and 
their families moved directly from Macclesfi eld to Paterson.” “Th e eventual high con-
centration of English-born immigrants who owned silk businesses in [Paterson] was 
perhaps the most pronounced example of systematic entrepreneurial involvement in any 
later nineteenth-century American manufacturing industry by members of this ethnic 
group.” Margrave () pp. , , .

. Margrave () p.
. Brockett, L. P. () p. .



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

in US and Europe. With the rising demand from the US for raw silk, Japan’s 
entrepreneurs and peasant sericulturists began to gear production for the export 
market.

Although Japan had been forced by the US to engage in trade with Western 
countries on unfavorable terms, Japanese oligarchs not only permitted the entry 
of Japan’s raw silk producers into the world-economy, they encouraged it. Both 
Tokugawa and Meiji leaders realized that raw silk exports provided the state 
with foreign gold currency needed to stabilize the Japanese yen, to purchase for-
eign technology, especially military technology, and in turn to enhance Japanese 
military and industrial power (Ishii and Sakiguchi ). Th e combination 
of mechanization and high labor costs led US silk manufacturers to rely on 
Japanese raws. Medium quality silk was of a regular and predictable strength 
compared to lower quality raw silk. It broke less frequently and thus reduced the 

time that workers would spend picking out irregularities or leaving machines idle 
to repair breaks. In contrast, European manufacturers could aff ord not to invest 
in mechanized production, in part, because labor had become cheaper than in 
the US. 

Th e rise and expansion of the mass-production US silk industry, as exempli-
fi ed in Paterson, also hinged on developments in global transportation which 
reduced the transport costs and time of shipping large quantities of raw silk. Th e 
completion of the Transcontinental Railway in  was quite timely and was 
itself a world-historical development that used some , semi-coerced work-
ers from China (Wolf : ) and international fi nance capital. Th e new route 
shortened transport time between San Francisco and New York from twenty-
two days by sea to six days by rail and was cheaper than other routes. Within 
a year of the railroad’s completion, San Francisco became the main entrepôt for 
Japanese silk imports, and quantities fl owing through the city by the bay sur-
passed those via New York by .

STAT E S A N D U N EQUA L E XC H A NGE

Prior to examining the network’s division of labor and struggles, it would 
be helpful to address in general terms why the more profi table activities of the 
Japan–US silk network were established in the US and not the reverse. Th is 
question is related to why the inequalities of historical capitalism occur not only 
at the level of classes within states, but also rather glaringly at the interstate level 
among states (or territories). Th is section therefore outlines basic structural 
factors behind interstate inequality as a theoretical view of the interstate char-
acteristics of the Japan–US silk network’s division of labor and how the func-
tioning of this network sustained and exacerbated both interstate and intrastate 
inequalities.

Key structural aspect of states that account for inequality at the level of states 
include the truncation of labor markets and national currencies. Restrictions on 
immigration and citizenship and monopoly control of a currency are defi ning 

 “It happens that conditions of manufacture [require that raw silk] be of uniform 
strength and thickness. Th e cost of labor is so great here that we cannot aff ord to stop 
a machine in order to pick out fl aws and irregularities in the threads. Consequently, the 
American manufacturer must have raw silk which works satisfactorily on his high speed 
machinery with a minimum amount of manual labor and waste. It was impossible for 
him to take low grade silks, re-reel and clean them as was done in Europe at that time. 
Indeed, the high price of labor, and the speed of the machines in the U.S. made low grade 
[raw] silks more expensive than the higher grades, which could be worked with less labor 
and at higher speed. Mason, F. R. () p..

Li says that the French still used hand looms while Americans were using power 
looms that required more uniform raw silk. “Unlike the French, who still used hand-
looms for high-quality silks, the American weaving industry in centers such as Paterson, 
New Jersey used power looms, which required standardized raw materials ... ‘Chinese 
silk is either excellent or rather poor in quality ...Japanese silk is of a more uniform qual-
ity’” Li, (), pp. –.

Eng also agrees: “Th ere is some plausibility to the argument that the quality require-
ments in France and the United States diff ered and that the Japanese, by promoting 
scientifi c innovations that made possible the massive exports of high-quality silk most 
suitable to the highly mechanized American market, were able to dominate that market. 
In France, where silk weaving continued to be carried out to a large extent on hand looms 
and where labor (cheap relative to American labor) was available for sorting, cleaning, 
and rereeling, less expensive silks from China and the Levant were preferred. As late as 
, power looms amounted to only one-third of France’s , looms.” Eng, R. Y. 
() p. .For an extended discussion, see Boles (), Ph.D. Dissertation, Rebels, 
Gamblers, and Silk: Agencies and Structures of the Japan–US Silk Network, –.

 Eng () p. .
 “In  imports of raw silk into San Francisco reached , lb. (US ,,), 

surpassing imports into New York, which amounted to , lb. (US ,,). 
Imports from Japan which had hitherto come via Britain, were also gradually diverted 
directly to the United States through this new route. During the period  to , on 
average,  per cent of imports of raw silk to the States came through San Francisco.” 
Sugiyama S., () p. .



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

new non-wage forms, such as New World slavery, indentured workers, peasants, 
and so on. 

If this was a competitive era insofar as many British and West European 
workshops competed for shares of world markets, it was also a new era of oligop-
oly capitalism insofar as the industrial core fi rms were relatively few in number, 
and maintained a very high ratio of output per fi rm by comparison to the much 
larger number of enterprises and workers producing the raw materials processed 
by the industrial fi rms. Price reducing competition among peripheral producers 
qua suppliers to core producers is relatively much greater because (a) the number 
of producers is greater (because entry costs are lower) and (b) core producers are 
fewer because they can aff ord to invest in the (more costly) productive activities 
that enable them to process the large quantity of materials from the peripheral 
and semiperipheral producers. 

On the whole, the axial world division of labor and the constitutive axial 
periphery-core and semiperiphery-core markets were infundibular or perhaps 
more accurately, “hourglass” shaped. Although the narrowest bottlenecks were 
probably to be found in high fi nance, which thus appears to be the “real home of 
capital” in Braudel’s words, oligopolies in trade (Venice, UP) and later in indus-
try (UK, US, Japan and Germany) were the foundations of the fi nancial rebirths 
of historical capitalism (see Arrighi ). World demand for core goods and ser-
vices gave rise to core infl ation and the relative strengthening of the global pur-
chasing power of core currencies. Th e relatively greater income of entrepreneurs 
combined with their increased demand for, and ability to pay for, relatively scarce 
skilled labor (the white collar workers and engineers of industry and fi nance) 
generated higher wages and in turn additional core infl ation As core incomes 
rose and the middle strata expanded, growing domestic consumer demand for 
the provision of goods and services further increased demand for domestic labor 
and the national currency.

Th is cyclical process infl ated the price of all labor in the core beyond the 
socially necessary labor time for the goods and services provided, which was 
falling as productivity increased. In turn, the strengthening of the core states’ 
national currencies provided the average resident with increased and increas-
ing world purchasing power over the average semiperipheral and peripheral 
residents’ purchasing power, or rather, over their labor and the products of their 
labor. Th is kind of process continues today, as manifest in worsening terms of 

features of modern states (city-states and nation-states). Given the limited labor 
supply in a country that results from restricted labor markets, it may be observed 
that when a country experiences a sustained rise in global demand for goods 
produced by enterprises operating largely within that country, the eff ect will be 
increased domestic demand for labor to meet growing demand and production. 
Labor shortages will tend to drive up domestic wages regardless of the success or 
failure of labor organization. At the same time, purchasing power of the national 
currency will increase because consumers within and outside that country seek 
that currency to purchase the goods sold by the enterprises of that country. 

To the extent that the state’s currency is strengthened, the individuals and 
enterprises of that country will fi nd that the cost of goods, including materi-
als and fi nished items produced in other countries, are now relatively cheaper. 
Consumers in the country experiencing this growth may obtain some fi nished 
goods produced abroad for less, while enterprises of that country may enhance 
their world-market position by lowering the cost of their products in line with 
the lower costs of production related to the now less expensive materials pur-
chased abroad. On an aggregate scale, the standard of living of the residents 
of this developing country have relatively improved while the reverse is true 
of the other countries. Th e prices of the materials and fi nished goods sold by 
the unlucky country to the developing country (whose goods are in greater 
world demand) have relatively fallen, as has the relative purchasing power of 
the state’s currency. If this process is sustained over the middle run, the eff ect 
will be to entrench interstate inequalities by altering the world division of labor. 
Entrepreneurs in the unlucky country will fi nd new opportunities to supply the 
materials and goods that the consumers and enterprises of the developing coun-
try want. Th e activities that these unlucky countries engage in will thus change 
to meet the needs of the “developing” country (and thereby close the door to 
engaging in other activities).

Fundamental to this the axial characteristics of the division of labor are the 
diff erent rates of productivity in the diff erent countries and the associated dif-
ferences in “entry costs.” If the so-called Industrial Revolution was a stage in the 
development of core areas and the underdevelopment of peripheral areas, it never-
theless dramatically altered the world division of labor (Arrighi , McMichael 
; Tomich , Amin , Hobsbawm , Wolf ). Emmanuel was on 
target in emphasizing zonal diff erences in productivity consequent to industri-
alization in Western Europe. Th e concentration of the industrial capital-wage 
labor (and the attending military power it aff orded to the various conquistadors 
of Europe), meant that areas incorporated and reorganized to supply the large 
supplies needed for mass manufacture would have to make use of existing less 
costly but also less productive forms of labor: wage-labor, non-wage labor, and 

.  Here the idea of overpriced value (price and value discrepancy) is applied at the 
interstate level. Marx applied the idea of overpriced value at the level of competing fi rms 
in the same industry. For Marx, the magnitude of a commodity’s value, as a quantity 



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

trade between core and periphery and growing wealth disparities (see Köhler 
, ), and as the agencies of strong core states, such as the International 
Monetary Fund and World Bank impose currency devaluations on peripheral 
countries. Th us, although some production activities in core states are identical 
to those in semiperipheral and peripheral states, remuneration is generally far 
greater in the core due to the combination of greater productivity and currency 
evaluation as aspects of the division of labor. And as long as the wealthy of the 
core do not transfer their assets out of the national currency, it will remain rela-
tively strong over the long run, national labor will remain relatively costly, and 
national living standards of the middle class relatively high.

In sum, the creation of interstate axial production processes engendered 
infundibular markets with bi-polar price-reducing pressures on peripheral 
commodities/services and price-increasing pressures on core commodities/
services. At one end of the hourglass-shaped axial production network, competi-
tion among peripheral producers drives down the prices of goods below their 
value or the socially necessary time. Simultaneously, prices of the peripheral 
suppliers are further driven down in the “middle bottleneck” by the oligopolistic 
purchasing power of core enterprises because the many peripheral and semipe-
ripheral sellers are “locked in” as sellers to these fewer core buyers (which is tech-
nically possible because of the superior industrial productivity and purchasing 
power of the core enterprises). Moving from the “middle bottleneck” out to the 
wide end that represents the world-market, core producers then enjoy reduced 
competition with each other, by comparison to their many peripheral suppli-
ers, as sellers to the entire world-market for their goods. Th us, the expansion of 
industry (the capital-wage labor form) hinged not only on the ability to create 
surplus value (or superior surplus value) through industrial productivity, but was 
furthered by unequal exchange: the receipt of value from the purchase of cheap 
goods. We may now see this process in the development of the Japan–US silk 
network.

