英文摘要 |
Food is an indispensable resource to maintain labour force. The nineteenth-century empires built transnational networks of agricultural production and consumption to support their industrialization, mobilizing cheap foodstuff from the colonies to feed workers and maximize capital accumulation. Among them, Southeast Asian rice was the crucial crop sustaining European imperialist expansion in Asia, also the major source of rice imports for Northeast Asian countries such as Japan. Employing food regime analysis, this article examines the transimperial division of labour formed through Southeast Asian rice, which nevertheless embodied Japan’s limited capability of utilizing the global rice market controlled by the European hegemony. This inferior status combined with the endogenous transformation of Japan’s industrialization propelled its turn to an imperial self-sufficiency policy in the 1920s, implying a different path of accumulating industrial capital through agriculture in a latecomer country. |