The problem of the degree of economic development which took place in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) and its effects on the modernization of Japan has given rise to considerable controversy. This is in part due to Marxist efforts to fit this development into Marxian categories, and to see in it elements of class struggle. These efforts have met stiff opposition from historians who have shown fairly persuasively how inapplicable these concepts are to the period. The trouble goes much further than this, however. Any kind of statistical measurement of the degree of economic development before 1868 is vastly complicated by the scarcity and by the notorious inaccuracy of Tokugawa statistical records, both public and private.

Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei, reformer and educator, chancellor of Peking University during the hectic first decade of the Chinese republic, is not usually considered a supporter of Confucianism. Since the early years of the 20th century Ts'ai had been an opponent of traditional society and an active member of the small but vocal revolutionary movement in Shanghai aiming at the overthrow of the imperial dynasty. In 1912, as first Minister of Education under the new republican government, he submitted a proposal to implement a programme for a new educational system, in which traditional Confucian elements were to be rigorously weeded out.

By the Kuomintang's own standards, the 1911 Revolution was a failure. Sun Yat-sen's movement nevertheless succeeded in imparting an impressive revolutionary legacy to modern China. After 1915, many of the student malcontents whom the T'ung-meng-hui had radicalized in Japan rallied to the New Culture and May Fourth Movements, keeping the revolution alive. These young intellectuals served to alert hundreds of thousands of Chinese, as well as a new generation of college students, to the importance of democracy, mass welfare, and, above all, national integrity.

Indian tariff policies, historians of British India have stressed, illustrated an economic determinism in imperialism, in which Manchester blatantly served its self-interest in generating exploitative policies. Ironically, the influential work of John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, which indirectly qualified the idea of an imperialism that was solely economically motivated, has helped to produce a new view of British economic exploitation regarding Indian policy.