A N I N F U N DI BU L A R DI V ISION OF L A BOR

By  the Japan–US silk network’s division of labor had formed largely 
in response to the needs of US capital for larger and larger quantities of cheap 
raw silk. As of the mid-s, Japan’s engagement in the silk industry of the 
world economy centered on raw silk production. Toward the US fl owed semi-
fi nished silk products required for the subsequent production processes toward 
the fi nal product that was sold in the US consumer market. Merchants shipped 
the raw silk from Yokohama to San Francisco, and to New York brokers, who 
in turn shipped it to factory towns, Paterson, New Jersey above all others. In 
the Paterson mills workers used the most complex technology and machinery to 
throw, wind, warp, and weave fabrics, while dyers applied their secret chemistry 
skills to color the pale fi bers. In the opposite direction fl owed forms of money 
which sustained the continuation and expansion of the raw silk production in 
Japan, above all. 

Sericulture and silk production in Asia prior to the advent of Western 
imperialism was a highly developed industry, but with the start of Asia’s incor-
poration into the world-economy, sericulturists and raw silk reelers throughout 
Asia faced each other in newly formed world markets which brought them into 
unprecedented competition and subjugated their activities to the needs of indus-
trial silk manufacture in the core. For the fi rst time in history, silk production in 
the West and the Far East became interdependent parts of a single division of 
labor. Production activities in the division of labor were linked by market (and 
intrafi rm) exchanges, the dynamics of which were fundamental to the processes 
of unequal exchange.

Markets create inequality because they are fundamentally structured by 
distinct forms of production which compose a division of labor. Th ere were as 
many markets as there were types of silk goods, from egg cards and mulberry 
leaves, to basins, cocoons, and raw silk. Th ese markets were at once local and 
global in nature. In Japan, the egg cards and mulberry leaves produced to make 
cocoons, for example, were overwhelmingly produced and sold within local and 
regional markets conditioned by prefectural government regulations and taxes, 
and employer cartels. Th e relatively intense competition in the sericulture and 
raw silk markets, as compared to the mechanized weaving, spinning, throwing 
sectors in the US, was conditioned by the nature of sericulture as a relation 
between man and nature and as a social relation among people. It was very labor 
intensive, could not be mechanized, and was aff ordable for peasants to engage 
in to earn some cash. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, perhaps millions, in 
Japan and China engaged in sericulture and silk reeling, and the numbers grew 

of socially necessary labor time (the average labor time expended to produce a good), 
can and will usually diff er from the magnitude of value expressed in money (price). A 
more mechanized and productive fi rm, for example, is able to temporarily lower socially 
necessary time below the average for that industry and therefore increase surplus value 
and profi ts through an unequal exchange of that good (produced with less average labor 
power) at the established market price. Unequal exchange in this case occurs without a 
loss to the buyer (Marx  ).



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

each year with expansion of Western silk manufacture. One measurement of 
the “striking expansion of sericulture” in Japan was the increase in the area put 
under mulberry cultivation. Another measure was the growth of US raw silk 
inputs which nearly tripled during the – period, as global prices for raw 
silk dropped.

Competition and demand created new market “niches” and classifi cations 
of raw silk according to varying local qualities to which corresponded new 
hierarchies of remuneration to producers in diff erent regions. New mills arose 
in “new” areas, some older even ancient silk areas declined, and others found 

special niches (see Appendix I). Small peasant household producers tended to 
market lower quality raw silk or to specialize in cocoon production for use by 
the medium and large mills. Th e relative decline of raw silk output among small 
peasant households was a reciprocal relation to their increasingly specialized role 
as cocoon producers for the new highly productive mills. 

Th e large fi latures, most of which were established by wealthy silk mer-
chants, arose in the “new” silk districts like Kōfu, Suwa, and Amami in central 
Japan, in which owners hired between fi fty and  women who produced most 
of the country’s higher and more regular-quality raw silk. Th e large semi-mecha-
nized fi latures also gained a relative measure of oligopolistic power over the 
myriad of small peasant suppliers of cocoons. Within the national and inter-
national market, they provided the keenest competition for small and medium-
size raw silk producers, including the peasant household in mountainous areas 
of Japan like Chichibu that eked out a living from season raw silk production 
(see Appendix I). Th e larger producers not only produced greater quantities of 
higher quality silk more months of the year, but as a result they formed close 
connections to, or even partnerships with, wholesalers which enabled them to 
create local oligopolistic bottlenecks that provided a degree of price control. In 
addition, the larger mills could better survive market fl uctuations and the harsh 
state development policies which small peasants could not and consequently fell 
into bankruptcy and land forfeiture. Out of desperation, they often sold their silk 
goods at even lower prices.

All silk producers of raw silk throughout Asia confronted one another indi-
rectly in world silk markets. Global competition ran “back” to input suppliers 
as entrepreneurs coped with competition in the selling (or “output”) market by 
fi nding the lowest priced cocoons in the buying (or input”) market. And since 
the number of peasant cocoon producers was growing rapidly, the tenuous cir-
cumstances of the small peasant proprietor worsened competition. It was par-
ticularly fi erce among peasants in mountainous areas like Chichibu who, since 
the Tokugawa era, were dependent on cash earnings to repay seasonal loans, 
purchase foodstuff s, rice above all, and pay taxes. Hence, global market competi-
tion was felt most acutely at the “bottom” of the commodity chain. It was there 
that the prices of labor, or the products of labor, were initially lowered well below 
their socially necessary values.

Th e contrasting competitive/oligopolistic characteristics of the market 
structures that linked the specialized, complementary, and mutually sustain-
ing activities of the axial network corresponded to the number of participants 
in a sector and to the forms of production and productivity of that sector. 
Mechanized raw silk production in the US was capital-intensive and expensive. 
A relatively few people on the planet had the skills, wealth, and/or access to capi-

. Hemmi explains that during the –: “Th e point to be stressed is that 
sharp competition dominated the reeling process from the silk producing region to the 
export ports and competition among exporters was also keen.” Hemmi, Kenzō, “Primary 
Product Exports and Economic Development: Th e Case of Silk,” Hemmi () p. . 

Tussing similarly states that “Th e availability of this previously un-utilized labor 
time, plus the rapid increase in population, was suffi  cient to assure a virtually ‘unlimited 
supply of labor’ over the whole [Meiji] period, even the highly skilled indigenous occupa-
tions. Th e unit price of labor in real terms, whether measured explicitly in wage rates or 
implicitly in the incomes of family enterprise, remained low. ...In this context, the output 
of products like raw silk and silk textiles could respond readily to the pull of outside 
demand...” Tussing, Arlon, () pp. -.

.  “Th e striking expansion of sericulture is evident in the rapid increase in the mul-
berry area and the spectacular expansion of cocoon production. According to the offi  cial 
statistics of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the index of mulberry area, with 
– = , increased to  in –,  in –,  in –, and 
 in -. Th e corresponding changes in the index of cocoon production were: , 
, , and .” Hemmi () pp. .

. Both overall US imports of raw silk, and that from Japan specifi cally, increased 
while prices decreased. Average total imports to the US increased from , thousand 
lb. during the – period to , lb. during -, to , during –. In 
 there were , US silk workers and in , ,. Computed from Sugiyama S. 
() pp. , .

Sugiyama claims that the drop in raw silk prices of Japanese raws throughout this 
period was due largely to their declining quality. However, had Japanese raws deterio-
rated in quality, they would have lost their middle ranking between Italian and Chinese 
raws, which they did not. Th e declining prices in general are better explained by growing 
supply (and also, as we shall note below, by intensifi ed exploitation of female workers). 
Moreover, that raw silk prices around the world tended to decline and fl uctuate in close 
synchronicity after  is a strong indicator of the regularity or “structured-ness” of the 
Japan–US and China-France networks. See Sugiyama’s tables on raw silk prices in the 
London, French, and US markets, Sugiyama S. () pp. , , .



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

tal, the industrial infrastructure (e.g. machinists, transport, etc.), and consumers 
with suffi  cient incomes, to profi tably engage in manufactured silk production. 
But if one could, then one could take advantage of the very cheap material inputs 
produced by hundreds of thousands of poor people in other countries. Th e scar-
city and profi tability of the US sector rested in part on expensive high-speed 
mass-production machinery. Mass production was among the very conditions of 
mechanized production that globally limited the number of producers and hier-
archically structured the world markets of the Japan–US silk network. It became 
possible for a very limited number of producers to very quickly manufacture the 
large quantities of raw silk that had taken far more workers and enterprises in 
Asia a far longer time to produce. In fact, there were only several tens of thou-
sands of US silk workers and far fewer fi rms. In  the entire US silk industry 
was composed of only about , workers and about  establishments, aver-
aging about  workers each. As the quantity of Japanese raw silk shipped to 
the US grew, the number of workers in each US factory grew; the average size 
increased by nearly thirty percent with about  workers per factory. By , 
Paterson’s silk industry had grown to include only  weaving fi rms and , 
workers—about  workers per factory. Th e average number of workers per 
factory in the US silk industry increased to about .

Th e average number of workers in company reeling mills in Japan, by com-
parison, was about sixty-seven in , and of course, there were hundreds of 
thousands of home reeling operations among peasant and farmer households. 
Th e growth in the number of US factories and their productivity drove demand 
for raw silk to new levels. US raw silk inputs increased . times during the 
– period, the labor force increased only . times. Th e quantity of raw 
silk processed by the average US worker increased from a ratio of . to  in  
to . to  in . Indeed, US workers manufactured almost twice as much 
raw silk per capita in  as they did  years earlier while the price of US silk 
goods more than doubled even though raw silk prices declined. In eff ect, the 
narrow end of the infundibular silk network became relatively narrower during 
the s as the US manufacturing sector shrank in size relative to the raw silk 
industry’s expansion. And it had to be this way. Barring any dramatic increases 
in productivity in the sericulture sector, growing productivity of the mechanized 

sector required absolute increases in the number of producers, which in fact 
occurred as noted. Th e eff ects of the infundibular structure of production were 
the creation and shaping of infundibular markets. Th e markets came was the 
moment of exchange which expressed the unequal division of labor and specifi c 
local circumstances and relationships.

Th e mutual interdependence of the network’s various forms of produc-
tion resulted in an unequal distribution of wealth and life chances. Lower 
remuneration to peasant silk producers was manifest, in part, in their relatively 
lower and worsening standards of living, caused in part by the very dissolution 
of the peasantry through fantastic increases in debt, bankruptcies, foreclosures, 
and landlordism (see below). But it was also manifest in the wages of factory 
workers. Japanese reelers earned about . cents per day, less than fi lature reel-
ers in Italy and China, and they worked the most, about – hours a day. 
Japanese reelers were also among the lowest paid wage-workers in Japan, largely 
because they were women, as we shall discus below in the section on the Kōfu 
strikes. By comparison, throwsters in Paterson, who were in the low-wage 
bracket among wage-workers in the city, received about  to  cents a day in 
. Comparisons based on a relative price index would show that US workers 
received greater compensation for their labor than Japanese peasants and mill 
workers.

 Th e question may be asked, “Why couldn’t Japanese entrepreneurs engage 
in the lucrative mechanized sector of global silk industry.” Th e simple answer is 
that they could not aff ord the high entry costs—but a full explanation would 
require nothing less than discussing the histories of modern capitalism, the 
Tokguawa system, and their intersection from the s. Suffi  ce it here to note 
the structural result and constraints. With state subsidies, Japanese investors 
might import some of the spinning and throwing equipment available in the 
US. However, they could not have aff orded the complementary industries and 
infrastructure required to operate and maintain the advanced silk weaving fac-
tories or aff orded the training of Japanese machinists to do so. In fact, at the 
time, Japanese entrepreneurs could barely aff ord to import the less technically 
advanced silk reeling equipment from Europe or less costly cotton weaving 

.   Sugiyama, S. () p. , .
.   Scranton, () p. -.
.   Calculated from Sugiyama, S. () pp. , .
.   Sugiyama S. () pp. , , .

