This book examines the political economy of the cotton processing industry, analyzes the process of cotton policy making and looks at how local governments and the former monopolist cope with the changes brought about by marketization.

This volume is a major contribution to fuller understanding of the modern economic and industrial history of Asian nations and to the general understanding of the socioeconomic conditions in underdeveloped countries, stressing the history of the modernization of the cotton industry, not merely because of its basic importance but also because such limitation gives definiteness to the subject. The author analyzes all the factors that have changed the tempo, altered the direction, and limited the extent of the industrial development in these countries, with special references to the economic implication of actions by social organizations and political institutions. The volume contains a wealth of detailed statistical matter in which the reader will find systematically the main factual contexts of the industrial development of each country. Sung Jae Koh's service to English readers is therefore an important one in a field where there is an acknowledged growing need for such information. Sung Jae Koh held professorships at Yonsei University and Seoul National University. He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

There are many studies of the Chinese cotton textile industry for various time periods. But most of them are rather limited in the scope of inquiry, and, occasionally, their interpretations cannot stand rigorous economic reasoning. The present study is an attempt to reorganized the data, which are widely scattered in an extremely large number of Chinese historical documents and modern writings, in a systematic fashion, and to provide an economic analysis. Since this study covers the entire history of the industry, the limitations of space do not allow us to deal with every detail; attention must be focused on the key issues.