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Thomas C. Smith, Ford Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, died in his sleep on April 3, 2004, in Danville, California. He was eighty-seven years old.
Smith was the most distinguished historian of early modern and modern Japan in the West in the last half century. In four major books, Political Change and Industrial Development: Government Enterprise, 1868-1880 (1955), The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (1959), Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a Japanese Village, 17171830 (1977), and Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920 (1988), Smith changed our understanding of the trajectory of Japanese economic development and social change in the early modern and modern eras. His conclusions were often quite striking, as he argued against what had become the accepted wisdom. In The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan, for example, he ascribed a major role in the shaping of Japan's modernization to the gradual evolution of the Tokugawa agrarian economy (16001868), the change in the village from subsistence production to production for the market, and the transformation of family farming. As Professor Kenneth B. PyIe of the University of Washington, a former student of Smith's, writes: "His research and writing are critical to our understanding of how it was that the Japanese became the first non-Western people to achieve an industrial society." What was often crucial to Smith's historiography was his willingness to write as a comparative historian; often, in fact, his explorations in Japanese history suggested the necessity of reexamining the assumed universality of the western process of modern industrialization.
Smith's books and articles ranged over a wide area of Japanese history,...