.  Sugiyama S. () p. , Table -; see also Ishii’s calculations, Sugiyama S. 
() p. .

.  “Japanese wage rates in the Meiji era were a pittance either by Western or by 
contemporary standards; and the wage rates for female silk-reeling operatives were 
among the lowest in Japan.” Tussing, A.,() pp. -.

.   Scranton () p. .



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

machinery. (And over the middle run, no sooner did Japanese entrepreneurs 
become engaged in mechanized cotton and silk reeling than did those industries 
become less profi table and low tech, with Japan stuck in semiperipheral activities 
of the world-economy—until after World War II when the Cold War altered 
Japan’s strategic importance to the US.) Th e Japanese population of this era did 
not have the income to purchase silks produced using the costly and advanced 
machinery, unlike the income of the budding US middle class. Perhaps Japanese 
entrepreneurs could have bought the high-tech spinning machinery and made 
profi ts as an export (to core)-oriented industry. However, access to the US 
market was restricted by the very high protectionist tariff s in the US and in 
Europe on silk goods except, of course, raw silk, which Japan already produced 
in large quantities. Japanese entrepreneurs simply did not have access to the con-
sumers of fi nished silks abroad to make investments in mechanized silk machin-
ery profi table. In short, given the exiting global disparities of wealth and power, 
Japanese producers had little choice but to engage in other sectors of the world 
division of labor, if they were to do so at all. When we speak of relatively diff erent 
“entry costs” then, we really refer to the entirety of historical developments and 
structures behind global inequality as manifest in a particular circumstance of 
structural constraints on groups.

M A R K ET PR IC E S A N D VA LU E S SH A PED BY PRODUC TION 
R EL ATIONS

Th e US bottleneck was a two-sided market relationship among buyers/
users of raw silk and the producer/sellers of raw silk. On the one hand, mecha-
nized raw silk production in the US presupposed the availability of cheap raw 

silk—raw silk at a price low enough to make mechanized production profi table 
at a given level of productivity, price of entry, and price at sale. However, once 
established, the very productivity and oligopolistic nature of mechanized US 
sector(s) additionally contributed to the price-reducing market pressures on 
raw silk producers in Japan. As suppliers of a semi-fi nished good in a division 
of labor, the various producer/sellers of raw silk were eff ectively “locked into” 
selling their product through merchant mediators to the limited number of US 
producers, as opposed to selling to a larger number of buyers. Th at is, prices are 
not determined only by the number of sellers in a market. Price theory involves 
both supply and demand curves. Leaving aside the historical mediation of states 
and cartels, the relative number of buyers in a market (relative to the number of 
sellers) fundamentally aff ects market price. Price-reducing pressures on raw silk 
in the Japan–US network became greater by virtue not only of the relatively large 
number of producer/sellers of raw silk, but also the relatively fewer number of 
purchasers (cum manufacturers) of raw silk.

Th e great productivity and the high entry costs of mechanized silk produc-
tion, which limited the numbers of entrants, gave US producers oligopolistic or 
“bottleneck” price-reducing power in the input market for raw silk. Furthermore, 
as relatively oligopolistic producers of raw silk, US silk manufacturers were also 
relatively oligopolistic sellers to numerous consumer-buyers. Th ey benefi ted 
from competition among buyers that moved prices on fi nished goods upward. 
In fact, some large Paterson fi rms maintained their own sales staff  during this 
period. Moreover, unlike international raw silk merchants, US silk manufac-
turers gained oligopolistic end-sale power over prices from the tariff  protections 
imposed on imported fi nished silk goods. Th is condition, which lasted until the 
industry became saturated with producers during the early twentieth century, 
suggests that rather than a “bottleneck” the division of labor and markets of the 
network may be more accurately envisioned as an “hourglass.” And the hourglass 
structure was evolving. Competition intensifi ed as production grew across the 
network, in particular, at the wide end. In a vicious cycle, growing productivity 
in the US sector begat growing competitiveness in the Asian raw silk markets as 
the number of raw silk producers increased to meet rising US demand. Th us, 
increased productivity and absolute production growth among US producers, 
which was based in part from previous profi t earnings made from low priced 
raw silk, put additional downward pressures on raw silk through markets thus 
structured by the interstate division of labor.

.  In addition to several examples of bankruptcies among the private and state 
run fi rms which imported silk reeling equipment from Europe, there were attempts to 
import a cotton spinning mill, as Smith explains: “Th ere was but a single privately owned 
spinning mill built [assembled] in Japan before , and the diffi  culties experienced 
suggest why. Th e founder of the mill, a Tokyo merchant, ordered machinery for it from 
the United States in . Th e machinery arrived in Japan in , but the diffi  culties in 
assembling the machinery, learning to operate it, and training a labor force delayed the 
beginning of production until . Even after production began, there were continuing 
technical diffi  culties that, together with competition from imported yarn, kept profi ts low. 
In , the best year before , the mill showed only a -percent profi t, or about half 
of the current interest rate on loans. When one considers that the capital invested in this 
mill yielded nothing from  to , and that investment in machinery entailed far 
greater risks than other types of investment, it is no wonder others were less venturesome 
than this Tokyo merchant” Smith, T. C. () p.. .   McLewin, Philip, J. () p. .



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

Th e superior remuneration to producers in the mechanized segments of the 
network in the US derived not only from greater productivity (surplus value cre-
ation), but greater productivity enabled relatively few enterprises in that sector 
to purchase and process large quantities of raw silk produced by a large number 
of producers. Th e ratio of few purchasers, which derived from the integration of 
specifi c forms of production and class relationships, translated into oligopolistic 
price-reducing market power for buyers, while the relatively large number of raw 
silk producers translated into additional price-reducing competition.

In this way, markets were structured by the forms of the division of labor. 
Th e articulation of the forms that structured the markets created unequal 
exchange—the domination of class relationships in the industrial production 
relationships over less productive forms. Market pressures consequent to the 
specifi cities of the axial division of labor lowered the prices of raw silks (labor) 
below their value and also overpriced US labor above its value, both as obtaining 
through currencies. In other words, at the point of interstate exchange, the low 
price of raw silk refl ected a “de-valorization” of the exchange-value of embodied 
labor. Despite the existence of merchant and production cartels, the value of 
Japanese raw silk was not fully valorized in Japan. Th e buyer of raw silk gained a 
greater magnitude of value than was represented in the quantity of money given 
in exchange. Th e expansion and profi ts of mechanized silk production in the US 
was thus based not only on greater productivity and labor exploitation within 
US silk factories (the appropriation of greater and greater surplus value), but this 
also enabled the expropriation of value subsidies from inputs as manifest in the 
low price of raw silk, which was fully valorized, along side surplus value, at the 
point of sale in the consumer market.

U N EQUA L E XC H A NGE A N D GE N DE R

I. Paterson’s Gendered Centralization and Decentralization

Th e evolution of Paterson’s silk industry from a silk thread manufactur-
ing center prior to the US Civil War to a decentralized and highly productive 
regional weaving and dyeing industry following the war, involved the dynamic 
interplay of patriarchy, class, ethnicity, ideology, and geography that was part 
of the historical process of unequal exchange in the Japan–US silk network. 

In  Paterson was home to six silk companies devoted to sewing silk manu-
facture. With the transplantation of the British industry to the US, –, 
and the infl ux of European workers, broad-silk weaving quickly became the 
dominant sector of silk production in the city. Factory owners purchased thrown 
silk, hired workers to prepare the warps and operate power-looms, and sold the 
woven broad cloth to fi nishing fi rms, wholesalers, or directly to retailers. Th e 
large integrated factories that arose focused on broad-silk weaving and dropped 
internal dyeing almost entirely.

From the early s large fi rms also began to build throwing and plain-
silk weaving annexes in northeastern Pennsylvania cities, including Allentown, 
Boonton, Harrisburg, Hawley, and Honesdale to take advantage of unorganized 
female and child workers. Th e drive to mechanize operations in Paterson and 
relocate simpler and labor intensive procedures outside the city was a process 
of decentralization and was based on the gendered class relations within and 
outside Paterson.

By , more men were employed in the city than women, reversing the 
earlier pattern of female predominance. During the last ten years of the century, 
male employment in Paterson rose overall by about seventy percent, while female 
employment rose only forty percent. Th e core sector of skilled-male workers 
thus became concentrated in Paterson while in surrounding towns of Northern 
Pennsylvania semi-skilled female workers labored in the numerous scattered 
annex operations. Patriarchal centralization-decentralization was a global pro-
cess, not just local, as it was premised on the infl ow of cheap medium quality raw 
silk from Japan and the radical transformation of the Japanese silk industry that 
made the raw silk less and less expensive. 

.  Scrantion notes for example that, “[T]he potential for labor unity was 
obstructed by antagonisms along lines of ethnicity, sex, skill, and ideology ...[For exam-
ple,] Th e appeal of the Knights of Labor for a universal silk-trade union withered when 

ethnic and skill issues surfaced. ‘English speaking’ ribbon weavers let it be known that 
they would ‘never join any body that includes the German, French and Italian weavers’ 
and that ‘weavers in general’ were ‘averse to being joined to several thousands of inferior 
workers.’” Scranton () p. .

.  “Catholina Lambert, a Yorkshire immigrant, pioneered the shift of throwing 
operations to northeastern Pennsylvania after building a throwing mill in Hawley in .” 
Scranton, () p. . “In , Paterson had lost seven mills and Pennsylvania had gained 
fi fty-three” and as “ began, there were a total of  silk mills in Paterson and  in 
Pennsylvania.” American Silk Journal , February, :, cited in Golin, () p. .

.  Th e percentage of men employed in Paterson rose from . percent in  to 
. in . Scranton, () p. .



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

Among the key reasons owners would relocate outside Paterson included 
labor disputes led by increasingly organized workers, attendant rises in wages, 
and attempts to keep women out of jobs that men held. Th ere were numerous 
reversals and counter-reversals in the employment of women in the diff erent 
processes of silk production. From Paterson’s early days, fi rms had employed 
women locally for certain work. Hand warping during the s, for example, 
was known as “women’s work” in factories and home-shops. However, when 
factories invested in new power-driven warping machines during the s, 
they hired men to operate them. But as the wages of organized male workers 
increased, “within a few years...manufactures again employed some female warp-
ers to avoid dealing with unionized men.”

Male workers vigorously resisted the encroachment of women workers, 
and the gender dimensions of class confl ict became an essential characteristic 
of many Paterson labor confl icts. Scranton touches on the essential patriarchal-
corporatist features of male workers’ resistance in Paterson and how, ironically, it 
led in some cases to demands by men for equal pay:

Though women workers were often valiant strikers [and strike-breakers] ... 
they were voteless, excluded from political debate, and generally ignored by 
union organizers. When manufacturers tried to take advantage of a labor 
market divided by gender by opening skilled jobs to women at half the rates 
paid men, male workers acted to prevent this incursion. On one occasion 
they made the simple and crippling demand that women's pay be the same as 
theirs. Far more frequent were strikes to exclude women entirely or, if that did 
not succeed, harassment and intimidation were used to force them to quit.

