Editor's introduction: Reflections on Japanese and Turkish modernization and global history

要旨

The trajectories of Japanese and Turkish modernization momentarily £ captivated the imagination of social scientists and historians during the 5 1960s as a testing ground for the analysis of the structural and institutional "* processes that went into the making of the modern in the world outside Europe and the US since the second half of the nineteenth century.The classic work on the subject is the volume edited by Robert Ward and Dankwart Rustow, Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (1964), which was published as part of a Princeton University Press series on comparative modernization in Russia, Japan, India, Turkey and China. 1 A collection of articles by the foremost specialists in Japanese and Turkish Studies, the volume is representative of the kind of modernization theory prevalent in the American academy at the time.Despite its shortcomings, the volume remains a classic and a singular attempt that brought Japan and Turkey together within the field of modernization studies.Ward and Rustow construct their framework by defining modernization as a process distinct from westernization in terms of political and cultural changes of identity; they claim to disregard the differences of such politically divergent regimes as democracies, communist totalitarianisms and constitutional monarchies.Accordingly, modernization is defined in structural terms of industrialization, secularization, social mobility, science and technology, education, the shift from ascribed to achieved status, and a rise in material standards of living.These are concepts which still dominate our everyday understanding of modernity, despite strong criticism and suspicions in current academic discourse.In the 1960s, modernization was described in terms of increasing control over nature. 2 However, our current assessment of that process is probably better represented by the jaundiced view that humans have destroyed nature.In

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