One critical area of silk production where women did not make inroads 
was dyeing. In , the fi rst silk dye works established in Paterson employed 
six hundred workers, four-fi fths of whom were women and girls. But over the 
next thirty years, the silk industry nearly became an “all-male” bastion of skilled 
laborers. Several factors came into play to make Paterson dyers among the most 
powerful workers in the silk industry. For one, their scarcity as highly skilled 
workers (human capital) had depended in part on excluding women from joining 
their ranks. Another advantage was locational: dyeing had become concentrated 
in Paterson due to the unique water of the Passaic river running through the city. 
Dyeing operations thus could not easily be moved outside Paterson as other sec-
tors could and were.

Adding to their market power, Paterson dyers in  broke with the city’s 
theretofore pattern of non-union protest and joined one of the most feared 
national unions in the country, the Knights of Labor. When they went on strike 
in , silk production in Paterson literally came to a halt (and if such disrup-
tions continued for a sustained period of time, they would have aff ected sericul-
ture and reeling in Japan.) Some twelve thousand workers throughout the city 
were temporarily dismissed. Some owners probably dismissed their workers not 
to prevent excess inventory, but to engender resentment by other workers against 
the dyers.

Th e relocation to annex facilities was partly stimulated by, and an eff ort to 
compensate for, the higher wages paid to male dyers and the costs of work stop-
pages throughout the region. If the dismantling and decentralization of large fac-
tories in the city contributed to undermining the power of organized and scarce 
male workers—who over time came to work in smaller fi rms or household-run 
facilities—it was also fundamental to the gendered character of the regional 
decentralization of the silk industry. Paterson owners sought to overcome higher 
wages and control of production which essentially meant overcoming male 
worker power and the “new tradition” of protest in Paterson.

Frequently worker’s demands for wage increases were acts of “catching up” 
because they occurred after wage reductions that were caused by instabilities 
characteristic of the silk industry. Th e instability of raw silk supplies and prices, 
elasticity of demand, and rapidly changing styles, which stemmed from the social 
relations of production in the less productive sectors in Japan, caused US indus-
try production levels, revenues, and remuneration to fall dramatically in some 
years. Wages among local throwsters, for example, dropped about ten percent 
on average during . When business picked up in March the following year, 
winders and doublers at Louis Franke and Company struck for an advance of sev-
enty-fi ve cents per week, raising their wages from . to . per week, about 
fi ve percent higher than  rates. Th eir success, according to the American Silk 
Journal, set off  a general demand for higher wages in nearly every throwing estab-
lishment in the city, with the result that in most instances wages were raised to 
 among some , non-union spinning mill workers. Th is prompted owners, 
in the short run, to cut wages and close shop for days. In the summer of , fol-
lowing the March strikes, business slumped and owners cut wages. Th en in early 
 the industry was busy again and factory hands worked overtime. Workers 
called for rate increases to off set the earlier reductions. Several large fi rms agreed 
to the demands, but some refused and strikes involving  broad silk weavers 
commenced, and workers won wage increases once again.. American Silk Journal  () cited in Scranton (), plate .

.  American Silk Journal  () cited in Scranton (), p.
.   Ibid., p. . .  American Silk Journal  () cited in Scranton (), pp. , .



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

In the typical pattern of industrial expansion and innovation, the combina-
tion of growing US consumer demand for silk products and the growing power 
of Paterson’s workers led factory owners to invest in labor-saving and skill-reduc-
ing mass-production machinery, which in turn created new gendered class con-
tradictions and antagonisms. Th e owners’ eff orts to take advantage of the more 
productive equipment were met with resistance. For example, to maximize the 
advantages of new weaving machinery, workers were called on to operate two 
looms at once. As McLewin explains, from the early s to the great strikes 
of , “Th e number of looms assigned to each weaver was the most important 
issue in the struggle for control of the labor process.” In , for instance, weav-
ers struck at two companies that increased loom assignments. No doubt, many 
of the forms of sexual harassment and discrimination among Paterson’s textile 
industry were patterns brought from Europe. Unionized male workers in cotton 
factories of Manchester, for example, created ‘female morality’ issues to retain 
higher skilled jobs for themselves and exclude women workers, who, being paid 
lower wages, set unwanted precedents and engendered confl icts. In Paterson, 
in late , female ribbon weavers at Levy Brothers struck against having to 
produce “as many yards as a male weaver at about half the male weavers pay.” Th e 
union women won their battle for equal pay, but did so by defeating non-union 
women, and themselves engaged in sexual harassment in the struggle. According 
to the American Silk Journal, a “female ‘scab’ was nearly disrobed, piecemeal, on 
the street, and chased, en déshabillé across Arch Street Bridge by a howling mob” 
of women ribbon weavers.

As a few women made inroads in the weaving sector, they also had to battle 
owners. Th e replacement of men with women workers naturally gave rise to 
new class-patriarchal types of confl ict. In one case, Joseph Bamford, partner of a 
large weaving fi rm, assaulted a young employee when he dismissed her for being 

absent from work. He was tried and convicted in court, which prompted other 
women workers to speak out about his abuse. It was reported that “assaults were 
committed on other occasions, but that the girls were afraid to make complaints 
before the courts.” Apparently workers responded with greater violence to this 
incident than ever before: Bamford’s mill and home mysteriously burned down 
in December.

As with dyers, organized men in other areas of silk production also resisted 
the hiring of non-union workers, particularly if they were women. In September, 
 eighty union ribbon workers walked out of the Pioneer Silk Manufacturing 
Company when the owner hired a nonunion weaver. Th e owner, Th omas Ryle, 
fi red all eighty union workers and replaced them with female-trainee strike 
breakers. At the end of each day, the union men jeered the women all the way 
to their homes. “Some evidently quit, and the fi rm escalated its challenge by 
shipping a number of looms to its annex at Allentown, Pennsylvania” where 
non-union women and children workers could be hired without incident. Th at 
was after female-decentralization and male-centralization of production in the 
region began.

Because large integrated fi rms could not avoid the strikes, worker stoppages 
or the high wages of skilled male workers, they increasingly subcontracted some 
work to smaller specialty fi rms and concentrated on low-skilled high-technology 
activities which they could move out of the city where they could hire women 
and children at very low wages. Th e large companies in Paterson were eventually 
displaced by the smaller, more competitive, male-predominant fi rms and house-
hold enterprises. As Scranton explains, “Silk manufacturing in Paterson thus 
gradually evolved away from the integrated factory toward a Philadelphia-style 
system of interlocked and versatile specialists arrayed around central weaving 
shops of widely varying sizes.”

.  Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital: Th e Degradation of Work in the 
Twentieth Century (, New York: Monthly Review Press) is the classic analysis of de-
skilling. See also, Kasson, John F. () Civilizing the machine: technology and republican 
values in America, - (New York : Grossman Publishers).

.  McLewin (), p. .
.  “In late ,  male hands ...struck at a Th omas and Joseph Heaton mill 

...[objecting] to the presence of three women recently hired as spinners ...on the grounds 
of morality and decency. Th e question of scanty clothes in the hot, humid atmosphere of 
mule spinning rooms and also the bodily postures required by the work fi gured promi-
nently in the debate that followed.” Lambertz (), p. .

.  American Silk Journal  (), p. ; , (), p. . Cited in Scranton (), 
p. 

.  American Silk Journal  () cited in Scranton (), p. 
.  Scranton (), p. . By , “Th ough many Paterson fi rms had moved all or 

part of their operations to Pennsylvania, silk remained the city’s predominant industry, 
with almost , of the city’s , wage earners being employed in silk manufac-
turing or dyeing. Th e largest sector of the Paterson silk industry was broad silk, which 
employed close to , of the city’s silk workers. Well over half of these employees were 
weavers, since throwing was concentrated in out-of-town plants. Broad-silk mills varied 
widely in size. A large number employed fewer than twenty persons and resembled a 
cottage industry, with operations often carried out in the owner’s home. Over  mills 



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

Th e Pelgram and Meyer Company in  pioneered the decentraliza-
tion strategy when it relocated silk-throwing operations to a separate plant at 
Boonton. Th e yarn from the new plant was shipped to Paterson where skilled 
workers fi nished the product. Th is proved to be quite profi table and so the fi rm 
rapidly expanded over the next several years. By  the company employed 
, workers who operated  power looms and , throwing spindles at 
both sites. It was reported in the American Silk Journal that  profi ts from 
Pelgram and Meyer’s Boonton annex “footed up a round , ... which is 
attributed mainly to the lower wages paid in the town where it is located.” 
From the s many other Paterson proprietors began moving their twisting, 
lacing, and high-speed plain-silk weaving equipment to annexes where they hired 
women and, for example, children of local miners. Women and children work-
ers protested less, were easier to control and supervise, and of course worked for 
lower wages.

Th eoretically, this sudden lowering of the price of labor, even in the absence 
of increased productivity (surplus value), is a prime example of how fi rms low-
ered the price of labor below socially necessary labor time and value, as discussed 
earlier. Historically, as in Japan, competition in one area spread to others even 
though production may not have been as productive. Th is in turn transformed 
the social relations and conditions of production, forming a new terrain upon 
which class struggles ensued.

Decentralization pitted workers in the productive annexes against those in 
Paterson who performed the same tasks, through regional market mechanisms. 
As the price of throwing, for example, declined in the annexes, pressure was put 
on Paterson fi rms to match the lower price or lose business. In , Paterson 
rates for throwing organzine (hard-twisted weft) and tram (soft-twisted warp) 
“were . and . a pound, respectively, though cost estimates were about 
a third less for the major [proprietors] who had built annexes and used ‘cheap’ 
labor. By  competition brought the rates down to . and ..” Th e lower 
prices in turn put pressure on owners to lower wages of Paterson’s workers. 
Consequently, a regular if not predicable pattern of class confl ict came to char-
acterize the silk industry in Paterson throughout the late and early twentieth 

century. When Rayon, an activity monopolized by the US for some time, was 
invented the Japan–US silk network was eventually destroyed.

II. Class-Patriarchal Relations of the Japanese Reeling Industry

Th e rise of Paterson’s silk industry required the radical transformation of 
silk production in Japan. However, the strategy of Japanese entrepreneurs to 
increase production and profi ts proceeded through an opposite spatial strategy 
of patriarchal labor control. Whereas Paterson owners had to circumvent exist-
ing male labor control and establish female and child relations of production, 
Japanese mill owners did not. Th e raw silk reeling workforce in Japan already was 
composed of women almost entirely. Instead, Japanese owners had to overcome 
the existing forms of raw silk production—the day-labor form, which itself was 
recreated anew as a result of the expansion of exports. To overcome this form, 
mill owners eventually centralized raw silk production. Th us, the expansion and 
increasingly low price of Japanese raw silk and conditions of unequal exchange 
was a process not only of market forces and state policies, but also of local con-
tingent patriarchal-class relations. Indeed, it is our thesis that the network 
could not have functioned, and would not have expanded as rapidly as it did, 
in the absence of the remaking of the patriarchal dimensions of silk production 
throughout its various sectors.

employed from - workers and about  mills employed - workers. Th e only 
really large broad-silk mill [remaining] was owned by Henry Doherty, who employed six 
hundred workers at his main plant.” Goldberg, () p. .

. O’Donnel, Patricia () p. .
.   American Silk Journal  (), p.  cited in Scranton (), p. .
.   Scranton (), p. 

.  Mies’ comments that “the concept of ‘patriarchy’ was re-discovered by the new 
feminist movement as a struggle concept, because the movement needed a term by 
which the totality of oppressive and exploitative relations which aff ect women, could be 
expressed as well as their systematic character. Moreover, the term ‘patriarchy’ denotes 
the historical and societal dimension of women’s exploitation and oppression, and is thus 
less open to biologistic interpretations, in contrast, for example to the concept of ‘male 
dominance.’” Mies (), p. . 

Sayer’s critique is also germane: “ To acknowledge the patriarchal dimension of a 
given set of production relations, conceived as those relations necessary to a mode of pro-
duction of material goods, is not to explain patriarchy itself. I reject the view—advocated 
by some Marxist feminists—that patriarchal relations can be explained with reference 
to their economic functionality, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Th e burden 
of modern feminist argument is rather to suggest an independent (if very material) basis 
for age and gender relations which is the particular concern of feminist theory …” Sayer, 
Derek () p. .

.   As Karen Sacks argues, “Th e point of all this is that one should not expect to 
fi nd any generic worker or essential worker, or for that matter, working-class conscious-
ness; that not only is class experienced in historically specifi c ways, but it is also experi-
enced in racially specifi c, gender-specifi c, and kinship specifi c ways. Th e big issue is how 



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

Patriarchy enabled Japanese owners to reduce the price of labor-power dra-
matically, even below subsistence. Not all analysts recognize this. Sugiyama, for 
example, underestimates the signifi cance of low wages in Japan by arguing that 
“Since wages for female workers constituted only - per cent of total costs, the 
importance of low wage labour should not be allowed to overshadow the role of 
low cocoon prices.” However, low prices of raw silk stemmed largely from the 
low labor costs of producers, whether that was manifested in the products of 
wage-workers or cash-crop peasant producers. Precisely because of intense patri-
archal exploitation, the wage bill for Japanese mill owners could be kept down 
to only four or fi ve percent of costs. Wage levels could be kept so low because 
mill workers were really “semi-wage workers” by comparison to Paterson wage-
laborers: the reproduction of their labor-power did not depend upon their wage 
income. Workers did not buy the necessities they needed with their wages, and 
probably could not have aff orded to. Th eir subsistence necessities were largely 
provided by goods produced by non-waged household members. Th e mill work-
ers’ income contributed to household subsistence and status, but the household 
was not dependent upon it. Th is form of patriarchy worked against the interests 
of mill owners, and it was eventually overcome by them as extending rural land-
lordism and debt to money lenders drove peasants to increasingly rely on the 
wages of women workers to maintain their landholding status.

Th e mill owners’ reliance on female peasants from nearby towns presented 
advantages and disadvantages which conditioned the very development of raw 
silk production in Japan, and in turn, the entire Japan–US silk network. When 
the new factory fi latures were established during the s Meiji mill owners 
took advantage of existing patriarchal norms, including the customary division 
of labor in which silk reeling was “women’s work” and in which women’s labor 
was socially valued below men’s, as manifest in the price of women’s labor. Th at 
is, existing patriarchal norms enabled owners, whether male or female, to pay 
women workers less than if they had hired men. In fact, Japan’s fi rst factory work 

force was composed mostly of women, not men. It was in this period that the 
modern day-laborer (hiyatoi rōdōsha) reeler (who produced raw silk for Western 
factories and consumers) fi rst came into being in Japan. Overall, in the new 
fi latures of the s and s female work became more regimented, intense, 
and dangerous. More women worked longer hours and more days of the year 
and became more concentrated within the cramped and stultifying walls of the 
increasingly larger and more impersonal mills. And as the number of women 
commuting from villages to mills increased, so did the number of rapes and rob-
beries infl icted upon them by men. Th us men took advantage of women workers 
not only as workers, but as women too.

Life outside mills was less conducive to collective resistance than for US 
male workers in Paterson, New Jersey, and this is another reason for their low 
wages. Women reelers in Kōfu during the s and s—prior to the creation 
of “dormitory workers”—were mostly commuting day-laborers who rushed 
home to their own villages after reeling to gain subsistence and perform house-
hold work. Social life outside the mill was distinct from their employment. In 
contrast, in Paterson workers enjoyed “fraternal paternalism” which established 
social ties among workers and employers during their leisure time. For instance, 
in November  Alfred Crew, a British entrepreneur from Macclesfi eld, pro-
vided various forms of complimentary entertainment to his employees. “Such 
festivities,” observes Scranton, “along with Christmas treats, summer excursions 
and baseball contests among mill teams, were regular features of Paterson factory 
life, even in years of turmoil.” Really, these newly invented customs of coop-
eration constituted a complex relation of fraternal patriarchy designed to lower 

to go about fi nding the unities and commonalities of class and class consciousness while 
being attentive to specifi city”, Sacks, Karen B., () “ Toward a Unifi ed Th eory of Class, 
Race, and Gender” American Ethnologist, p. -. Maria Mies makes a similar argument, 
Mies (), pp. -, see also Acker, Joan () “Class, Gender, and the Relations of 
Production,” Signs : -. Also see how Ann Stoler constructs her historical analy-
sis in “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial 
Asia,” Gender and the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern 
Era (University of California Press, ).

.  Sugiyama S. () p. .
.   “Factory girls may have been familiar with blows and brutality before they 

reached the mill. Yet when a supervisor chastised one of them, the humiliation of public 
shame infl icted by a stranger must have added greatly to the very real bodily pain of the 
beating. Although rape and other forms of physical assault were not unknown in village 
life, in the mills women and girls were especially vulnerable to sexual attack or seduc-
tion. Away from supportive families and familiar surroundings, often lonely, disciplined 
harshly, caught up in the dehumanizing routine of racing machinery, youngsters were 
hungry for any sign of aff ection or gesture of kindness.” Tsurumi, (), pp. -. See 
also the classic work on this subject, Hosoi Wakizō (), Jokō aishi (Th e pitiful history 
of female factory workers) (Tokyo: Iwanami).

.  Scranton (), p. . See also ibid., p. , and his article, “Varieties of 
Paternalism: Industrial Structures and the Social Relations of Production in American 
Textiles,” American Quarterly  (); -.



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

worker costs by heading off  worker dissent. Mill owners in Japan also invented 
instrumental paternalist customs. Th ey were not as lavish, for profi ts in the more 
competitive sector did not permit it. Rather, they were blunt, including, for 
example, loans to workers. However, such paternalist actions could backfi re and 
stir up dissent among workers. In fact, the fi rst recorded factory strikes in Japan, 
in Kōfu in —just months after the Chichibu rebellion—were triggered by 
just such a paternalist custom gone awry, as we shall see in the next section.

Nonetheless, as day-laborers, Japanese reelers during the mid-s had a 
few structural-market advantages on their side. Th e day-labor form of employ-
ment set limits on the rate of exploitation by fi lature owners because the available 
labor supply was limited to those who could commute to the mills. Th e mobility 
and relative scarcity of skilled reelers provided reelers with certain bargaining 
power, such as the ability to receive their wages at the end of each day rather than 
monthly. Owners complained to local offi  cials that workers who were unhappy 
simply quit after getting paid and gained employment at another mill the next 
day. Owners clearly knew that they competed among themselves to obtain work-
ers, and that workers played one employer off  another by switching from one 
to another who provided higher wages and better working conditions. It was 
because owners now competed in a world-market to sell raw silk that the pres-
sure to reduce costs, and gain control over the market for labor, was greater than 
it had ever been within the Tokugawa social system.

Initially mill owners responded to the local market power of day laborers by 
forming local associations or cartels. Th ey aimed to end the free mobility of the 
day-laborer by binding workers to a single fi rm and made agreements to control 
wage rates, speed up the work pace, and stretch out working hours. It is signifi -
cant that some of these local associations were established under the auspices of 
the government Silk Manufacturing Industry Alliance (Sanshi Sangō Kumiai). 
Th is national organization was established in  by the Meiji government to 
help manufacturers and merchants recover from the eff ects of the Matsukata 
defl ation and to improve the quality of raw silk exports. Merchants and produc-
ers established local branches to coordinate with the central headquarters to 
regulate sorting and raw silk production quality. However, top businessmen of 
the Nagano and Yokohama branches strongly opposed government attempts to 
regulate the industry. Th e real signifi cance of the Alliance and branch organs was 

primarily in the appropriation of its authority by manufacturers to organize their 
local employer cartels.

It was when Kōfu manufacturers formed such a cartel and tried to implement 
a city-wide labor contract system, that workers began a series of strikes in . 
Th e employers succeeded. However, world competition was intensifying and the 
contract system was limited in its eff ect. It simply could not resolve the underly-
ing problem of worker scarcity which was rooted in the commuting day-labor 
form of production. More drastic measures were required to expand the labor 
force and gain greater price-reducing and patriarchal control of silk reelers.

Such drastic measures were initially taken, and ushered in the second phase 
of the Meiji reeling industry’s expansion, when silk capitalists circumvented the 
day-labor form by establishing the dormitory-system of employment during 
the s. Housing reelers in company dormitories dramatically expanded the 
available supply of workers because workers could be recruited from throughout 
entire regions. Th e dormitory system spread rapidly and underpinned the expan-
sion of Japan’s entire textile industry. Women remarkably continued to comprise 
the majority of the country’s factory working class—sixty-two percent before 
. Th is was nearly twice the percentage of women factory workers in the US 
and France at the turn of the century.

Th e dormitory system gave vast new power to mill owners by expanding the 
supply of workers and consequently heightening competition among workers 
for jobs. Th e bargaining power that the comparatively scarce day-laborers pre-
viously enjoyed was eliminated. Th e new female migrant worker—the dekasegi 
(lit. “work away from home”)—signed a contract with one mill owner and lived 
twenty-four hours a day under the strict control of his managers. Workers could 
no longer easily leave a mill where working conditions were harsh to work for 
another employer. And the terms of the workers’ contracts were enforced by 
police and local employers’ cartels whose members agreed not to hire each other’s 
employees. 

Mill owners lengthened the worker turnover period from days (or months) 
to months and years and limited trips outside the dormitories. But women were 
often too exhausted to do anything but sleep after working six or seven days 
a week, fourteen hours a day. Further, the dormitory system also created new 

.  Yoneda () p. . On the alliances formed during the early th century, see 
Ishii, K. () pp. -. 

.  According to Gary Saxonhouse, in   percent of all factory workers in 
Japan were women, compared to . percent in the US () and . percent for 
France (), . percent for Italy (), . for Belgium (). Saxonhouse, Gary, R. 
(), p. .



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

social spaces for men to make women the targets of sexual conquest. Inside the 
mill women faced the sexual attacks or advances of supervisors; outside the mill 
they faced rape by the recruiters who brought the women to the mills from rural 
areas. For fi lature owners, reelers became nameless, faceless, expendable instru-
ments of capital accumulation and targets of sexual abuse.

DAYL A BOR : STA N DI NG I N T H E WAY OF “ PRO GR E S S ”

Yamanashi prefecture had been an area of concentrated commodity produc-
tion since the middle-era of the Tokugawa society-system. However, as part of 
the formation of the Japan–US silk network, Yamanashi prefecture became one 
of several dense “new fi lature” areas of the Kantō region in central Japan. It dif-
fered markedly from the small producer sericulture areas where many peasants 
reeled poorer quality silk in their homes, such as in Chichibu district in Saitama 
prefecture. 

Silk production was extremely concentrated and specialized in the new 
fi lature areas like Kōfu. In  about two-thirds of all goods sold in Yamanashi 
were silk products—cocoons, raw silk, and kimonos. Most of the silk goods 
were produced in just four of the prefecture’s rural nine districts (gun). And 
among these four rural districts between seventy and ninety percent of peasants 
and small proprietors engaged in sericulture. And just two of these four rural dis-
tricts produced ninety-four percent of the entire prefecture’s woven silk goods. 
But there was one extra-exceptional district not among these four: the urban 
Nishiyamanashi district.

While the former two rural districts plus Nishiyamanashi produced  per-
cent of all raw silk in the prefecture, Nishiyamanashi stands out as an exception. 
Most production from Nishiyamanashi district came from the city of Kōfu. Like 
the Suwa district in Nagano prefecture, Kōfu was had become a highly special-

ized silk manufacturing center. In , there were eighty mills in Yamanashi 
prefecture, the third highest number for any prefecture in Japan. By  the 
number of mills in the prefecture grew to , and, by far, the most productive 
and largest of these were in Kōfu. (By comparison to peripheralized sericulture 
districts like Chichibu, the number of mills in Yamanashi prefecture was huge). 
But even more impressive, by  more than half of the entire prefecture’s raw 
silk output came from the large Kōfu mills. Th ey were not only larger in size, 
but operated more hours per day, more days per year, and even began to break 
the pre-established seasonal rhythm of production. Early on the prefectural 
government in Yamanashi played an important role in facilitating the expansion 
of raw silk production. Supplied with funds from the central government, during 
the mid-s the prefecture made loans to local entrepreneurs for land reclama-
tion projects to increase mulberry leaf output and also built a large technically 
advanced fi lature for entrepreneurs to model their own after. 

During the mid-s, Kōfu mill owners were frustrated by the short supply 
of local reelers. Th e supply probably had peaked during the early s when the 
Matsukata defl ation struck and pushed local poor peasants into tenancy and in 
turn into the fi latures for cash to repay loans and taxes. Indeed, a local journalist 
observed conditions in Kōfu that were similar to those in Chichibu: “Everyday 
half the newspaper reporters’ announcements are fi lled with stories of land for-
feitures.” Yamanashi offi  cials noted what we today call the “dissolution of the 
peasantry”: “In the generally pervasive great depression, the working world has 
undergone great change. Th ere has been a sudden increase in those trying to eke 

. “[T]he reality of the environment in which women were recruited and worked 
made them extremely vulnerable to harassment and sexual violence of various kinds. 
According to Hosoi ...recruiters routinely raped or compromised the young women they 
were escorting to the mills. Shokkō jijō, . , has numerous references attesting to the 
fact that male fl oor supervisors had absolute control over the women working on their 
shifts, and that during night work they often treated these women as a private harem. 
In larger companies, the fl oor supervisors recommended bonuses, reported tardiness, 
docked workers’ pay for various infractions, and ultimately decided how long the shift 
would be. It was extremely important for women working with these men not to dis-
please them.” Sievers () pp. -, fn. .

. Yoneda () p. .

.  Ibid., p. 
.  Ishii () Nihon sanshigyō shi bunseki, p. .
.  Among all fi latures in the prefecture employing between - workers,  

percent were concentrated in Nishiyamanashi district (Kōfu). More impressive, about  
percent of all mills in Kōfu employed at least  workers in  by comparison to a mere 
 percent of mills in the other districts. Most impressive of all is the output of the Kōfu 
mills. In  the number of Kōfu mills () accounted for only  percent of all mills in 
the prefecture (). But these  mills produced  percent of the prefecture’s entire raw 
silk. Th e average output of the Kōfu mills amounted to ,. kin ( kin =  grams) 
per factory, while the average output per factory in the other districts totaled only . 
kin. Yoneda () pp. -.

.  Seventy-one percent of Kōfu mills operated more than  days a year whereas 
about  percent of the mills in the rest of the prefecture operated less than  days a 
year (and of these more than half operated less than  days a year). Ibid., pp. -

. “Kōgyō iken” vol. , Meiji zenki saisei keizai shiryō shúsei, vol. , p. , cited in 
Yoneda () p. .



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

out a living as factory women.” Th e local supply of reelers thus increased; but 
not enough to bring down wages as low as mill owners desired. Government 
offi  cials were sympathetic. Th e following exaggerated government report, for 
instance, tells of the women reelers’ power and refl ects the frustration of local 
capitalists:

From Meiji  [] the [silk reeling] mechanisms [filatures] increased and 
the shortage of factory women became an extremely serious problem. The 
reason: it is not the custom in this prefecture for factory women to live in 
factory dormitories, so they all commute to work. Rather, it became an indul-
gent custom of factory girls to work in one reeling mill today, and tomorrow 
to work in another. Even if a factory woman misbehaves the factory doesn’t 
have the right to censure her; if the factory censures her, she already has plans 
to go to a different factory the following day, so censuring her has not the 
slightest effect. As a result, the attitude of factory girls to factory owners is 
very unfriendly and one can see that the employer is, on the contrary, domi-
nated by the factory women.

A prefectural report of  similarly reported that,
Due to the recent shortage of factory women one can see there are now 
severe problems in Kōfu and neighboring villages ... Even though faced with 
an insufficiency [of reelers], new reeling mechanisms are constantly being 
established. From the start, the new founders make no preparations to hire 
women. To cope with the situation they secretly plan to steal factory women 
[from other shops….So factory women are happy to work in a shop with no 
rules. If the shop’s rules are strict and hated, they will quit tomorrow and go 
work in another shop.

T H E 18 858 6 KŌF U ST R I K E S : M I LE STON E S TO OV E RCOM E

Th e scarcity of reelers had thus forced owners to compete among them-
selves for workers, and evidently to complain to local authorities about it and 
to begin off ering “paternalist” incentives to encourage workers to stay at their 
mills. But in the fi rst known factory strike in Japan, in , women workers 
complained about how such paternalism was implemented unfairly. At one mill 
they complained that they did not all receive the same loan amount and that the 
owner gave preferential treatment to unmarried reelers and to those considered 

.  Yamanashi ken kigyō geppō, vol. , no.  (September, , ), p. , cited in 
Yoneda () p. .

.  Seishi shijun kai kiji, cited in Yoneda () p. .
.  “Nosho musho shirei” (), cited in Yoneda () p. .

attractive. Specifi cally, married reelers and other workers received only one-yen 
loans while the others received fi ve-yen loans. Th e women workers’ complaints 
suggested that the owners were sexist and preferred to hire “attractive” and “avail-
able” workers. As a result, a number of women refused to work until all workers 
were treated equally. Th e owner tried to replace the protesting women, but the 
replacements lacked the necessary skills, and so the owner conceded to their 
demands. Unfortunately, little more is known about the strike. Unfortunately, 
their success and developing gender-class consciousness would be undermined.

After the incident, Kōfu owners took new and unprecedented steps to deal 
with defi ant workers and the overall labor shortage. In February , they 
and merchants formed the Raw Silk Business Alliance (Kiito Eigyō Kumiai) 
under the auspices of the government-sponsored national Silk-Manufacturing 
Industry Alliance. Filature owners in Japan generally opposed the regulations 
on the silk trade that the government sought to implement through the Alliance. 
But in Kōfu they made use of the Alliance’s platform and authority to establish 
their own Raw Silk Business Alliance as a means to implement a city-wide con-
tract system that would end the reelers’ rights to move freely from one mill to 
another and force them to accept a fi xed wage rate.

To the bylaws of the national organization, the Kōfu Alliance added numer-
ous restrictive labor regulations. Tsurumi found that the local Alliance sought 
to unilaterally set wage rates each year and pay wages on a monthly rather than 
weekly or daily basis. Further, Yoneda explains that Regulation  required 
factory women to work only at the mill where they previously worked most 
often. And in anticipation of any reelers who considered defying this restriction, 
regulation – stipulated that reelers could be dismissed at the “convenience 
of the employer.” But if employment was terminated “at the convenience of the 
factory woman” then no silk mill in Kōfu would hire her for six months. And 
if termination of the worker was a result of her “misconduct,” then all the mills 
would boycott her for an entire year. Regulation  gave employers the right to 
deduct and hold back / (one-fi ftieth) of the reeler’s wages as forced savings, 

. Tsurumi () p. -.
.  Ishii, K. () pp. -. Yoneda (), p. . Th is is the Alliance’s title accord-

ing to Yoneda. Tsurumi uses the same source but refers to the alliance as the Seishi Sangyō 
Kumiai. (Tsurumi, (), p. ).

.  Tsurumi, () p. 



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

which prevented owners from valorizing most of the surplus value. It was passed 
on to the next buyer and eventually valorized down the chain in those sectors 
that held oligopolistic market power. Th e intense competition among the mills, 
as noted, was “passed back” to sericulturists, such as those in Chichibu.

T H E C H IC H I BU R E BELLION : MON EY LE N DE R S , GA M BLE R S , A N D 
SE R IC U LT U R E

Th e worsening conditions of the petty sericulturists in areas like Chichibu 
were shaped by regional and global dynamics. State offi  cials since the late 
Tokugawa era explicitly acknowledged the strategic importance of raw silk 
exports because they earned the government Mexican silver dollars which 
fi nanced the purchase of Western military weaponry, machinery, and technol-
ogy, including that for the improvement and expansion of raw silk production, 
such as through the establishment of the famous Tomioka mill (Ishii ). 
However, national development programs to advance Japan’s integration into the 
world-economy also required development policies to cope with the attendant 
economic instabilities and diffi  culties. Increased taxation and fi scal retrench-
ment throughout the Meiji era had caused widespread peasant hardship and 
discontent. Partisan oligarchic political control also engendered resentment 
among elites and educated middle strata, even gamblers, who initiated a modern 
political movement for democratic government and people’s rights, known and 
the Liberty and People’s Rights Movement (Boles, , cf. Vlastos , Jansen 
). To combat the social eff ects of its modernization program, the Meiji 
oligarchy imposed new “social development” policies of political oppression 
during the s against dissidents, including peasants. In the face of worsen-
ing economic conditions caused by the modernization program, protests among 
peasants, activists, and outlaw-gamblers, among others increased markedly, and 
combined are known as the “incidents of intensifi ed violence.”

During the s, unfavorable exchange rates, caused by the international 
weakness of the Japanese yen, and skyrocketing demand for Japanese silk resulted 
in unabated infl ation. To remedy rising prices and the fl agging national currency, 
the Meiji government’s fi nance minister, Matsukata, initiated the infamous 
“Matsukata defl ation” program in . Prices of sericulture products—cocoons, 
mulberry leaves, egg cards, etc.—plummeted between –. Incomes among 
silk producing peasant households fell by nearly half, such that they had to sell 
forty-two percent more silk in  than in  to earn the same amount (Smith 
: ). 

However, tax rates were fi xed, and in the preceding boom years hundreds of 
thousands of peasant households had borrowed cash from local moneylenders  
in the expectation of continued growth. Th ey were not fully aware of the ramifi -

another unwelcome incentive to continue at the same mill. Worst of all, Yoneda 
points out, were regulations for the establishment of a fi ne and reward system. 
Regulation , for example, stated that up to one month’s wages could be with-
held for infractions of various fi nes.

Th e implementation of the new regulations, backed by the government, 
took eff ect in mid-May, . Following their implementation, the Yamanashi 
Daily News reported that signifi cant changes had taken place, for example, at the 
Amamiya mill. Wages were reduced by a third, from  sen per day to  sen and 
workers were made to work  hours a day, starting at : .. and fi nishing at 
: .. 

Th e new controls on workers triggered a series of strikes at fi ve mills between 
June and August, beginning at the Amamiya mill which employed about  
workers. According to a prefectural report, about  women left the mill and 
gathered at a local temple on June . After four days of negotiations, owners 
conceded only a one-hour reduction of work time to  hours per day, and the 
abolition of fi nes for arriving late. Little more is known about the other strikes. 
However, Kōfu strikers were unable to defeat the mill owners. In eff ect, this was 
the fi rst major blow to the reelers’ status and power as scarce day-laborers.

Th e establishment of the contract system, and later the dormitory-system, 
gave unprecedented control over workers by owners, which seems to explain 
why so few strikes occurred in the industry after the day-labor form of produc-
tion declined. Nonetheless, among the few strikes that did occur, those by Kōfu 
women certainly stand out. Among the twenty known fi lature strikes between 
–, more than half, thirteen to be precise, occurred in Kōfu. Th ree 
occurred in Gifu, one in Gunma, and three in Fukushima, that is, in areas where 
the dormitory system was less pervasive. Th e paucity of strikes in Nagano—
only three between –, is testimony to the area which perfected and relied 
heavily upon the dormitory system.

In theoretical terms, the transformed and intensifi ed patriarchal relations 
of raw silk production enabled Japanese mill owners to reduce the price of labor 
below the socially necessary time of raw silk production. Th e under-priced value 
of female labor provided mill owners with additional value which could be real-
ized as profi t when valorized upon exchange for money. However, the Japanese 
mills also faced intense price-reducing market competition in the world market 

.  Yoneda () pp. -.
.  Yoneda () pp. -.
76.  Ishii, K. () p. .



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

cations of the new system of private property that the Meiji state had instituted, 
with the aim, in part, of increasing raw silk exports. Unable to repay their taxes 
or to repay loans for silk production and / or to pay taxes, creditors and offi  cials 
as never before began to mercilessly expropriate the land and possessions of 
petty forfeiters through the new courts with the full aid of the police. 

Facing disaster, peasants responded throughout Japan in the mid-s by 
forming “poor people’s parties”—the title revealing a novel combination of the 
nomenclature of the new political parties and customary peasant petition meth-
ods. Th e various poor people’s parties initiated petition campaigns and collective 
requests for debt relief from lenders and authorities. When the powers-that-be 
refused to make concessions, peasants typically went bankrupt and lost their 
land and possessions. In  the recorded number of peasants taken to court 
was ,, a fi gure that shot up to , in . About , households 
lost land in  alone, more than any other year of the Meiji era (Irokawa : 
). As noted earlier, Kōfu prefecture offi  cials believed that the dissolution of 
the peasantry in their area led peasant women to seek work in the mills. Such 
local transformations are precisely what conditioned the expansion of Japan’s raw 
silk industry, and in turn, the expansion of the mechanized US sector.

Meanwhile, in the context of rapidly worsening economic conditions and 
widespread political discontent, a number of small political factions of the 
Liberty and People’s Rights Movement sought to recruit gambler-outlaw clans 
and groups of indebted peasants to form revolutionary armies to overthrow 
the Meiji government. At the peak of the economic crisis in , on at least 
two occasions, peasant sericulturists in cash-crop sericulture districts where 
gambling fl ourished rose up with the aid of local bakuto (gambler-outlaws) and 
radical members of the Liberty Party ( Jiyūtō) (Boles , forthcoming). Th e 
Chichibu rebellion was not only the largest and most violent among these inci-
dents, but it was also  the very last millenarian peasant uprising. Th e revolt began 
on November ,  in Chichibu district, Saitama prefecture, when between 
– well organized peasants began smashing the homes of moneylend-
ers, burning government offi  ces that contained loan records, and battling local 
militia and eventually government troops. Th e uprising lasted several days and 
spread across three prefectures. 

Th e Chichibu rebellion is perhaps the most debated event in the social his-
tory of early Meiji Japan. Th e two most common positions stem from diff ering 
interpretations of the participants’ status, political affi  liations, demands, and 
actions. While most Chichibu rebels were peasants who targeted local creditors 
to free from themselves from indebtedness, and who acted in the tradition of 
millenarian customs of protest, the top leaders claimed or actually had Jiyūtō 

membership and apparently planned to march on Tōkyō to overthrow the gov-
ernment. 

Th us, on the one hand, the event has thus been characterized as the last and 
greatest uprising of the Liberty Movement, one with with the characteristics 
of a “bourgeois and democratic revolution” (Azami ; Ebukuro ; Inoue 
; Irokawa , , : ; Nakazawa , ). On the other hand, it 
is said to be the last and greatest armed millenarian uprising of Japan (Chishima 
, Inada , , Moriyama , , Scheiner , Yasumaru ). Th e 
works in English on the incident essentially follow one or the other of these two 
positions (Bix , Bowen , Hane , Jansen , , Norman ; 
Scheiner , Vlastos ).

Both interpretations, however, neglected the role of bakuto (gambler-out-
laws) in this and other incidents of that year, and of course none place the wors-
ening conditions of the rebel peasants within the framework of the Japan–US 
silk network.

Th e involvement of bakuto was partly the outcome of the “raise-an-army” 
tactics of several radical Jiyūtō factions who sought to recruit gamblers and 
indebted peasants into an army that would overthrow the Meiji government 
(Boles, forthcoming). However, local peasant sericulturists cum petty gamblers 
had already initiated a debt deferral petition movement in Chichibu before 
Jiyūtō radicals—members of the Yūshinsha political organization in neighboring 
Gunma prefecture who were active in the area—recruited them into the party in 
early . Still, the infl uence of these Jiyūtō radicals on the bakuto sericulturists 
was consequential, in terms of providing them with encouragement and gump-
tion than in infusing them with modern political ideals of democratic govern-
ment. However, most bakuto-peasants’ notions of justice stemmed from their 
own millenarian traditions, and they interpreted the Jiyūtō from this perspective. 
Petty gambler Arai Teikichi, for example, testifi ed that when he was visited by 
Sakamoto Sōsaku (one of the bakuto who initiated the debt deferral petition 
struggle) and his bakuto friend, Onda Uichi, they had said:

On  November there will be a gathering which is so important that even 
people suffering greatly with hardship should come. Uichi said I should 
gather ten of the Jiyūtō members at Kobayashi Shōnokichi’s house and tell 
them the same thing; that the Jiyūtō will hold a gathering in Ōmiya in Chi-
chibu district ... and if this gathering goes well, the usurers and banks will be 
crushed and the world will be made even (CJSS III: . italics added).

The Jiyūtō symbolically authorized violence to “make the world even.” But to 
“make the world even,” was a millenarian ideal that when put into practice meant 
smashing creditors’ houses and burning loan records stored in government 
offices. Certainly this was no concept of Liberalism. As Moriyama explains, 



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 
The concept yonarashi—in the Chichibu peasants own words, ‘make house-
hold wealth even’ or ‘make the world even’—were not ideas invented by politi-
cians or philosophers. This is true of the term yonaoshi [world renewal] as 
well. Both terms developed over a long period of social history and uprisings 
since the pre-modern era. By the Bakumatsu period they were finally explic-
itly expressed in this language. Thus, they are nothing other than popular 
social ideas” (Moriyama, : ). 

Bakuto Teikichi could not have been more clear: in answer to the interroga-
tor’s question, “what is the doctrine of the Jiyūtō?” he responded, “It’s doctrine is 
to destroy the usurers and the banks that greedily charge high interest rates and 
control all the money, and to help the poor people” (CJSS iii: ).

A fi nal noteworthy twist in this mix of millenarianism and Jiyūtō slogans 
are the references to the conservative Jiyūtō President, Itagaki Taisuke, as a mil-
lenarian “Great Rectifi er” or a Great Oyabun (Outlaw Patron). Itagaki was no 
supporter of social movements. Within days of the uprising he denounced it 
and dissolved the Jiyūtō to disassociate himself from Chichibu rebels with Jiyūtō 
membership. 

How could the rebel’s image of Itagaki diff er so radically from the reality? 
Perhaps this too is linked to Yūshinsha activists (the Jiyūtō faction from Gunma) 
who, prior to and after the Gunma incidents, spread the word of Itagaki as great 
defender of the people. For example, before his arrest for his role in the “second 
Gunma incident,” Yūshinsha activist Murakami Taiji traveled the district telling 
people that “Itagaki’s army would assemble, rout government offi  cials, reform 
the tyrannical government into a good one, and make the world free so people 
can live peacefully” (CJSS vi: ). Likewise, his mentor, Arai Kisaburo, after his 
acquittal in the Gunma incident, continued organizing in the area. He told at 
least two hundred peasants in late October  that “according to the orders 
of President Itagaki, one-hundred thousand Jiyūtō members from all areas will 
revolt sometime between November fi rst and third, and in all prefectures and 
wards, police stations and offi  ces will be wrecked, politics will be made free 
[“jiyū”], and taxes will be reduced to one-one hundredth of what they are now” 
(Azami : ).

Th e combination of bakuto support for peasants, their personal chivalry, 
the encouragement of Jiyūtō activists, and the perception of the Jiyūtō president 
as a deity-like leader, provided leaders and peasant rebels alike with suffi  cient 
gumption and moral authority to create an unusually well-organized rebel force 
structured along the lines of a political party and army combined, and to obtain 
justice and wealth equalization through a quasi-millenarian world renewal rebel-
lion—Japan’s very last. Had they not made this breakthrough, the debt deferral 
struggles probably would have proceeded peacefully and unsuccessfully as they 

did elsewhere in Japan during the mid-s. But from a world-historical view, it 
is essential to take into account the rise of the Japan–US silk network. For this 
takes into account the worsening conditions of peasants with regard to growing 
global competition that drove down raw silk prices and the government’s nation-
alist export-oriented and military development policies that impinged on peas-
ants by giving new powers to moneylenders cum landlords and to silk merchants 
(with the aim of increasing silk exports for strong foreign currency to purchase 
Western military weapons and technology). Th e Chichibu rebellion was the 
imbrication of local social relations and customs, the reconstitution of ideas and 
forms of struggle on new terrain shaped by national mediations and the world-
scale processes and forces of the Japan–US silk network in the world-economy.

CONC LUSION : H ISTORY A N D T H EORY

For the fi rst time in world history, specialized silk production activities in 
America and East Asia became integrated within a globe-spanning division of 
labor. During the mid-s producers in France and the US became the leading 
woven silk producers among wealthy states through purchases of raw silk from 
East Asia. During the – period, China became the main foreign sup-
plier of raw silk to France while Japan became the main supplier to the US. 

To examine the historical processes of unequal exchange and stratifi cation 
the unit of observation selected for this study is the Japan–US silk network. 
An incorporated comparisons method was developed through reconstructing 
the interrelationships of agencies, labor forms, and interstate structures of the 
Japan–US silk network to explain the historically specifi c interrelation of local 
and interstate processes and inequalities. Th e categories of “unequal exchange,” 
“commodity chains,” and “class relations/forms of production,” were not treated 
as independent “fi elds of inquiry.” Rather, the meaning of these conceptions have 
been relationally defi ned as dimensions of distinct world-historical processes of 
the network examined at local, regional, and interstate levels of abstraction. In 
this respect, this body of this paper is not strictly about unequal exchange or 
commodity chains or class relations per se, but about the historical processes and 
elements of systemic inequality. 

More specifi cally, I have argued that interstate disparities of the Japan–US 
silk network arose through the interconnections among distinct capital-labor 
relationships; that uneven prices and remuneration resulting in interstate 
inequality occurred as a consequence not only of local capital-labor relations of 
the production, but from the very integration of these relationships because the 
integration of these diff erent forms fundamentally shaped markets. 

Th e expansion and higher profi ts of the US silk industry was based in part 



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

on greater productivity and labor exploitation of the mass-production US silk 
factories. Th is productive advantage not only translated into lowering wages per 
unit, de-skilling, and use of lower cost female and child labor, but also into a 
price-reducing force on the raw silk market by virtue of the monopolistic market 
power gained as oligopolistic buyers of raw silk. Th at market power derived 
directly from the high productivity and high entry costs attending the expense of 
mechanized machinery investments. Relatively few entrepreneurs could engage 
in mass production silk manufacture, but those who did could process the raw 
silk imports of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of raw silk producers. 
Th eir oligopolistic power contributed to driving raw silk prices below their value 
and thus in turn provided value subsidies to US producers. Silk producers in 
Japan in the fi rst place had expanded production and exports to meet the needs 
of industrial manufacture relations in the US. Asian producers of raw silk were 
far more in number and far less productive per person compared to the US 
suppliers, and they were “locked into” the markets supplying these producers. 
Consequently, they faced intense market competition among themselves that 
was amplifi ed by the oligopolistic market power of the US silk manufacturing 
enterprises and wholesale buyers. 

Th us, the conjoining of historically specifi c industrial wage and non-wage 
forms of production, which composed the Japan–US silk network, created and 
exacerbated infundibular market structures—with conditions of relative intense 
competition at one end and oligopoly at the other. Th e diff erent market pres-
sures that eff ectively lowered prices of raw silk below their value arose primarily 
from the very juxtaposition of diff erent forms/class relations of production, that 
is, from the division of labor itself. Th e low price of raw silk was not simply a 
manifestation of intense class exploitation of peasants and female mill workers 
by landlords and mills owners. Rather, the integration of specifi c forms of pro-
duction and class relations through interstate markets decisively structured the 
uneven market pressures on the prices of commodities in those markets, and in 
turn on production relations, thus eff ecting price-reductions of the exchange-
value (of socially necessary labor) of raw silk.

In view of their interdependence, the forms of production and protest in the 
Japan–US silk network should not be treated as each having a self-contained 
logic, though they did have distinct logics. Distinctiveness within a totality does 
not exclude the interrelatedness of elements that are formative of a totality. On 
the contrary, as elements of a totality they must be both distinct and interrelated. 
It was through the regular unequal exchange of US cash and Japanese raw silk 
within this interstate division of labor that local-regional relations and circum-
stances of raw silk production became mutually conditioned and transformed. 
Th e cash income from raw silk exports, declining with the tendential fall in raw 

silk prices, sustained sericulture and raw silk relations of production in Japan 
within increasingly intense parameters of instrumental rationality and profi t 
maximization, just as the raw silk sustained and subsidized silk factory relations 
in the US. Th us, the social relations and conditions of sericulture and raw silk 
reeling in Japan, through raw silk exports, entered into the conditions of factory 
production and class confl icts in Paterson, New Jersey, just as factory relations of 
mechanized silk production in the US entered into the historical environment of 
peasant sericulture and rebellion and raw silk reeling, patriarchal relations, and 
mill strikes by women workers in Japan. Th e “local” conditions of each confl ict 
were thus molded by world-historical processes encompassing the interdepen-
dence of their circumstances in the interstate silk network, and it was a formative 
part of the capitalist world-economy.

If I have stressed the importance of market mediations shaped by the juxta-
position of labor forms as elemental to unequal exchange, I have also emphasized 
that unequal exchange was thus also sustained on the basis of contingent social 
conditions of production, class-patriarchal relations in particular. Intensifying 
class-patriarchal exploitation in both the US and Japan decisively conditioned 
value magnitudes and prices of labor within and among the interdependent 
production activities. Patriarchal relations of production, contradictorily embed-
ded within wider social and state-sanctioned patriarchal relations, restricted 
wage-work activities and opportunities for women, under-priced the value of 
their labor, and lowered the price of raw silk, while subjecting women workers to 
various forms and degrees of sexual abuse and humiliation.

Price-lowering patriarchal relations of production that conditioned unequal 
exchange were not automatic, but historically constructed and changing. When 
Japanese entrepreneurs faced ever intense competition to meet ever-increasing 
US demand, they sought to reduce costs by controlling day-labor workers. Th eir 
eff orts initially worsened conditions for women workers leading to the Kōfu 
strikes of –, which were followed by few thereafter during the Meiji era. 
Within a few years, fi lature owners tremendously expanded the labor market and 
gained greater control over female workers by destroying the day-labor form of 
production with the establishment of factory dormitories which housed many 
young and initially semiskilled women, many from indebted peasant households 
located in distant villages.

Th e success of mill owners in overcoming worker resistance contributed to 
the continued expansion of the US silk manufacturing industry. But US expan-
sion also led to new class-patriarchal contradictions in Paterson, New Jersey, the 
“Lyons of America.” Th e strikingly diff erent local outcomes of these interrelated 
processes resulted from the opposite spatial strategies of labor control taken by 
US and Japanese entrepreneurs. Paterson entrepreneurs tried to increase the 



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

number of women employees whom they hired at lower wages. But resistance 
by male workers to the hiring of female workers, combined with spreading 
unionization, worker militancy, and rising wages in general during the mid-
s, led Paterson’s entrepreneurs to decentralize silk manufacturing operations 
by relocating to annex facilities in smaller towns where they hired semi-skilled 
women and child laborers to operate new semi-automated and mass-production 
machinery. In contrast, the establishment of the factory-dorm system, raw silk 
production became concentrated in large-scale fi latures in the urban areas of silk 
cities, including Kōfu. Labor resistance was not destroyed in Paterson as it was 
in Kōfu. In view of the interconnections of these developments, it would have 
been insuffi  cient to merely observe that the Kōfu solution was a manifestation 
of greater coercion, as typically found in semiperipheral areas, and the Paterson 
solution a manifestation of greater freedom.

Th e transitional nature of the network’s formation is exemplifi ed not only in 
the fact that the Kofu strikes were the very fi rst known factory strikes in Japan, 
but also by Japan’s very last millenarian peasant uprising in  among indebted 
sericulturists (Boles , ). Just as British textile industrialization had 
required enclosures and slavery, the rise of the Japan–US silk industry required 
the full subordination and alienation of peasant lands held by sericulturists. Th e 
triumph of local landlords/creditors over indebted peasants in Japan during the 
mid-s was a truly major turning point and marker of Japan’s incorpora-
tion into the capitalist world-economy. At no other period before or since did 
so much rural land come into the control and private ownership of the rural 
wealthy. Irretrievable debt to moneylenders among Japanese peasants, especially 
in sericulture areas where cash-crop production was advanced and tied to world-
markets led to widespread land forfeitures caused in part by collapsing raw silk 
prices which were the direct result of the Meiji government’s defl ation policy 
and currency-trade reforms. Th e Matsukata reforms, launched in the early s 
were explicitly designed to strengthen the yen, increase raw silk exports, and 
advance Japan’s position (in the capitalist world-economy).

Th e Chichibu rebellion of  was exemplary of all these local and world-
historical changes. Th e cultural form of rebellion by these small-plot holding 
sericulturists who faced unprecedented land forfeitures was, for example, truly 
transitional. On the one hand, rebels were inspired by millenarian fi gures, 
deities, and led by gamblers. On the other gambler-leaders had formed “poor 
people’s parties,” joined radical factions of the national Liberty Party, which was 
itself the head of Japan’s fi rst popular movement for representative democracy 
and civil liberties. Chichibu gamblers joined the party because their millenarian 
notions of equality and freedom vis-à-vis dominating landlords and local offi  cials 
meshed well with comparable notions of equality and freedom espoused by the 

Matsumoto,
Nagano

Kita-kanraku, Gunma

Sho-goori, Gunma
Gunma, Gunma

Tano,
Gunma

Niigata

Kanagawa

Shimoina, Nagano

Fuji, Shizuoka
Higashi Yamanashi

Nakakyoma,
Yamanashi

Kodama, Saitama

Osato,Saitama

Higashi Chikuma,
Nagano

Chiba

Mie

Kita-Uwa, Ehime

Toyohashi, Aichi

Suwa, Nagano

Hyogo

Miyagi
Kyoto
Tottori

Tokyo

Amami, Aichi

Ibaraki

Kumamoto
Maebashi, Gunma

Irima, Saitama

Chichibu, Saitama

C

E

A'

Kofu, Yamanashi

Hanika, Nagano

Shiga

Kita-Adachi,
Saitama

Ogata, Nagano

B

D

A

100%0 10 20 30 40 9080706050

310

300

290

280

270

260

240

230

220

210

200

190

180

170

160

Kamiina,
Nagano

IwateFukushima

Av
er

ag
e

Nu
m

be
r

of
Da

ys
of

Fi
la

tu
re

Op
er

at
io

n
Pe

r
Ye

ar

Percentage of Basins in Filatures with More than 200 Basins
out of all basins infilatures with 10 or more basins.

Okayama A"

Hierarchy of Meiji Silk Mills by Size and Days in
Operation 1918

Figure 1:



Elson E. Boles Critiques of World-Systems Analysis and Alternatives 

Liberty Party vis-à-vis Japan’s oligarchic government. However, both movements 
were crushed by government military forces. Modern landlordism took root and 
peasant resistance to the untrammeled expansion of rural banking and landown-
ership, and to perhaps the lowest cost sericulture industry on the planet, had 
been cleared away. Japan’s raw silk mill owners obtained cheap cocoons and cheap 
female labor from destitute peasant farmers while US silk factories obtained 
cheap raw silk.

In sum, this analysis of the network’s unequal division of labor has permitted 
the interwoven connections among seemingly disparate developments and events 
and forms of collective protest to be understood on the basis of their mutual 
formation and transformation, and as formative parts of the capitalist world-
economy. Th e method of incorporated comparison developed here has sought 
to explore world inequality and unequal exchange by examining the structur-
ing of infundibular markets consequent to the integration of distinct wage and 
non-wage forms, and by contemplating the world-historical dimensions of local 
events and the local faces of global processes (Tomich ).

A PPE N DI X I : R E ELI NG I N DUST RY ST RUC T U R E

Th e sundry grades of raw silk shipped from Japan to the US may be simpli-
fi ed to three basic grades of quality which generally corresponded to three strata 
of raw silk producers. Th e lower quality raws tended to be produced by women 
in small peasant households who, as petty sericulturists, also produced their 
own cocoons which they reeled into raw silk using older or lower quality hand 
reeling apparatuses and communal or fee-based re-reeling facilities. Th e lower 
quality raws produced in small peasant households were characteristic of areas 
like Chichibu district where peasants increasingly competed with small and 
medium mill owners who used nearly the  same techniques, but who purchased 
cocoons of higher quality and who seasonally hired skilled women reelers. Many 
others simply sold their cocoons to regional merchants who in turn sold them 
to mill owners. Small to medium mill owners purchased from local and regional 
merchants most of the cocoons that their mill hands reeled. Th e owners of the 
medium to large fi latures, which produced most of the higher quality Japanese 
silk, sourced their cocoons from larger wholesalers who in turned sourced from 
national markets. To these diff erent grades of raw silk also corresponded geo-
graphic concentrations of production. Th e largest of the medium-sized mills, 
which hired up to fi fty or so young women workers and produced a medium 
quality silk, were concentrated in areas like Gunma, Fukushima, and north-
ern Japan. Th e large fi latures, most of which were established by wealthy silk 
merchants typically hired between  and  women. Th ese highly productive 

fi latures arose in the “new” silk districts like Kōfu, Suwa, and Amami in central 
Japan, and produced the country’s higher quality raw silk. Th e fi rst known fac-
tory strikes in Japan occurred in Kōfu fi lature mills, and the last millenarian 
peasant uprising in Japan occurred in the Chichibu sericulture region. 

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